John's Site

I've made it to Greece, and am sitting in our apartment convincing myself that I've forgotten nothing major.  Lists help.  Actually, lists help a lot.

For the past two years, my childhood friend Nicho Hatsopoulos and I have been planning our second scientific meeting.  The first, AREADNE 2006, was a huge success.  So huge that through essentially only word-of-mouth advertising, this year's session, AREADNE 2008, has sold out.  In 2006, we pressed hard to get people to attend.  This time, we've had to turn people away. 

Much of my time over the last few months have been devoted to preparing this meeting, from writing the web site, to wrangling submissions from poster presenters, to managing registrations, to editing and printing the proceedings.  And the feeling before the meeting is the same as the last time, nearly. It's a mixture of, "holy crap, I hope we can pull this off," and "this was *so* much work; I'm not getting paid enough."  The first, this time, is tempered by our success from the last session; the butterflies aren't nearly as strong.  Although no one else I know has started a conference from scratch, the accolades were great last time, so I'm quitely confident things will work out again.  This time around the second thought above was followed by, "we didn't charge people enough."  Actually, I thought that the first time as well.  But I'm a little wiser now, and understand more about how things like this work, and maybe we'll charge a more appropriate amount next time.

Planning and running a scientific conference is like publishing a book and arranging a four-day wedding, all at the same time.  With the added constraint that the book's first printing gets distributed at the wedding.  There are guest lists, travel arrangements, last minute changes, scheduling, food, excursions, hotels, caterers, expected events, save-the-date cards, reminder cards, receptions, dinners ... and the book, the conference proceedings, writing, typesetting, editing, printing, binding.  It has been months of work to get to this point and nearly everything that was under my control is done.

The scientific world is not one for giving applause for more than a passing second or two.  Even an outstanding presentation gets only five or perhaps ten seconds.  In 2006, as Nicho and I closed the conference, there was spontaneous, appreciative applause that, embarassingly, lasted about half a minute. The message was driven home, it was worth having made the effort, and people recognized that the meeting ran well.

From my experience last time, though, the best part is going to be talking one-on-one with the towering leaders of our field who have agreed to present at our conference, surrounded by the stunning beauty of Santorini.  Moreover, two of the handful people who are responsible for my being a neuroscientist, Larry Abbott and Bill Newsome, will be there.  These are my professional heros! 

Running a good scientific conference isn't hard, like most things in life when there are plenty of examples to learn from.  You just have to pay attention, observing other people's successes and mistakes. One of our secrets is that it's a little difficult to get to our conference, and a little expensive, so the people who come are committed to being there.  Another is that we chose a good location, and were brazen and bold when soliciting support and involvement.  And another is that we do not publish the precise schedule of who is presenting when, so that people come for the entire time; this is subtle -- when people come to a conference for only a short time and leave quickly, this generates a sense of transience that leads to a lack of involvement and participation.  People there for a short time are only going to listen.  We don't want people to just listen, as a good conference involves exchanges of ideas. By not publishing the schedule, people are encouraged to be there the entire time, and build familiarity that leads to interaction.  I could go on and on about what makes a good scientific conference.  But perhaps I'll leave that to after the 2008 meeting.

In the US, the part of a company that handles business-to-business relationships, especially establishing new ones, is typically called the Business Development Office.

Is it called the same thing in Europe and Asia?

There is a global public relations and marketing firm called Saatchi and Saatchi. They're based in London and New York.  Saatchi and Saatchi are big.  Their client list has a lot of members of the Fortune 50, like Sony, Ford, Proctor and Gamble; their gross income is nearly a billion dollars.  They're big.

Every few years, they put together a list of projects and people whom they think have come up with very innovative ideas, ones that will push the envelope of communication, ones that will make the world a better place.  They call them World Changing Ideas.  And they present an award, a pretty hefty $100,000 award, to the single member of their list of elite projects that most embody these ideals.  To select the winner, they use a panel of internationally renowned movers and shakers drawn from widely different fields.

In the middle of 2007, I got a letter from Saatchi and Saatchi inviting me to apply for this award because of my research in restoring sight to the blind. I later learned that they sent out only 300 such letters.  I thought it was pretty nice to have been invited, so worked hard on an application and sent it in.  Some months passed, and a few weeks ago, I got word that my project had been selected as one of the ten finalists.

We won't know who will win until the award dinner, an event with a few hundred people in attendance.  Looking at the list of finalists, however, I doubt my chances are that good, but, still, it is quite an honor to be in the same room as these people.  One nominee that nearly everyone reading this will have heard of is the One Laptop Per Child project.  Another is called Village Phone, and the fellow behind it won the Nobel Prize in Economics two years ago for his work on the project.  For my project, run by one person on a very modest budget, to be on the same list as these mega-efforts, is pretty heady.

The judging panel consists of Peter Gabriel (of pop music fame), Malcolm McLaren (also of pop music fame), HRH Prince Hassan of Jordan, Carolyn Porco (a well-known astronomer), Edward de Bono (inventor of the idea of lateral thinking), and Philippe Starck (an international designer).  Getting to shake the hand of any one of these people would be a pretty big deal: having dinner with them and having a chance to present my research will be phenomenal.  I'm not going to win the prize -- at least I think I have no real chance of it -- but have every intention on making the best of the valuable opportunities this presents.

The press release announcing the award and ten finalists went out yesterday. The award dinner is in just under a month, in New York.  Wish me luck.

This is a technical question for anyone out there who knows javascript, HTML and IE7.

I'm writing the registration page for a conference I run.  On this page, there's a submit button that, when pressed, triggers a credit card transaction.  It is important to prevent multiple clicks of this button.

Usually, you do this something like:

<input name="submit" value="CONFIRM and PAY" type="submit" onclick="this.disabled=true;">

... and that works great in Firefox.  Does exactly the right thing.  Under IE7, the button gets disabled and that's all that happens.  As far as I can tell, because the button gets disabled, submission of the form is blocked at click time, even if I include an explicit call to submit the form in the onclick javascript.

Are there any workarounds?  I can't find anything on the net. Am I missing something?

With a new job underway and the new year approaching, I thought it might be a good time to re-evaluate my personal strategy for keeping a calendar.  For the past few years, I've been using a hand-me-down Palm V that my brother very kindly gave me.  Although it has served me well, it has seen its days and needs refreshing to restore it to utility (like a new battery).  It also has a nasty habit of losing the screen calibration from time to time (a known bug with this model, but there's a 3rd-party app to recover when this happens).  The computational environment at my new job includes an on-line time management system that many people use.  Then there's Google Calendar.  I'm personally a big fan of the traditional pen-and-paper week-at-a-glance planners.  So, with all of that, I've thought it might be a good idea to solicit comments from my friends, family, and associates.

What do you use to manage your calendar, what do you like about it, and how does it meet your needs?  Do you use pen and paper?  One of those really thick daily planners?  A giveaway pocket calendar from your bank?  A Palm-style device?  Your phone?  An on-line system?  If you use an electronic version, what do you do for backups?  If you use a paper-based system, do you make periodic photocopies?

Today, 9 October 2007, I signed the letter offering me a research position at the Massachusetts General Hospital, in the department of Neurosurgery, to pursue my work in creating a visual prosthesis.  This is a serious job that came with a pretty substantial commitment on the part of the hospital to my career.  MGH, as it's called, is one of the premier hospitals in the US, probably in the world.  It supports basic science research along with clinical research, and treats I don't know how many patients each year.  It's part of the Harvard Medical School system, and educates many of the top doctors in the US and abroad.  It is where the first public demonstration of anesthesia-based operations was performed.  I'm pretty excited about working there.

One of the serious downsides to the position is that it's what's called a soft money job: there is a surprisingly modest startup package that came along with the offer, and raising funds to support my research (and pay my salary after the first period of time) is up to me.  So, in addition to making this announcement, I'd also like to say that if any of my friends and colleagues that might have come into a little money recently and are looking to make charitable donations to help defray their tax burdens, please contact me.  I'll be setting up what's called a Gift Account at MGH where interested parties can make tax-deductible donations to support my research.  Anything from $10 to $10,000 (or more!) would help, although the total needs to be above $10,000 to start the account.

If you aren't familiar with my research, the quick version is that I'm trying to restore sight to the blind.  The leading causes of blindness in the western world are diseases of the eye (macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, glaucoma).  When someone loses the ability to see from these diseases, we think we can restore sight by using an artificial retina -- a digital camera -- and wire that into the brain. It's just like a cochlear implant to restore hearing.  A nice review of my scientific paper on this research appeared in The Economist earlier this year, and you can download a copy from http://pz.med.harvard.edu/pz/papers/pezaris-reid-2007-pnas-the-economist-coverage.pdf .

If you can't make a donation, then please, seriously, mention my work to anyone whom you think might be able to.  And thanks!

I hate doing my taxes.  It's not the paying part I dislike so much as the infernal amount of shuffling and sorting of papers because unless I want to pay more than the law allows, I must, like many, itemize my deductions.  I've got society memberships, conference expenditures, home office expenditures, and a 4-inch thick folder of unreimbursed employee expenses (it sucks that it's hard to get research funds, but being able to deduct out-of-pocket expenses eases the sting a little).  Certainly I'm not alone in this dislike of shuffling through a years' worth of paper and electronic entries to slice and dice into Federally-mandated categories.

So, I'd like to have everyone comiserate through answering two questions:

1. How much time do you spend preparing your taxes?  If you pay someone to prepare them, please estimate how much time you spent getting things together for your preparer.

2. If you pay someone to do it (either money or in-kind), how much do you pay?

I am generating videos on Linux, in uncompressed AVI format that will play everywhere (Windows and Mac in particular), but the files are ridiculously large. So, I need to compress them.

What tools are available to convert a video stream from one codec to another, preferably running under Linux? I'm going to be using this only rarely, so a $1000 solution (ie, buying some video editing suite that I'll never otherwise use) isn't going to be helpful. But I do need to use it in the immediate future, I need a codec that has wide compatibility, and can generate pretty high quality. Absolute compression levels aren't that important (ie, I don't care if it gets 3:1 vs 4:1) because the video I'm generating is eminently compressible, but quality is important.

Any suggestions?

Suppose you forget a gin and tonic with ice sitting out in the summer sun. What happens to the liquid level as the ice melts?

(Assume the surrounding air is perfectly dry so there is no condensation.)

In a new collaboration with my dear, old friend Nicho, I'm doing some ultra-cool data analysis on neural data from the part of the brain where motor control (ie, moving your arms, legs, and such) is found. The data analysis requires some serious computation: my current desktop, with 3GB of main memory and dual Athlon XP 1900+ processors is not quite up to the task.

The task is eminently parallelizable, so multiple cores or multiple processors, or even multiple boxes, is fine, or even desireable but the base main memory needs to be 2GB. What's going to be the best bang for my computer buck?

Happy New Year, 2007 from GMT+1!

In the spirit of my brother's recent journal entry (http://pez.multiply.com/journal/item/152) here are five things many people don't know about me.  I agree with him, Multiply is exactly the right place for this kind of communication.

1. I collect old CPUs.  Yep, old 386s, 486s, Pentiums, 8086s, 6800s, whathaveyou.  I even own the first single-chip CPU, the venerable Intel 4004.  If you want to send me an old chip as a gift, I would gladly, happily, accept it.

2. My pinkies splay slightly, and because of this, a physician once asked me if I'd broken both of them.  I hadn't noticed until he mentioned it.

3. C. Everett Koop is my hero.  If you don't already know why he's heroic, read the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_Koop; the crux is that he repeatedly did the Right Thing even though it was often against his personal religious beliefs and the then-current and powerful political forces.

4. On any given day, I often quote or make reference to movie dialog or musical lyrics.  Since most of my references are relatively obscure, no one gets them (eg, "what's in the big pink box?"; go ahead, use Google to search for it, and don't forget the quotation marks), so no one realizes how commonly I do this.

5. I dislike black licorice intensely, and always have since childhood.  Oddly, though, I've grown to enjoy ouzo, but still dislike licorice.

And you?  Join this blog ring.  Put a referene to this page in your blog entry that has five things about you.  Don't forget to add the "5things" tag, if you're on Multiply.

It's rare that this jaded, seen-it-all, know-it-all gets his head bent, but it just happened.

In case you've never experienced a head bending, it's like this. Each one of us has a vision of reality, a set of intuitively and often subconsciously understood rules about how the world works, covering things from gravity to social interactions. These expectations, in aggregate, form a space that can easily be described. From time to time, an event happens that warps this space by revealing a previously unrealized distortion, or a previously unrealized limitation. One of the most common lesser events like this is when we suddenly realize that two places are actually very close when we thought they were quite distant because we took distinct paths to each, and our internal map hadn't bridged the two. The epiphany experienced during this eureka event is a head bending, albeit a minor one.

Nearly everyone reading this knows how to drive a car, and some have driven things larger than cars, like trucks, buses, or perhaps even airplanes. There's an awesome power in controlling such large objects with finesse. In some ways, it's action at a distance, as the small movement of a control, like a steering wheel or gas pedal, can create a large change in the state of a heavy object with substantial physical extent. Here's where my recent head bending came into play -- researchers in Britain (part of the UK Ministry of Defense) are developing remote control airplanes. Sure, sure, remote controlled airplanes are nothing new to model plane aficionados, but that's not the UK government's goal. (GAWD this is awesome.) They want to have one pilot flying a fighter plane while simultaneously controlling a swarm of other planes. But we're not talking about flying 5 or 10 planes all at the same time using identical control inputs so that they all do the same thing, we're talking about coordinated flight that uses a language and input space outside of normal controls to encompass synchronized motion between the vehicles with an automated mechanism taking care of the mundane aspects of flying each plane. The fighter pilot becomes a symphonic conductor, albeit a phenomenally lethal one.

But it's not the lethality that impresses, but the idea that we understand enough about how to automate an incredibly complex problem like flight control to think about a meta problem: once we can control aircraft (or cars, or anything) well enough to make them be autonomous, what possibilities open up when we can add coordinated control between collections of such craft? One dancer now becomes the entire ballet troupe; one driver now controls the entire fleet of cars; one sailor becomes an armada; one athlete, a team; one person gets multiplied.

As I write this, I'm watching the flight status of my mother's plane from London Heathrow back to the States.  Every few minutes I click the update button, and get a new status on the flight.  And, every 10 minutes, the estimated time of departure moves 10 minutes into the future.  The flight is now over an hour late.

I fly a fair bit, more than most, but not as much as many.  I'm probably on less than two dozen separate legs in any given year.  And I've seen a fair number of delays due to various reasons.  In my experience when the delay is due to a mechanical problem with the aircraft, the time estimates for the delay are pretty accurate.  When the delay has to do with weather, or Air Traffic Control, or similar source that is affecting many flights (eg, congestion at Heathrow, weather at Newark, and so forth), invariably, the delay estimates (a) start out wildly optimistic, and (b) grow and grow.

Like I said, I fly not too much, and yet I've noticed this trend.  Let's look at the bigger picture for a minute.  Take the example of Continental Airlines.  According to a recent press release for operational status in July 2006, they experienced an on-time arrival rate of not quite 70%, and blamed most of that figure on weather effects.  They claim to run 3,200 flights per day worldwide.  So that's 3,200 flights/day x 365 days/year * 0.30 delay fraction = 350,000 delayed flights per year.

And that's not enough data to do a better job of predicting delays?

Today (2/7/06) our first poster submission arrived for the AREADNE 2006 conference (see http://www.areadne.org).  I'm more than a little excited about this!

I mean, it's one thing to invite people to come to give a talk in a beautiful place when you're footing (much of) the bill for them, like we are for the speakers at our conference.  It's completely another when strangers want to be there too, and are willing to spend resources, money and effort, to join along.

We've heard many people say, "sure, I'd love to attend, sounds good!"  We've even had a number of big wigs say they'll be attending.  In the face of all of those positive reactions, I've kept on reminding myself that talk is cheap, and until people have expended some effort or time to commit, I'm not holding my breath.  But now, someone has done that.

WOO HOO!


p.s. Coincidentally, the poster submission arrived on my co-chair's birthday!

michaelg wrote:
Combine the reduced production costs with the ability to distribute music inexpensively via the internet and things are both more competitive (more bands to choose from) and more democratic than ever (I actually have the ability to choose).

Although I agree with Mike's quote above wholeheartedly (trust me that it does not suffer for being taken out of context), it is even more germane than it might appear at first blush. The larger picture is that transduction technology -- the ability to capture sounds and images in particular -- has become nearly free. So has publication technology, with Internet sites like Multiply.

Whereas there previously was a substantial barrier to recording music (the one and only single my band recorded back in high school cost a month's allowance each to rent the studio for an afternoon) or taking photographs (ditto for the thousands of dollars in camera equipment), there now is almost none. You can record music, mix, edit, master, with a run-of-the-mill sound card and free software. You can take reasonably high-quality photographs with disposable digital cameras. And then you can publish them for all the world to see on the net.

So?

So, this means the following. Before, when it cost a lot to record a song or take a picture and send it to a gazillion people, people would put substantial effort into doing a good job. You didn't capture just anything for posterity, you recorded your best songs, you were selective what you took photos of. You considered things carefully. If the recording and distribution costs for a single song were on order of $1000 (not unreasonable back-in-the-day for a small band) you sure as hell made certain it was going to count. If hanging a set of photos in a gallery was going to cost $2000 (an underestimate, speaking from personal experience), you selected your very best.

But now, since it's free, that incentive to edit and self-censor is gone. We get more and more drivel published, and the fraction that's actually any good becomes vanishingly small. This is not intended as an indictment, but an observation. Since only, say, 5% of the bands in existence are worth listening to, when, suddenly, all of them are publishing songs when only the good bands were before, you've got 95% crap where before it was almost all listenable. Similarly for photos: before, when 5% of people behind a camera had a modicum of talent, the fraction of photos worth looking at was pretty high; now that everyone has a digital camera, we get a dozen shots of Timmy's dog eating Tuesday afternoon's leftovers when even one would be too much.

The people at Slashdot figured this out and built their site around a peer-review system where the best posts were floated to the top and the junk sank. The community on Slashdot works together to effectively edit the content. Multiply has been built around the premise that your friends will publish good material (from your perspective) and use that as an editing filter. It would be interesting if these two systems could be combined, somehow.  Or perhaps we could educate people to use more self-restraint: just because you can do something like post a 10 minute video of baby Bobby taking his first bath or post 150 photos of a small speck in the air from a sea-and-sky show, doesn't mean you necessarily should. 

Anyone have any good ideas?

I've just learned moments ago that I've been awarded a fellowship through the King Trust, as administered by The Medical Foundation, here in Boston.  This, as my boss puts it, is a big deal.  There were 170 applicants for this fellowship, and 18 finalists, of whom something like 15 will receive awards.  It covers my salary for the next two years to work on creating a visual prosthesis.  That's the amazing part: people who are complete strangers have given me money with a reasonable number of zeros at the end to do something that if you think objectively about it is near insanity ("You're going to put wires in a blind person's brain and make them see? You're nuts!"), but is work that I absolutely love.  To say I'm grateful for and humbled by this award understates things.  What an incredible opportunity!

Letters from the Front
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Pezaris, Boston, 10 November 2000.

NOT DEAD

I'm sure you're all aware of the famous quotation by Nietzsche which
translates to English as, "what does not destroy me, makes me stronger"
(Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker). Toward the end of my
writing-up, variations of this aphorism became intensely interesting, and I
started collecting them. My favorite three are below.

o That which does not kill me merely sharpens my fangs.

o That which does not kill me makes me meaner.

o That which does not kill me just committed its last mistake.

And, in an exquisite bit of timing, the popular song by Chumbawamba was
released with the deliciously defiant lyric,

: I get knocked down
: But I get up again
: You're never going to keep me down
:
: -- Chumbawamba, "I Get Knocked Down", Tubthumping.

which provided a marvelous backbeat to the insanity of finishing my
dissertation. Not dead. Survived. Harder, tougher, meaner.

- pz.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2000, J. S. Pezaris, All Rights Reserved.

Letters from the Front
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Pezaris, Athens, Greece, 5 July 2000.

DEPARTURE

I am out of time. Outside. Time currently holds no immediate meaning. No
doubt this has as much to do with having traveled for 20 of the past 24
hours, having slept little both before and during the transition, as with
having been in four cities in the last month, including the move from
Pasadena to Boston. Add to this mix the base of not knowing what day of
the week it is spanning the past six months for writing, defending and
publishing my dissertation and managing to graduate on time, and perhaps my
feelings of directionlessness make sense. Perhaps?

I'm at once ready for this vacation in Greece and reluctant to take it. I moved from
Pasadena to Boston not even two weeks ago, and had not fully settled in to
life back home. Oh, but how _good_ it was. So good I didn't want to leave
for Greece! My reluctance to come to the land of childhood holidays speaks
volumes of how enthralled I was with being back in Boston. As my dear
friend Juli Zimmerman put it, "welcome back to your life, John!"

I'd spent so many years defending myself and my dislike of Pasadena and LA
to the people there that it was a huge relief to return to Boston and find
that I was not crazy to be holding so firmly to that position.
Boston is just what I thought it was, and more. Every day has been filled
with resounding joy. I find myself grinning fro no apparent reason,
driving down the road, walking along the sidewalk, standing in the aisle of
a supermarket, or walking my mother's dogs around the conservation land
near her home. It's good to have left Pasadena, but it is far better to have returned to Boston.

But, as I write this, my locale is Athens where there is a vacation to enjoy, a
wedding to attend, and years of scars to start erasing.

- pz.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2000, J. S. Pezaris, All Rights Reserved.

Letters from the Front
------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Pezaris, Pasadena, California, 29 April 2000.

ESCAPE

From the Department of the Army Field Manual FM 21-76, /Survival
Evasion and Escape/, a document on how to be an effective prisoner
of war, including instructions on how to escape once captured,
published in March 1968 by the Headquarters of the Department of the
Army, page 299:

> The best way through a wall or fence is the gate. There are many
> ruses which may be used to leave a prisoner of war camp in this
> manner. The ability to bluff is a primary factor. A word of
> caution--any bluff when used when escaping or evading, must be a
> 100% bluff--99% is not good enough. The disguise may be perfect,
> the timing right, but one wrong glance, or a hasty walk when an
> unhurried one is called for, can result in failure.

Wish me luck!

- pz.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2000, J. S. Pezaris, All Rights Reserved.