Lab Meeting, Spring 2017, Week 10

Awe- and Aw-inspiring readings (or just stuff you think deserves a mention)

• You guys, Amazon finally added MTurk support to Boto3 (blog post). If you want current MTurk API, you have to switch to boto3, but it's going to require some code rewriting due to significant changes between boto and boto3. --alw

• Science news post about MTurk pool and psych researchers' dependency on MTurk --alw

What we did over last week

Florian

• Research

  1. To-do

     • ONE WEEK OF HOLIDAY ... SUN, SEA, DIVING, DELICIOUS FOOD, and lots of NOTHING!

  2. Planning

     • ...

  3. Writing

     • Drafted a short reply to Nieuwland et al. (2017) together with Shaorong. Still working on it. But hopefully we'll have something sharable for the lab soonish.

  4. Feedback on

     • CUNY dry runs x 2
     • Chigusa's project with Meredith and Mike. Did a wee lil' ideal observer analysis
     • Initial analysis of Rachel Smith's data. Got my GAMM on.
     • Got back to Darcy on questions regarding Bayes Factor for her thesis.
• Logistics:

  1. Unfortunately, Eleanor declined my offer to join the lab (going to Northwestern instead). In the meantime, I became aware of Rachael Tatman's work, who will soon give a talk via skype. She might be a suitable candidate for the position.

• Service:
  1. Meetings with Job candidates.

  2. Editing: one editorial letter for Linguistic Typology

  3. Letters: 0.

  4. Quals:

     • Finished Mr. Burchill's quals and 27-thousand answers to his many questions. And I'm not even exaggerating. Not at all. Not at all.
     • Reading Mr. Burchill's quals
     • Congratulations to Shaorong for passing his quals!

  5. Thesis:

     • Started reading Sebastian Sauppe's thesis.

     • Feedback on initial draft of final remaining study for Guillermo Montero Melis's thesis.

     • Initial feedback on one chapter of Darcy Rose's thesis.

Xin

1. Run Exp5(!) for BCS207 and analyzed data.
2. Finished discussion of fMRI paper on vowel project.
3. Worked on intro of BB08 ms.
4. Contacted Kodi and read CG04 ms.
5. Explored and compared ELP vs. IPHOD for calculating lexical properties.
6. Read the readings for Probability class.

Andrew

1. Read the documentation for and played around with boto3, including trying to rewrite my getResults.py script. On the plus side, boto3 finally integrates MTurk with the rest of AWS, On the minus side, what you get back is no longer Python types wrapping MTurk XML data structures, but rather Python dictionaries of the keys and values parsed from the XML data. The Answer part of an Assignment actually still comes back as a string of QuestionFormAnswers XML you have to parse yourself. (Hopefully that changes down the road; MTurk support is only 2 weeks old in boto3.)

2. Started writing a proper README for CrowdExp

3. Did a code cleanup of MTurk Utils code

4. Started to really dig into the results conversion code in CrowdExp so it can dump R analyzable results files soon

Jenn

Dan

Amanda

Zach

1. Drafted outline of CMCL talk
2. QUAAAAAAAALS
3. Redid my entire grant proposal again, wrote the approach section

Linda

1. Worked on CUNY talk.
2. Reading + writing for grant writing
3. Reading for courses
4. Traveled to Naples + gave a talk. Lots of official + unofficial rehearsing. Met some really awesome people!
5. Follow-up with said people. Networking on steroids yo.
6. Still SO pumped about Danny Wegman.

Wednesday

Shaorong

1. Working on CUNY poster.
2. Adding subjects for the Chinese norming study and wrapping up
3. Working on response to Nieuwland et al.
4. Reading and writing for Grant writing
5. Reading for courses