Fingers Crossed: Physiology Data Rolling

Things were looking good about two and a half hours ago. Data were rolling in. The very first psychophysiological experiment was running in the college of mass communications at Texas Tech University.

It gets pretty boring watching what the participants are watching, so I decided to fire up the laptop and write a post similar to this.

But then Murphy's Law -- or as I like to call it, Sam's Law -- kicked in.

Literally as I was typing my Blogger.com login, the stimulus computer crashed.

It's still crash-friendly, and I cannot figure out why. Arrrrgh. Thanks, MediaLab!

The second participant is running, and hopefully I will actually be able to use her/his data.

My fingers are crossed. Luckily the SNAFU happened to me, as all of the graduate students are in class.

If the TV Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It

Lab setup continues, although today I almost took a hammer to it all.

Traditionally, I have used a 19-inch flat panel display to show stimulus materials, such as television programs.

Then someone (I forget who, sorry) told me that my old mentors at Indiana were buying a 32-inch flat panel television to make the experience more realistic. Aha, I thought! What a great idea! As an aside, it also would display a wicked robot.

So I am (by proxy of the state of Texas) now the proud owner of a 37-inch Magnavox.

We don't use the TV as a TV. Instead, we feed it digital video from a Dell computer. In order to have our TV content look real on the big screen, picture quality is a must. So we had to buy an expensive high definition digital video (DMI) splitter and gold plated DVI to HDMI cable.

Add to that the fact that we need the experimenter to have a small monitor show the exact same stimulus that the participants see.

This all might be simple if it were not for plug-and-play. The technology keeps trying to outsmart you.

So I got it all hooked up around noon today, and voila! It worked. I changed one setting on the resolution, and both were DVI beautiful.

There was just one problem. If you turned off the TV, the computer monitor went blank, too. Thanks, plug-and-play. And I didn't exactly want to burn out the TV having it on for no reason while we programmed the experiment, backed up data, etc.

So I shut everything off and plugged the monitor into splitter port "1" and plugged the TV into splitter port "2."

I'll spare you the details, but it took me and the IT guy more than 3 hours to undo that little switch. We had to pull the video card, install a VGA monitor, uninstall all of the drivers associated with the card, reinstall the card, plug a monitor directly into the card, reinstall all of the drivers, and then plug the splitter back into the video card (with the TV in its rightful and proper spot as No. 1).

So now I have to use the fool remote control to change the TV's input settings to keep it from being "on" all of the time.

Everything else, however, is working wonderfully.

And yes, I crossed my fingers as I typed that.

Sequential MPEGs Lead to Flashing Woes

Update: This single line of code makes the flash much briefer!

jP.setBackground(Color.black);

---

A small copper wire comes in the back of my house. Through that small, little copper wire comes myriad cable television channels, digital cable (and dozens of channels of digital music), broadband Internet, and my landline (which we never use and need to get rid of).

That's an amazing damned wire. One stupid wire.

This week I am trying to get an experiment ready to run. For that experiment, I need to show multiple video clips in a sequence. They're chopped up in a particular order for very particular reasons.

I would like for those clips to go together seamlessly. However, this seems impossible. The MediaLab software we use goes to a blank screen between clips, which results in a flash between clips.

I hate this flash. I have spent days trying to get rid of this flash. Finally I resorted to programming myself in Java. I spent much of the day today trying to get the code right. I'm a hack as a programmer, so I have to beg, borrow, and steal code.

Finally, at 8:30 p.m. tonight, after my kids went to bed, I got two clips to play back-to-back in Java.

And guess what?

Flash! That's what!

My laptop is new and pretty darned fast. Millions or billions of calculations per second.

Showing two MPEG clips back-to-back without a flash? Priceless, apparently.

Lest you think that I'm simply being obsessive about the flash (admittedly probable), there is a scientific reason that I hate the flash.

We study the orienting reflex, a preattentive reflex in response to novelty in the environment. Something so simple as a scene change in a television program reliable elicits an orienting reflex (see the work of Annie Lang).

So I know that a huge flash between clips will sure as heck elicit an OR.

And since I am studying cardiac response, I would strongly prefer not to artificially elicit a massive OR.

One little cable can carry as much information at the Library of Congress, but playing two clips in serial eludes modern computation.

Go figure!

Reasons to Never Travel by Air

I hate to fly. I used to like it. Now I don't.

Perhaps it is because I am a control freak, and you have no control on a plane.

Right now, my half brother is stuck in Denver under two feet of snow. He has been there since 8 a.m. Wednesday. He has no idea when he will be able to leave.

Two other friends are stuck on the tarmac in Houston. They were flying here to see us ... due to arrive at 4:02 p.m. Instead the Houston airport is closed due to lightning. They are on the runway watching the light show.

This map shows current lighting activity (thanks to ultra cool site, Vaisala). Note how the country is almost free of lightning ... except for friggin' Houston.

To summarize, I know three people traveling by air today. All three are being hosed by fate.

Airlines: boo, hiss!