neonleonb

I'm back in Berkeley after nearly 4 weeks in Tennessee. It was a pleasantly long break, and I did only the bare minimum of work. I cooked a lot with my brother Sam, even making fudge with my mom's guidance. That was useful for my parents, in part because....

Now, I should probably tell you that my mom has multiple myeloma, a sort of marrow cancer. I've been avoiding telling people because I don't want them to see me as needing their support. I mean, what can people do? But it turns out they can do a lot, in particular taking care of my guinea pig Chester while I was gone. Thanks, Chung Hay, Todd, Cheryl, and Ryan!

So, my cooking was useful because my mom, with her low blood counts, wasn't allowed to use a knife, and that means my dad has been doing most of the cooking, so our help with that was probably useful.

In any case, my mom is at Vanderbilt having another round of chemotherapy right at this moment. She says the side effects aren't as bad as she'd been warned, and the main result is a lot of tiredness. The worst part is the low immune system and clotting afterward--she was in the hospital for 1-2 weeks after her last chemo because she had a mysterious fever. And it made her miss her brother's wedding, but at least she got to take part via Skype. It was kind of amazing that she could be there with us in a way. (The wedding was wonderful, by the way.)

Now that I'm back in Berkeley, I'm aiming to graduate by the end of the summer. I think I can do it, but it will require substantially more effort than I've been putting in so far. For the forseeable future, I'm officially declaring Sunday a weekday. Onward and upward!

Today I'm going to go to a talk in the Wang Room. Of course, the amusing thing is that since it's in Cory Hall, home of the EE department, the name is appropriate: there probably aren't many women who go in there on a regular basis.

I've got a paper published in ICML 2008! You already know that, because I was already excited about going to Finland. But the final revision of the paper is finally complete and submitted to the conference, so I've put it up on my website, which you can see here. Yes, that means that my guinea pigs are now recorded for posterity in an academic conference.

I had to give a presentation about some of my research on Friday. I didn't have that much time to prepare for it, since I'm busy, but I knew the topic quite well, since I've been busy revising the conference paper about it. I thought the presentation went all right, but my advisor said my presentation was "very good"! W00t!

Also, Megan attended, so by now she's met most of the people I know at school. I imagine it fleshes out the stories I tell.

The paper that got accepted was the one in which I used my guinea pigs as an example. I quote, "For instance, Chester likes only hay, and Milo likes only carrot, but greedy Louis likes both equally." Now Louis's greediness is exposed to the world, and will be published in a respected academic conference proceedings. That poor little fatty doesn't even realize that he'll be recorded for posterity.

But the tastes I describe are actually not true, and of late Chester has been greedier about veggies than Louis. Still, I'm highly amused to put the pigs on display.

Good news everyone! I'm going to Finland!

My paper on reinforcement learning was accepted to ICML 2008, so hopefully Srini and Jerry will send me to my first conference in all my 4 years of grad school. And it's in Finland in the summer, which I hear is a nice time to visit. And I got into a good conference! It's good news for sure.

Our Judo instructor is an Olympic medalist in the sport, which is pretty fancy. I'm not sure why he's here at Berkeley, but I guess you've got to do something to pay the bills while training for the Olympics.

Today, we were learning a technique for pinning someone. The idea was that one person would hunch over on all fours and try not to be pinned, and the other person would pry their elbow to destabilize and pin them. My partner was pulling my elbow the wrong way, so the teacher demonstrated on me. But I successfully resisted, holding my elbow still and remaining unpinned. Even an Olympic medalist couldn't pin me! Then, of course, he used another technique he hadn't taught us and easily pinned me. But I'm still proud that I held my own for a moment.

Background:

I'm in a class about the neurobiology reaching and pointing. That sounds a little specialized, but my research is about the theoretical structures (hopefully informed by the neural structures) that are used to produce and understand action. So it's a very relevant class to me.

Yesterday, in class, we were talking about adaptation of motor actions, and they mentioned one of the classic experiments. In this experiment, they make a subject wear funny glasses that make everything look over to the side. Then, the subject is asked to perform some normal tasks.

Story:

The cool thing was that they asked for a volunteer to demo the distortion glasses on, and I shot up my hand as fast as I could, and was chosen. So, I scampered up to the front of the room, and put on the glasses, and then, as instructed, reached for a marker the professor was holding. I missed by quite a bit, but I soon got better at it.

Then, when I took them off, they had me try it again. I could see that my vision was finally undistorted, but as I reached straight for the marker, my finger went off to the side! I had adapted to the glasses, and it took me some practice to fix my reflexes. It sounds simple enough, but it was amazing having my body betray me like that--I felt like I was reaching straight for the marker, but I was way off. The whole class, including me, laughed in amazement.

I'm not sure I can describe the glee and amazement I feel. It was more fun than I had any right to expect, and that's probably a measure of my geekiness. But I now know that I can fool my body, and that there's a lot of unconscious stuff going on! The moral of the story is: take part in psych demos when you can. The results can be wildly fun.

In order to be a UC Berkeley teaching assistant, I need to sign the following loyalty oath.  It seems like some sort of horrible holdover from the McCarthy era.  WTF?

I am in a crazy good mood right now.  I just finished my class project, meaning I'm done with class for the semester.  Not that class was a big part of my semester; as a grad student, I'm only taking one class.  Still, it's good to be done.  And the project went better than I'd expected.  I think I got more out of it and did a better job than I had planned.  Also, I had a couple of good conversations and meetings today, and I don't feel like an idiot.  Plus, I'm finally over my cold (I still cough and sniffle, but I don't have that sick feeling anymore).  So, all I can say is:  I feel happy!  Everybody dance!  (I'm referencing the short animated video "Rejected", from the "My anus is bleeding" commercial, in case you didn't catch that.)