Lab Meeting, Spring 2015, Week 11

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

What we did over last week

Florian

Finished and presented my CUNY plenary.
Met with a bunch of people at CUNY to talk about their projects and collaborations. This included a chat with Vera Demberg about Zach's idea to use ICA to measure syntactic adaptation in spoken language comprehension.
Wrote large chunks of a paper on dependency length and information density in natural languages compared to chance (joint work with Dan Gildea) and outline further studies we need to run before we can submit.
Met with Dean Williams, Chigusa, and Dick about upcoming UofR fund raising meeting in Florida.
Met with Brad and Dick about planning of new NICHD training grant proposal.
Met with Emily Morgan to provide feedback on her NRSA post-doc proposal (for a joint project with Davy Temperley and me on music and language production) and discussed revisions and time line.
Edited press release for Weatherholtz et al. paper.

Andrew

Moved subject running system to MariaDB from SQLite in hopes of a performance gain.
Put Tal's new experiment up.
Started looking into hardware for a replacement webserver, because it looks like that's the real performance problem.

Olga

Sarah

Dave

Esteban

Amanda

Ran two of the remaining studies for the mammals project. Met with Mike and Chigusa to talk about the findings of these studies.
Met with Zach and tried to put together all of the stuff we need to meet with our advisors about the Zamanda project.
Recorded some sentences for the Zamanda project.
Read through Cory and Dan's grant proposals for the mock review we had this week. Made plans with Greg to discuss my grant this upcoming week.
Made lecture slides for my guest lecture in Scott Grimm's Intro to Pragmatics class for this Tuesday.
Read Fedzechkina, Jaeger, & Newport (2012) in prep to make my guest lecture for Lang Dev this Thursday. Started working on the slides.
Responded to a ton of student emails, set up meetings with students, etc to help them with their Lang Dev CHILDES homework.
Set up a survey and collected responses for the group projects for Lang Dev.
Started setting up the (hopefully) final (production) study for the mammals project. Thought seriously about reading it (in Chigusa's words, I opened the paper, but haven't started looking at it yet...).
Looked up a paper by Emiel Krahmer based on people's recommendations from CUNY (he's also the editor on my Frontiers paper).
Found out how much Frontiers papers cost. In case you're wondering, it's a lot ($1900 or ~$1500 for a special topics paper). Also, in case you were wondering the max. length for a paper is supposed to be 12,000 words (the real reason I was looking up things on their website).
Started to think about Quals.
Discovered that there is an NSF DIG in linguistics again. Proposed to Mike and Chigusa that I should aim for the January 15th, 2016 deadline (post-quals, with enough time to resubmit, if necessary for the July 15th deadline before the start of my 4th year).

Maryam

Zach

Linda

Held RA meeting where I met Lauren (new RA)
Worked with Zach to get PyGaze output working
Wrote tool for the RAs to mark coordinates of images within visual scenes... I'm calling it PixelPy: https://github.com/llinda/pixelpy
Addressed mturk worker emails. Basically, a memory issue -- I tested on a machine with lots of RAM so didn't notice how greedy the experiment was. Fixed.
Created a more fine-grained (31 step) s-sh continuum. I'm using steps 14-19 (where larger = more s like) for the next iteration. These should correspond to the most ambiguous regions from exp2.
Ran 64 subjects on mturk. Pen and Mouth #3. exp3_sampleresults
Prepared (in prog) material for review session for midterm 2 for Steve's class.