Learning the ropes...

I've been incredibly fortunate to have an awesome grad. student take me under his wing. he's not only teaching me techniques and protocols, but also helping me understand things like grad school applications, study design, etc. Last fall I completed a round of stereology (cell counting) for his project, and we are hoping the paper will be published soon. (It will be my first publication in neuroscience!). Today he patiently spent more than two hours coaching me in an insufferably hot lab, as I laboriously (and unintentionally) mangled my subject matter in the course of learning how to do prep for neuronal cell culturing. More practice is required.

Tomorrow, another graduate student is going to teach me protein quantification, and I'll be doing some slide preparation. I feel very grateful to the students who are very busy with their own projects and yet take the time to help me learn the ropes. It's one of the advantages of working in a lab in a small institution - the people are great, and very supportive.  And of course, I'm open to any opportunity to learn something new. Every technique I learn now will be invaluable in my honours thesis project. (And if they need me to wash labware, I'll do that too, except that they now have a first-year student on a summer internship, so HE gets to do dishes!)

And on that topic, I also managed to develop some ideas for my project that will allow me to further explore the pathways involved in protein suppression that occur during major depression. This is a topic of particular interest to me so it's great that I have a supportive thesis advisor who is encouraging me to pursue my interest area and come up with my own research project. The downside is that my searches on google for "ketamine" will likely have me on every NSA and CSIS watch-list out there...

And I continue to finish up my work in the human behaviour research lab, finalizing software (written in matlab) and documentation for EEG data processing. (Oh Strongly Typed Programming Languages, how do loathe thee? Let me count the ways...) That professor (not my advisor) wants to pay me again just to keep me in his lab. He keeps trying to woo me to do my honours thesis with HIM, which is flattering, but I'm committed to Lab #1 for my thesis. I want to do work that elucidates the pathways involved in suppression of translational machinery during depressive states. If we can understand the pathways and circuits, we have a better chance of getting to the root causes of the neuronal synapse dysfunction and lost plasticity, rather than just treating symptoms.

At some point, I imagine this will take me back to human behaviour research, because I'm also interested in how cognitive therapies change brain biochemistry and alter these pathways (and when effective, they are as efficacious as drug therapies). Unfortunately, at this point, we don't have good tools/protocols for looking at those mechanisms in the human brain (And ethics wont allow us to chop people's heads off and look at what's going on, *sigh* ;-) ).

I'm now 2 years and 1 month into this new adventure and still loving it.  Okay, maybe not EVERY minute - exams still suck - but the majority of it still excites and enthuses me, and as a dear friend puts it, makes me "sparkle". 

Dear Mathworks, how to NOT "Do the right thing"....

As part of my student volunteer work for a human behaviour research lab, I was tasked with modifying some Matlab code that takes advantage of EEGLab (an open source suite that runs on top of Matlab).  The code is intended to simplify batch processing of participant data for students running studies.  In order to do this project, I BOUGHT the Student edition of Matlab.  Unfortunately, at the time I bought it, only the 32-bit edition was available in the Student version, though I am running Windows 8 on a 64-bit system.  I subsequently found out that I'm faced with critical "out of memory" errors, even though I have 8GB of memory.  Even more frustrating, the 6GB core 2 duo in the lab can run more files without memory errors, than I can...  The answer, I am told, is to move to the 64-bit version, which was released just 90 days after I had purchased my 32-bit license.

I emailed customer support and requested what I hoped would be a free upgrade.  They flat-out refused.

Ironically, their Mission and Values statement says,

Our guiding principle is "Do the Right Thing." This means doing what is best for our staff members, customers, business partners, and communities for the long term, and believing that "right" answers exist. It also means measuring our success, not merely in financial terms, but by how consistently we act according to this principle.

Dear Mathworks.  I actually BOUGHT my software.  When literally thousands of people out there are using ILLEGAL copies, I DID THE RIGHT THING.  Once upon a time, software companies used to give their LOYAL customers free upgrades if they released a newer version within 6-12 months of the date of purchase.  I really WANTED the 64-bit version, but you didn't have it ready.  Then, when you finally DID have it ready, a mere 90 days after my purchase, you want me to buy it again, even though there are KNOWN issues in terms of memory utilization with the 32-bit version running on a 64-bit system. Wouldn't it be DOING THE RIGHT THING, to allow your customers who are running 64-bit systems and have made a purchase in the last year a free upgrade to the 64-bit version?

Personally, this kind of "squeeze the customer for every penny" attitude is what is driving so many in the biological sciences (and economics) to open source systems like R.  I hope Mathworks wakes up and figures out what "Do the Right Thing" really means when it comes to treating their customers fairly, or they will continue to lose them in droves in the coming years.