Procrastination

I find it easiest to procrastinate when I either have too little or a lot to do! I have a report to hand in tomorrow morning, but that is the last thing my mind wants to focus on and I am much more concerned about other things going on, which involve decision making, something which is very difficult and therefore very worrying indeed! So to fight the conflict I am procrastinating!

Had the first project meeting today, didn't go great, but not terribly badly either. It's very difficult to articulate ideas, especially when they are abstract ones. We also probably didn't go to the meeting with the clearest ideas of what we wanted to do, or even what kind of things are possible in a 4 month time scale. But it was productive and we have a much clearer idea of how the system repsonds both biologically and computationally. Literature you've read is also suprisingly difficult to remember in that kind of situation, despite having re-read it before going in! But we got some direction and need to start bringing together our ideas into a plan. A plan to test the relative successfulness of having repellent pheromones in addition to attractive ones, and how the system behaves according to what mechanisms(or rules) are used to control repellent (and attractive pheremones) for Pharaoh ants!

In reality these are pesky little critters, which are incredibly small and live in large spread out colonies which often inhabit places where humans live, particularly hospitals and scavenge their landscape for whatever food they can find! What makes this especially pertinant, yeah I went there!, is that they can also chew through things like sterilised hospital equipment, so the ability to manage them effectively is important. Currently they are managed by laying out food which contains a slow acting posion to kill off as many as possible. This type of ant is highly mobile and if scared can quickly move to a new area and repopulate a colony. Perhaps a better understanding of there pheremone mechanisms and dynamics in the world can provide answers to the how they could/should be controlled.

Also I've basically finished my website! It's very basic, but I wouldn't mind some feedback if you have the time - http://www-users.york.ac.uk/~sb992/

2011 begins!

I've somehow neglected my blog for a little while, but have found a bit of time and will to update.

Firstly I guess I need to tie up some loose ends from the previous Xfactor type blog. I haven't performed analysis on any data collected after my previous post and may not till some time in the future if at all.

 In the end Matt Cardle won the Xfactor, with Rebecca Ferguson coming second, One Direction were runners up and Cher Lloyd came fourth. These are also the top four artists who were still in the competition when the graph was produced, however not in the order they placed by the end of the competition. Of course it is difficult and unwise to draw conclusions when only one piece of data has been analysed, though this is an interesting result. Comparing it against the actual votes the acts were recieving at the time which was between weeks 7 and 8, the proportions do not really align, though it is noted the graph I produced was the sum of everything previous, even if this sum was taken I don't think they'd compare that well. I conclude that facebook may not necessarily be a good substitue for determining the outcome of a public vote. Although this conclusion fails the new rule for science journalism, I support the scientific paradigm - more research (and in my case data as a must) needed to better answer the question!


But asides from that what have I been up to?

~I've got back from the winter holidays and sat some exams, which didn't go great in all honesty, but could've been worse I guess. Will have to wait till the results come back!

~I've been using C++ to create a program which performs a random iterated algorithm, on an Iterated function system of a finite number of contracting affine transformations. If that means nothing to you, I'll suffice to say I've been making fractals and if that means nothing to you I'll redirect you to here. I may post some images when the assessment is completed.

~I've been reading up on algorithmic processes and the biology and experimentation on ants! I am planning on doing some research and developing algorithms for ants to produce biological knowledge(and potentially computational knowledge also, everythings interdisciplinary nowadays).

~I've been learning to use HTML and CSS to build my own website to advertise myself to potential PhD supervisors and job opportunites. W3 schools has been an excellent resource to this end!

~I've been looking for the above mentioned PhD positions and job opportunites, though I'm finding it very difficult to narrrow down on anything. There are so many fascinating things I'm interested in and to choose a PhD is to define an interest for 3 years, which still feels like a massive amount of time to me! It makes it even more difficult to know that funding deadlines are very near and that there is less cash in the pot, and hence more competition for places, due to the economic climate.

~& finally I've been eating a lot of chocolate as I got a lot for Christmas! Yummy!