Week of Aug 24

After the Week of Frustration last week, things are beginning to pick up. We have some data from Hot or Not, and are testing here and there.

Had a huge breakthrough in the Value Learning E-Prime programming today (thanks to my neighbour who knows Visual Basic) and now have a working version of a program that will present Gain and Loss stimuli, add five cents for a correct response, take five cents away for an incorrect response, and update the total after every trial. Victory! Still working on a version that will handle Neutral stimuli - hopefully that will be ready soon.

Spent a whole day yesterday with Ben working on the SD Review. We revised the outline to make more sense and flow better, and I am much happier with it now. There are a few sections where Ben has papers and just needs to add the info to the wiki, so am just waiting for him to do that and then I think we will have most of a draft. I feel like we are much further forward after yesterday.

Started brainstorming ideas for NSERC applications. I think I will end up pitching the Value Learning stuff. Need to work on this more next week.

Emailed Jan at Stonehenge twice, but no reply. I guess we will leave that for now.

Things I learned this week:

1. Tabbing matters when programming Inlines. Things that are tabbed in will run only in the current Procedure (local). Things that are flush to the left side of the window will attempt to run globally - ie. they will run through once when the experiment starts and not every trial.

2. Declaring everything as an integer = BAD IDEA if you are working with decimals.

From Kamil:


There are a series of different types:
Bit, or boolean (1 and 0, or true and false)
- Dim x As Boolean
Integer (+ve and -ve whole numbers)
- Dim x As Integer
Unsigned Integer (+ve whole numbers)
- Dim x As UInteger
Floating point values (decimal numbers)
- Dim x As Single
Double values (decimal numbers, higher precision, higher range)
- Dim x As Double
ETC...

Once again, floating point values are sufficient for basic calculations.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/47zceaw7(VS.80).aspx
Gives a detailed description of what exists, and what are the specifics of each.