December 2009
28 posts
1 tag
Woooo Finished the New Effort IRB!!!
3 days, 20 hours, and 8 pages, its a beauty. I must have rewrote each sentence close to 3 times. When you write this sort of document, you are forced to clean and linearize all of your ideas. Doing this was not easy, and I was forced to face some deep theoretical issues that have escaped me in the past months. However, tonight I was able to tackle them head on and draw new distinctions that I...
“If history is any teacher, it teaches that when you get indifferent and you lose...”
– Colonel Arthur D. “Bull” Simons
This is the guy who goes overseas and breaks people out of prison for rescue missions.
In 1970, Simons was hand-picked to be the ground commander of Operation Ivory Coast, a joint special operations effort to rescue American prisoners of war from the Son...
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Paulus Lab Website Coded!
Whew! This is my first fully php website. Its way cleaner and more efficient to use php. Each page renders the entire “theme” (all the links, images, css, html) in only 5 lines!! Now thats lightweight coding. I need to make the flash part next.
http://research.davidderiso.com/paulusweb/index.php
Worked on it over the past 2 days, which is about 10 hours..
WatchThis is a video on how body parts are grown with stem cells. There are 2 strategies:
Build a part from scratch (using a mold)
Make the body regrow its own parts (with a chemical that fetuses use to regrow parts before birth)
I highly recommend watching this. It is the future of medicine as we know it.
Props to Robert Koehler for sharing this!
Hacking Disqus to Disable Commenting
I really like disqus, don’t get me wrong. But I just feel like the whole “Comments closed” section looks pretty ug. So, I came up with a clever workaround to remove the disqus section entirely when I want to disable comments for a particular post.
Here is the code. It basically looks for something in your post that has the id “no_comment”. For example, add...
“That’s an esoteric question of “why do we do art?” Commerce. I...”
– Bonnie Tanaka (my Typography professor at SMC)
Dr. Douglas Nitz (my Systems Neuroscience professor at UCSD)
Before I took up science, I was pretty sure that I wanted to do art. I eventually decided that it wouldn’t pay the bills so I thought a business career might. Realizing that this was a...
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Sensation Seeking Application Finished!!!
Thats right, I stayed up all night. 839 lines of code later, I finished the php script that scores Zuckerman’s Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS). The SSS is a neat inventory that basically quantifies how gnarly you are. Zuckerman (1979) has a different percentile distribution because he had a different sample size, it was a different era, and he was in Europe. Dr. Paulus has resampled his...
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Super Simple AS3 Webcam Uploader
This here script does what everybody’s been looking for. A simple flash webcam app that uploads images from your webcam to the web. It also lets you download the image you just took.
Here’s a working demo.
Here’s the source files.
Here’s how it works:
The flash code creates the camera and takes the picture as bitmapdata
This bitmapdata is fed into a jpeg encoder (in...
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IT Database Finished!
Sweeeeeeeet!!! Just fixed a ton of bugs and made it look awesomer.
Improvements:
Wrote a flash webcam image uploader that automatically save the image from your webcam to the proper item in the database (AS3 kicks ass!!). This addressed the issue of how to allow anyone to put images in the database. This is sustainable, so when Im gone, the next guy can keep the database strong
Resized columns,...
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Mysql and Iframes Suck
Mysql is a database language. Writing working php scripts for it is about as entertaining as navigating the VA bureaucracy. It blows.
I wanted to move the whole inventory site over to Koso. But after an hour of trying to get the Koso server to try and access my server’s msql database, I decided to say screw it and wrote an iframe script to just port the whole site into one html file on...
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Today Marks the Beginning of IT Madness
I just took my last final. It was online and it finished at 10pm. Whew! Now that its over, I have 2 full weeks to make things happen for the Paulus lab. Martin and Heather have given me so much, now is my time to give back.
Im usually up for 16 hours, I figure that 10 of those hours can now be devoted to IT and 6 of the remaining hours can be devoted to research, eating, and facebook.
Here are...
Why is the male HPV vaccine hidden?
HPV is a silent epidemic. According to the CDC’s Manual for the Surveillance of Vaccine-Preventable Diseases (4th Edition, 2008), “Genital human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the United States, with an estimated 6.2 million persons becoming newly infected every year” (1). “Approximately 20 million Americans are currently infected...
“scientific research need more transparency. the actual code used in analysis...”
– me
after rewriting my 1500 line analysis software for the 4th time now, i have caught countless errors that affect the overall output of my data, and inevitably my findings. i have realized that your analyzed data is only as strong as the weakest portion of your software. thats why it is absolutely...
On A Roll
This weekend:
Friday: got approval for submitting an IRB for my honors thesis experiments and commissioned to build a new experimental apparatus
Saturday: designed and modeled the apparatus that uses compressed air, microcontrollers, solenoids, and fiber opic switches. created and submitted animations and a bill of materials with links
Sunday: came up with 2 awesome new experiment ideas and...
“Publish or perish!”
– Gerardo Perez, PhD (my first mentor. i used to study bacterial virology in the dean’s lab)
This winter I WILL finish and submit my first paper. Or I will die.
WatchA Wireless Brain-Machine Interface for
Real-Time Speech Synthesis
Abstract:
Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) involving electrodes implanted into the human cerebral cortex have recently been developed in an attempt to restore function to profoundly paralyzed individuals. Current BMIs for restoring communication can provide important capabilities via a typing process, but unfortunately they are...
“Strive for reasonable perfectionism. Unreasonable perfectionism is a roadblock.”
– a note to myself
HM's Brain Slicing Saga Concludes
From Weds morning to Friday night, just minutes before midnight, the last of the 2401 slices was collected. Dr. Japoco Annese had stayed up slicing from Thurs morning till Friday night and, despite his sleeplessness, only 2 sections were damaged!!
Congratulations to Dr. Japoco Annese and the UCSD Brain Observatory for a job well done!!
So what next? Over the course of the following months, Dr....
“A man walks into a psychiatrist’s office wearing nothing but saran wrap.
The...”
– dumb jokes that are funny . com
