Friday, March 06, 2009

On voice neurocognitive psychologists and diagrams

On Tuesday, my sort of supervisor showed me what she'd done to my data the other day to put in her own paper. It was this intelligent and beautiful rainbow spectrum of a graph, all blue, red and yellow, and where data overlapped it became purple and orange... it was preeetty! And it was the data that I'd collected! Sadly I won't be using it for my own project cos that would feel too much like cheating. Turned out she wasn't the only working on pretty diagrams. That same morning, one of the other francophones in the lab also showed me his crazy complex multiple graph diagrams that he'd been creating. And then yesterday (after a right cuffufle of forgetting the right usb stick with the version of my project that I'd been intensively working on over the last couple of days) I got some highly useful feedback from my actual supervisor.
At least half of what he said could be condensed into this:-
- "Put in some cool diagrams here and here and here and here"
(it may have been a summary of what he said but I assure you, the word "cool" made an appearance on several occasions). So I had a go at some "cool" diagrams today. I made a reasonable effort I think, but none of them come even close to the rainbow spectrum graph I saw on Tuesday :( siiiigh...

Lessons for the week:
- Programming matlab is a useful skill to learn
- Voice neurocognitive psychologists like "cool" diagrams
- Never put your usb stick in your jeans pocket so you don't lose it. You will inevitably forget to take it out the next day

Man am I becoming geeky... see what final year is doing to me!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

geekery is the new fun...!

vaguely linguistics related.. read this today which popped into my rss reader.. http://www.badscience.net/2009/03/weve-come-across-a-sticky-patch-were-going-to-have-to-work-through-it-or-get-out-and-go-our-separate-ways/

(also.. played a friends violin last week.. it's incredibly annoying knowing when you know what it should sound like when you put your finger somewhere and it turns out quarter of a semitone out.. think i'll leave high pitched wobbly stringed instruments for a while yet...!)

Anonymous said...

Says a lot about psychology really. Lots of style for not so much substance. Verdict: not a real science :p

Dish said...

haha violins are silly instruments :D Only really made for mega-maticulous people i.e. not either of us. Any time you wanna have a go at my cello again let me know

hmmm... I think exciting diagrams only clarify psychology's position as most interesting science