phase out

I've been moving this blog to a new place, one that I won't tell you about! Mwahahahaha! So you probably won't see any posts here anymore unless I feel like posting here randomly.

idea for youtube

Dear Youtube,

I have an idea: Search by hit count or filter by millions of views. The best videos out there are often those with more than 4 or 5 million views (at the current time) that aren't music videos. The most viewed list and other "most [x]" lists are too limited as they show only five pages. The other best videos out there must be spread virally for others to see and it would be nice to access those videos easily without catching the virus, so to speak.

Thanks,
Ryan

Java Web Development... Where are the tutorials?!

School has started and I am beginning to get bogged down with work.

For one of my classes, my group and I are going to develop a web application with Java. This may prove harder than I first realized, with all these technologies we have to learn how to use, such as:

• Hibernate
• MySQL
• Apache Tomcat
• JavaServer Faces
• JavaServer Pages
• Java Servlets
• All kinds of Java EE things

And we also need to figure out how to configure them all to work together nicely with each other and with Eclipse. Then we can write our webapp and try to get it up and running. But once we do, hopefully, we will have learned a lot about Java web programming, which is pretty important, given how the internet and computer science are evolving today.

I hope to get a useful tutorial up here soon, once I've figured it all out for myself.

Two more weeks until school starts...

Hello world!

My, it's been quite a long time since I've posted something here. Well, I returned home from the CSHL Undergraduate Research Program last weekend! It was a pretty good experience. =)

More news will come eventually...

I got in somewhere!

I've been accepted into the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Undergraduate Research Program this summer! Hooray! I have accepted and have preliminary details about what I would be working on - studying learning and memory in drosophila and altering code/hardware for the flight simulator to better track drosophila flight patterns or something like that. It sounds pretty interesting and does indeed combine parts of neuroscience (including memory!) with parts of computer science pretty interestingly. Hopefully, it will all work out nicely.

If you're interested, here is the lab page explaining the research.

And for my reference, related links:
A drosophila flight simulator, with video
Recent related paper by future mentors: Analysis of the Trajectory of Drosophila melanogaster in a Circular Open Field Arena
PLoS comment section for above paper - contains link to discussion questions
A list of some papers by my future higher-up mentor, Dr. Partha Mitra
Drosophila melanogaster - Wikipedia
Related to first link; Simulating neuronal nets with SNNAP

Summer Programs

Ugh. I'm applying to a bunch of research programs this summer, mostly in neuroscience, with one in computer science / math. I have a list of seven programs so far and it sometimes feels like a lot (even though I cut it down from ten), but I'd really like to get into one, and more applications means a higher chance of getting in somewhere.

I don't mind applying to more programs. Their applications are pretty much the same. But it's the faculty recommendations that are giving me a hard time. My two recommenders are my research mentor and my computer science program director who was my boss when I was a CA for one of her classes. I don't want to ask for too much since they are both busy with the beginning of the semester. I have already sent the lists to them and my CS director replied, saying it was a pretty daunting list for this time of the year. (My research mentor hasn't replied for a few days now.) So I feel like I should really cut it down, namely on the ones that require more than a general letter of recommendation, but these programs - MIT's UROP and Univ. of Minn.'s Program in Cognitive Sciences - look pretty promising, with MIT offering many many more possible mentors that I might enjoy working with (memory, plasticity, computational/theoretical neuroscience). So, to drop or not to drop the Univ. of Minn. program... My girlfriend applied to four REU's and thought that was a lot. I'm doing seven (although one requires no rec's and has a deadline after all the others will have decided if I got in). *sigh*

Ok, I will drop it. Make life easier for my recommenders. I don't want them getting tired of writing rec's for me...

Thanks, blog! Writing my thoughts out helps. =)

Hello

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog, where I plan on writing, maybe sometimes ranting, about my life and its many ups and downs.

I'm an undergraduate studying neuroscience for a bachelor's degree and computer science for a joint master's. "Why?! They're such different fields!" Well, I'm really interested in neuroscience, where so many interesting things are left to study and discover. I would really like to study memory and its biological bases, but I've recently been exposed to other areas of neuroscience that are also pretty interesting, such as vision and spatial navigation.

I'm drawn to computer science because I really enjoy programming and working with computers. The puzzles and problem solving involved in programming can keep my mind busy and satisfied (or frustrated and then satisfied) for hours and hours at a time, and exploring and developing new, good, and useful technology for use by everyday people appeals a lot to me too.

"But what will you do after college?!" *Sigh* This question has been bugging me for a while now and it's becoming more and more urgent to answer it because focusing on both areas is becoming increasingly difficult as I take on research and internships.

With neuroscience, I can go into medicine or research. I've already decided to opt out of med school and becoming a doctor, mostly because I'm not good with blood, I have somewhat shaky hands, and I'd rather not spend so much time in school and in debt. So that leaves research, which I think I would enjoy doing. Cognitive neuroscience / cognitive psychology / cognitive science appeal to me the most because I don't feel all that interested in biological lab work (although this may be due to a lack of experience - I haven't done anything remotely bio-lab-y in a few years now and have since forgotten much of what I did in high school bio.)

With computer science, I can go into software development and testing, research and design, theoretical research, or tech support. Everything except the last one appeals to me.

The fields do have some overlap, but not much. There's artificial intelligence, computer vision, brain-computer interfaces, and neural network modeling. I haven't learned much in-depth about any of these yet, but hope to soon, so hopefully, I'll see if I like any and see whether that helps me decide on one field over the other or to stay with both. If you know of any other areas of research or job possibilities that incorporate neuroscience and computer science, do let me know! I would really appreciate it. But until I really have a good idea of what's out there for me, I fly down both paths, somewhat blind to what lies beyond and whether a fork and a big choice await me somewhere in the future.