It is now safe to turn off your interface

So, it's been a while since I posted anything, and I probably fell off everyone's radar over the past couple years, but I wanted to give a brief explanation.

Once I started getting data for my thesis project, I put everything else on the back burner, including my health. I gained some weight, which wasn't unexpected, but that set off a cascade of problems. Thesis work slowed to a crawl and tasks that usually took a day were taking weeks. What I thought was just mental fog from poor sleep and stress turned out to be one of the most severe cases of sleep apnea my doctor had ever seen.

I took a year to focus on my health, which has been an incredibly slow process, before sitting down to churn out the rest of the thesis document. My advisor went on an extended sabbatical to run a scientific institute in Europe after agreeing to review the document progress, forcing me to finish the whole process through my thesis committee. That process took 2 years, but in July, I (finally) successfully defended my dissertation.

"The document" (Is this considered prior publication?)

That's the VERY short version of the toughest 5 years of my life. Now I have a PhD in Neuroscience from Brown University for work in the field of implantable brain-computer interfaces as part of the BrainGate project and John Donoghue's lab. I am very grateful for all the support I received from students and staff, and especially my thesis committee (David Sheinberg, Leigh Hochberg, Mike Paradiso, and Phil Kennedy).

When people hear the details, they always ask, "Was it worth it?" Much of the experience was incredibly rewarding and I worked alongside many brilliant people. But, having been through it, I could never recommend graduate school to anyone. At least not yet. As with all schooling, the value of the experience is really determined by the opportunities it unlocks. So, when asked if it was a worthwhile endeavor, I always respond, "It depends on what comes next."

Next?

Resume
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LinkedIn

Email

I'm now looking for industry positions that will take advantage of my background in alternative interfaces, technology, medicine, science, and business. That could mean VR, AR, BCIs, assistive devices, HIDs, etc, but I'm not interested in a traditional post-doc arrangement. The bigger, more complex, and more disruptive the problem, the better.

For others in a similar situation, but with less experience between undergrad and grad school, check out Free the PhD, a project by my friend Vay who also left academia for industry. There's plenty of good advice there regarding the differences between academic and corporate general mindset and communication.

For now, DNI will be placed in suspended animation. It was awesome conversing with all of you here and at conferences and workshops. I will post small status updates from time-to-time, but this will be all for now. Thanks much!

I'm not dead yet!

I think I'll go for a walk now...
I feel happy! I feel happy! I... *thump*

Hey DNI isn't the only thing I've neglected. I haven't even had time to sit down and do my bills, which I realized when my electricity abruptly shut off yesterday at 11am. Whoops!

So just a quick wave hello and a thinking point.

Sleep researchers have been quietly warning about the proliferation of electronic devices (further) damaging our sleep habits. How? Well, we're wired to get sleepy as the sun goes down - less light leads to more melatonin. Light to melanopsin expressing ganglion cells in the retina (and some rods and cones) to the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus (where pacemaker cells reside) to the pineal gland to some rockin melatonin release.

Increase the length of daylight and you stay up late because, after all, the length of the day varies throughout the year. Deprive rats of light and their schedule drifts into what scientists now call the "Grad Student Sleeping Schedule", or around the equivalent to a 26-28 hour day length. Add light and the rats lock back on to a 24 hour schedule.

Why am I mentioning this? The iPad. Touted as the end all be all of ebook readers, the one place it ironically falls short is when you can read it. Not only are LCDs notoriously tough to read in direct sunlight, but reading before bed means exposing this light sensitive circadian rhythm pathway to a slab of light. The iPad is no worse than staring at a computer screen, but E-Ink clearly has a niche here. Sure you need light to read, but a single LED book light isn't anywhere near the number of lumens as the the iPad's screen.

If you do have an iPad, fear not. Most ebook reading apps have come ability to adjust colors or brightness, so be cognizant of the idea, since most people, including myself, love displays with high contrast ratios.

DNI goes Hollywood

Well, not really. But, I did help a couple friends with a short film project that was accepted to the Cannes Film Festival. Yeah, THAT Cannes. While it isn't as amazing as getting a judged feature in, it's still a crazy awesome opportunity, so here I am.

For those interested, the short is called Hushed and is a psychological thriller based around the idea of choice and free will. We used a religious theme, a group of folks going door-to-door witnessing for their unspecified religious sect, but isn't about, or pro, or con, religion. Since shorts are designed to either sell the story or the production group, there are a bunch of decisions you have to make regarding content. You want to show an understanding of the film making process, the business, and the showcase some creative talent. We really did do this in spades. The story is left open at the end, even though you generally have the illusion of thinking you know what it means. The main character remains a blank slate the whole way through, even though most people are sure they could describe him at the end (and these descriptions aren't consistent from person-to-person based on our polling, and people thought they were accurate in their descriptions). Basically, we played on biases heavily.

The religious theme was to create an immediate relationship between viewer and characters - it doesn't matter if you are a bible thumper or Richard Dawkins. You can root for them or against them. In a way, it is a perfect expose on innate bias. If you want to hate the characters and think they're screwed in the end, that's possible. If you love them, but think they got screwed and that the message is confrontational, you can think that. If you love them, and think they work it all out in the end, yup, there's that. The film is a product, and as a product, I think it rocked.

On the downside, we had nowhere near enough time or money to really do what we did. I mean, we did finish, but the timetable was so rushed that we couldn't do many takes of scenes. Shooting conditions, basically, left much to be desired, and a better schedule could have resulted in a better overall film. The result is some amateurish looking bits. But, we got through it. Also, while the actors and actresses did their best, the levels of experience varied greatly. That with the ramped up schedule means they are probably not portrayed as performing at the best of their ability. Awesome folks, though, and they stuck through the whole deal like champs. I know there are some scenes that could have been better, but there was just no time.

So, what did I do? Well, I was one of the 5 writers of the story and screenplay. I helped with a good deal of the technical aspects, was on set for every shoot (except one make up shoot), co-casted the talent, set photography, and basically odds and ends stuff. I was supposed to manage the post-production, but that fell suddenly and at the same time as major lab events began unfolding. Same goes for the website, which I started (the current one is the early alpha version, but unannounced deadlines and ramp up in lab work kept me from moving too far on that. So, I've been a busy beaver.

Check out the movie's site, if you're interested, and if you happen to be in Cannes, France or nearby and want to meet up for cafe', feel free to drop me a line.

Redesign notes

I got a little distracted by... ooo shiny thing over there... oh sorry... by general web design stuff and stumbled across the new Blogger 'In Draft' features (basically Google Apps for Blogger). The new design is still a work in progress, for instance, I'm not wild about the background pic, but it's a little taste of things to come. Just a few things to note on here now:

• New social bookmarking links on the right - these will likely be expanded and changed slightly, but you get the idea. Easily add DNI to Delicious, Digg, Facebook, etc. NOTE: To avoid the massive amounts of spam this could generate, please add a personal message whenever a service allows it, so I know you are a human, or at least partly human.
• New tag cloud spinning ball thingy. I like the way it looks, but I'll probably replace it with something that takes up the same amount of space and doesn't have the processor overhead involved in this neat little ditty.
• News feed - I'm forgetting which things I said I would 'star' versus 'share' in Google Reader, so for now it is set to my Starred items. Again, this will soon be replaced by a more snazzy widget that is more multi-functional. But I'd like to get the rss feed items up there so that visitors can keep up on the news items I've noted.
• More complex layout - Personal/contact info at the top, minimal. News/feeds in a wider column format. Utility links, like archives, in narrowed columns within the right column. There's some tweaking to be done, like too much padding and combining elements, but it's pretty close to what I want.
• Color! Yeah, I know. Shocking! I like blue.

Anyhow, enjoy! And feel free to leave any comments if you like certain things or you spot any major problems. The site renders fine in Firefox 3.6, Chrome 5, and mostly in IE (tag cloud fails to render, so another reason to replace that).

Visual Studio and other Microsoft programming tools free

For students, that is. Nevertheless, it does include the brand-spanking new Visual Studio 2010 Pro, which, if your university has annoying IT/software access policies like Brown, can mean less frustration for you. So far I've procured 3 copies of Windows 7 Pro x64, Visual Studio 2008/2010, and Expression Studio 3 for $30 (cost of a student IEEE membership). And there's still plenty more stuff available to play with should I suddenly become inspired.

The weird thing is that Brown University has an MSDNAA agreement (the MSDN Academic Alliance program, which allows schools to provide free and deeply discounted MS software to students). In fact, we have 4+ agreements! Check if your school has a sane policy in place. Here, I'm a grad student in the Dept of Neuroscience, working in a lab that's part of the Engineering Dept. Somehow, I qualify for almost nothing, as far as these MSDNAA memberships go. Oh, wait. I can get a free copy of Windows XP! Woo! The school pays me, through grants to the lab, but I don't qualify as an employee or staff member. Fair enough. But I don't qualify for the CS Dept or Engineering Dept programs because I'm not taking any classes in the departments. I could TA, but even then I'm not technically enrolled. I've fired off a few hot-headed emails, but the responses have been the usual Brown hand-waving/"Wait until we start the Program"/"We're talking with people about that" types. It was easier for me to sign up for the IEEE and hunt down offers like this, rather than deal with my own school, which still gets paid $45k/year for tuition. Amazing.

Aaaanyhow, get yer software at the Microsoft DreamSpark site.

If you're not a student, there are 'Express' versions of many Visual Studio tools available for free. These lack MSDN Library access, which is a great thing to have, as well as 64-bit compilers and some of the more powerful tools, but they're free, legit, and lack alot of the bloat you would usually just throw into a new install. (Am I going to be using SQL Remote Doppleganger USB Ninja FlipFlap elements? I dunno. Meh, just install all of it.) Get them here.

iPhone app worthy of "WOW!" and a Chrome fix

They thought it wouldn't get through the mysterious Apple approval process, but Opera Mini is officially available for (free) download at the App Store. And boy is it a whole new ball game for regular ole 3G (non-3GS) owners. It's friggin blazing fast. It feels like my iPhone did when I got it - instantly launches, instantly renders the page, and just a great experience all around. The only downside is that your bookmarks don't automatically sync. I'm betting there's some type of limited access to user info, like bookmarks, that Apple prohibits, but that's totally speculation. There is syncing built in, but only to an Opera account, so I'll have to look into ways of getting that to sync with Firefox or Chrome. The desktop Opera app is actually very good, and similarly speedy. Alas, every time I try to stray away from Firefox I end up running back for the add ons. But, definitely worth checking out if you haven't.

(And as an aside, if you have Firefox on your PC, get this add-on. You're welcome!)

Next up, Google Chrome. I've been using Chrome for DNI related stuff and Firefox for my everyday browser. One thing that had been driving me NUTS was that using my mouse's 'back' button jumped me back two pages instead of one. Every friggin time. Maddening!

So, a little ninja intuition after a hearty googling returned plenty of people with the problem, but no solutions that worked for me, and I figured out how to fix this issue. This might not work for everyone, but I figured that there were 500+ page forum threads on the topic and a few people might be helped by this.

The problem for me was that my mouse (Logitech G9) had the 'Back' and 'Forward' commands bound to the Back and Forward buttons. And the problem with that is...? It appears that Chrome will detect that you have a multibutton mouse and execute the back and forward commands if the appropriate button is pressed. BUT, somewhere in the process of drivers, mouse software (SetPoint 5 or 6 in my case), and Chrome handling mouse events, the button press is detected as a 'back button press' AND 'execute the back command'. In other words, Chrome says, "Hey! That's a spiffy mouse! I'll hook into that button and do what comes natural." But, the Logitech software says, "I don't know what's going on, and I don't care. All I know is that when you hit that button, I send the 'back dat ass up' command." You hit the button, Chrome backs up a page, and the mouse software sends the back command, making Chrome back up another page.

The solution: bind the mouse button to GenericButton4 (for back) and 5 (for forward), or the equivalent in your mouse's software. It might even be listed as 'no function' or 'do nothing' or 'default'. If you use the Back binding in other programs, this can be a pain because it forces you to choose whether Chrome works or your other programs work.

So, try getting Chrome to work and then go about using your PC as normal. If you're missing the back command in some programs, you have a couple options.

• If you have a mouse with customizable software, like the Logitech SetPoint software, make a special profile for Chrome, set the mouse buttons accordingly, and use application switching detection. This is what I ended up doing.
• If you have a tilt scroll wheel, the kind that lets you scroll left and right, you probably don;t use the function (I've had the function on my mice for about 5 years and have used it about a dozen times total). Rebind the left right scroll to forward and back or genericbutton4 and 5.
• You can try searching out some freeware, like this program: X-Mouse (note: I've never tried this, so no idea if it will blow up your computer and eat your children)
• AutoHotkey might be a decent option if nothing is working and you're minutes from a a Chrome Navigation Bug Induced Triple Shotgun Homicide. Much more technical, but I would bet the actual script would be pretty simple.
• Search out a registry tweak, though if the above didn't help this probably won't either.

Hope that helps someone out there!

Excellent, picture-packed review of prosthetics

Not an academic review, but it you ever need a picture for a presentation, there are plenty to nab here.

Powerful Prosthetics: The Ultimate Integration of Design and Technology (WebUrbanist)