no meeting this week, so just an update

I would just like to say, it is amazing how unmotivated I feel on weeks we don't have a Wednesday meeting. Well, I am still motivated (lord knows I am DYING to collect some Hot or Not data!) but I don't have the same excitement about the research as after I've just spent an hour discussing it with someone who thinks it is equally cool. I guess you can take that as a giant compliment, Mark.

Anyway, things continue. Today I am off to Stonehenge to (hopefully) collect a bit more data from the women. I was sort of worried I'd collect all this and never use it, but Mark seems certain we will use it for SOMETHING, so that's good. It really is a giant pain, so I'd hate to do it all for nothing!

Last week I went to the Stonehenge recognition lunch in an attempt to build some bridges. It was kind of weird - they have a LOT of rules about which I know nothing. It's really like being in a foreign country sometimes, where you have no idea what the etiquette is. However, they fed me a hot dog and red juice, and then I went to their little awards ceremony and that was nice. (Oh, and attended a fire drill, just for authenticity!)

In other news, Ben has cancelled our SD review meeting for this week, so am guessing he hasn't done much. I've collected some information but haven't done much writing. Maybe today or tomorrow - really want to get some kind of draft done, even a rubbish one.

On the plus side, we are in good shape with Hot or Not. Had a big setback last Friday when the images weren't lining up properly and it was a matter of messing with the code rather than the easy non-code E-Prime. I went in on the holiday Monday (dedicated, I know!) and managed to get it working again. The images were also really small, but I have come to the conclusion that they looked full-size on the SurveyMonkey site just due to differences in how they are displayed for the web vs. on E-Prime. I doubled the size of them for the E-Prime and they look fine. I've also gone through and fixed a bunch of images that got cropped incorrectly (looks like they were run through a batch processor at some point), so that is all done.

So currently, Angele is making the practice programs (I am hoping it should be easy enough for her - the images are all selected) and then I need to run through the whole thing and have a look at the data, and then I think we can run. We are having technical issues where I can't get my thumb drive to connect to the testing computer so she can work on it at the lab - very annoying. However, we will get it done.

And finally, should I get a burst of energy this week, I would like to a). do my Python homework as I've fallen way behind from missing a few weeks, and b). sort out the value learning experiment. It may be that we could test both together within an hour, which would be excellent.