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/
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