16 posts tagged “pitt”

I think I'll be opting out of primate research.  I've been working at it since January and already I've convinced and then unconvinced myself that I contracted a fatal disease and messed up countless times getting animals from the kennel.  Somethings get better over time, but I've always been absent minded/forgetful/dumb and thats dangerous when combined with these animals.  I really really don't want to give up so soon, but aside from my aforementioned short comings the lab's animal manager thinks I'm not cut out for it(and she's the boss).  This throws a very large wrench in my plans for graduate school.

I'm wikked beat.  Studied a lot over this past week and I think managed a solid C on my Bio midterm, which is about the best I could hope for given the breadth of material and my lack of experience. Go team!  I think I stand a good chance of passing the class.  Comp. Neuro. is still focused on Matlab so I'm killing it, and the Linear Systems teacher grades very easily. 

Still working out my schedule for next semmester.  System Neurobiology is a must, and I might also take Control Systems and the Brain. 

Rode about 18 miles yesterday morning.  Tried to take a sweet jump ( TM ) in Panther Hollow and botched the landing.  Shoulder is a little sore and I goy grass stains on my favorite shirt, but not too much worse for wear.  Knees are still creaky, but it was totally worth it.

This place looks krad, but it's all the way over in Cleveland.

Small quantities of good beer are hard to come by in this town.  All the dedicated shops sell cases of 24+ which isn't going to work unless I get a rack on my bike. ( Disc compatible racks are currently sold out ).  There is however my local church which sells incredibly expensive 6-packs of their micro brews. Amen.

School is going OK.  I failed my first Bio quiz, but no one makes their first jump so I'm not letting it slow me down.  Speaking with some other students at Oktoberfest ( as good a place for any for academic discourse ) I learned that the Mol. Bio. profs dump on the first years, but somehow everyone turns out O.K.  I have another quiz this Friday and my fingers are crossed.

Computational Neuroscience is actually going really well because the work is primarily programming with a few diff. eqs. thrown in.  It's going so well I've been helping other kids in the class.  It takes me a while to grasp the underyling concept and I find myself thinking yet again "I'd read more if I didn't have so much homework to do".

I'm getting next to nothing done in lab.  I'm trying to develop a state machine or something to appropriately stimulate patients suffering from foot drop but I don't know the first thing about anything.  I'm just now getting the hang of the gait cycle analysis, but that all goes out the window when dealing with stroke patients.  I'm feeling in the dark to develop an appropriate algorithm for processing this crap data. Zain Navabi deliver me!.  The other guys in my lab are super pro.  They don't sleep much.  I wish I could manage with less but so far 7 hours is as low as I can go before I become retarded.  As it is I'm ingesting a lot of caffeine.

I get to "learn" tables of amino acid properties for my Mol. Bio. quiz this Friday. I am wicked pissed.

Eq

\begin{align}
y(t) &= \int_{t-2}^{1}( \tau)    (-1)\ud \tau +
        \int_{1}^{t-1}(-\tau + 2)(-1)\ud \tau +
        \int_{t-1}^{2}(-\tau + 2)(1) \ud \tau \qquad \text{for } 2 < t < 3 \nonumber \\
%%
     &=       -\frac{\tau^{2}}{2}             \Big |_{t-2}^{1} +
        \Big(  \frac{\tau^{2}}{2}-2\tau \Big) \Big |_{1}^{t-1}
        \Big( -\frac{\tau^2}{2} + 2\tau \Big) \Big |_{t-1}^{2} \nonumber \\
%%
     &= \bigg(-\frac{1}{2}-\Big(-\frac{t^2-4t+4}{2}\Big)\bigg) +
        \bigg( \Big(\frac{t^2-2t+1}{2} - 2(t-1)\Big)-\Big(\frac{1}{2}-2\Big)\bigg) +  \nonumber \\
      &\qquad
        \bigg( \Big(-2 + 4 \Big) - \Big(-\frac{t^2-2t+1}{2} +2(t-1)\Big)\bigg) \nonumber \\
%%
     &= \bigg( \frac{t^2-4t+3}{2} \bigg) +
        \bigg( \frac{t^2-6t+8}{2} \bigg) +
        \bigg( \frac{t^2-6t+9}{2} \bigg)   \nonumber \\
%%
     &= \bigg( \frac{3t^2-16t+20}{2} \bigg) \label{29step3}
\end{align}

First week went well.  I changed my schedule yet again so now I'm taking: Bio, Computational Neuroscience, and Linear Systems.  Bio looks like it will be a lot of memorization ( surprise! ) but the tests are apparently based on analyzing real data which might be kinda cool. 

Comp. Neuro is mostly the prof. deriving various hierarchical models of the brain, I think this will be the killer class for the term but I need to learn it so there's no dodging the bullet.  It seems like there are some people in the class who follow the material so I can get some help when I need it.

Linear Systems is actually not at all what I thought it would be.  At NU it was pretty much the intro to Digital Signal Processing.  Here it's actually about anaylzing Linear Systems ( surprise! ) , and is intended as a follow up to classical control.  The teacher is really REALLY excited to be teaching us the subject.  Ordinarily it would be fairly dry but I now think this will be fun class!  The prof. is researching the application of Non/linear systems theory to biological problems so I think I may ask him to be on my thesis team ( we're required to have one advisor not from the BioE faculty ).

The first week of lab was spent mostly soldering.  There is a procedure this coming Tuesday so there are a lot of lose ends (literrally ) that need to get cleaned up.  I don't have any experience soldering so its slow going, but its a skill I've been meaning to develop when the opportunity presents itself.  The PI gave me some EMG data to look at involving activating of various ankle muscles and their effect on foot drop.  The goal is to improve the current paradigm and update existing prosthetics.  I don't know how far I'll get in 3 months, but I think it will be fun.  Also down the pipe may be some fMRI data and labView programming.

“For the modern [ Electrical Engineer ], the lure of the Laplace transform is its ability to map the complicated
operation of convolution into multiplication. This integral has for decades driven electrical
engineering undergraduates to contemplate theology either for salvation or as an alternative career.”
-  Paul J. Nahin

Not anymore I don't! 

Talked to another professor today.  Apparently he, the lab I visited previously, and the lab I was planning on visiting all work somewhat closely together so he suggested I do rotations ( if the other professors agree ). Jackpot!

I start work tomorrow.

Well I was looking for something challenging and looks like I found it:

BIOENG 2520 Molecular and Cell Bio 1
BIOENG 2520 Molecular and Cell Bio 1 Recitation
BIOENG 2525 Statistics For Bioengineers
BIOENG 2023 Ethics Seminar
ECE       2373 Artificial neural networks
ECE       2646 Linear Systems
Total: 13 credits

Not sure how well this will go, but the syllabus recommends 12 credits so I filled them with what I could.  My advisors suggested a very different set of classes, all of which conflict with BIOENG 2520. I'm hoping through lab workI will pick up what I missed. Oh man I need to work in a lab on top of all of this...
 
And here's how my Spring is shaping up:

NROSCI 2102 Systems Neurobiology
NROSCI 1012 Neurophysiology
NROSCI 1012 Neurophysiology Recitation
BIOENG 2023 Ethics Seminar
Total: 11 Credits

This might even be enough to pass my prelim, but feel free to start a dead pool on my behalf. On that note I think I will crack the books today and get started.