The Last Day :(

LONG DAY.

Woke up, went to lecture with a heavy feeling in my stomach. This was the last day of the conference. :(

First lecture was stuff I already knew (about the evolution of the English auxiliary 'do,' not really interesting to non-linguists). Dr. Anthony Kroch was the professor giving the lecture. Next we listened to Dr. Ann Bunger talk about children and how they process verbs and action-related words as opposed to concrete nouns and such. I don't really feel like writing about it. So meh.

Then we had lunch. My last lunch with my new favorite people. :(

Afterwards we had a long talk with several of the professors about graduate school and how to get a PhD, and how to tell if getting a PhD is even right for you. After discussing the whole process, I've actually come away feeling less excited about graduate school. I'm going to have to think long and hard where I want to go in life to decide whether or not graduate school is worth my time and if it's something I really want to do. We'll see...

That night we had a catered Indian food dinner complete with tikka masala (my favorite food in the world), naan, and a variety of spicy-as-all-hell vegetables and rice. I stuffed myself to the absolute brim in the hopes I wouldn't have to eat the next morning (bad idea. SUCH a bad idea.) and then insisted that everyone sign my ukulele while we were eating. Rachel had put together a slide show of photos from throughout the conference that was put up while we ate, and I went around the room to get pictures with everyone like a creeper.

Dana!

Morgan and Timur!

Louis!

Josh, Abigail (top), and Ivy! 

My awesome roommate Yuan Chang!

Left to right - Mirela, Luisa, and Alyssa!

Matt, Jose, and Bethany!

Megan, Tatiana, and Ashley!

Debjani, Karla, and Rachel!

 My signed ukulele :D

Everyone planned on meeting up in the 3rd floor lounge to hang out for one more night before we all parted ways across the country. We ended up playing ERS for a couple hours before Jose came down and asked if I wanted to go out to the bars for our last night there, so naturally I put down the cards, got dressed and we headed out on the town. Little did I know I was headed out on another adventure in Philadelphia.

I suppose at this point I should explain why I now love going out with Jose. I forgot to mention it on my other post, but either  Tuesday or Wednesday night (or maybe last Saturday?) we went out and stayed longer than everyone else. We switched between sitting at the bar and dancing around on the dance floor for an hour or so, and then we met a middle-aged man from France, living in LA, and in PA for business. He started buying drinks for Jose and I just mosey'd around for another hour or two. When I felt like leaving, I let Jose know we should start going back. The French guy was still there with Jose and I discovered that he'd bought him not one, not two, not three, but nine margaritas. So Jose was totally done for, and the French guy had been matching his drinks so he was pretty out of it too. At this point I was halfway sober (I'd only had like three drinks all night) so I led Jose out of the building while Frenchman followed us to the bus stop. He kept saying, "I feel bad making you guys walk all the way back to campus! I can get you guys a room at the hotel I'm staying at! I feel bad!" And I was like, "No, no thanks, we're just going to ride a bus instead," except I was slightly more dramatic and kept putting my hand up like I was a police officer stopping traffic. At one point I think I said, "Swiper no swiping" with the hand motion and got a kick out of it. I think I amuse myself a little too much sometimes. Anyway, we made it to the bus stop and I got him to leave ("Nous allons, au revoir! Merci! Nous ne vous verrons jamais!"). Instead of taking the bus we wanted to walk back to campus (about 2 miles of walking), so we started heading west at a brisk pace. When I'm even the slightest bit inebriated, I love to speak foreign languages and try to avoid English at all costs. So the whole way back I was yelling at Jose in Spanish and everyone was looking at us funny. Halfway through our journey, Jose spotted a gas station with a Subway inside and decided he was hungry and that we needed to stop. I went in and got a hot dog while he went to the Subway counter and started singing to the woman behind the counter. He wouldn't listen to me trying to get him to stop and the sandwich lady just kept throwing me evil glances. The rest is history. We got back okay and Jose did not feel well the next morning.

BACK TO TODAY.

At this point it was about 10 o'clock. We'd ridden the tram to Center City (about 3 blocks from our destination), walked to the bar, and found that Jose had forgotten his ID back in the dorms. Instead of giving up, he wanted to go back, get his ID, and come back. I had two tokens left so we used them to get back to the dorms on the bus and he found his ID laying outside his dorm. We went back as quick as we could (I had to buy a couple more tokens for the bus) and at about 11:30 we'd finally gotten situated. My flight was supposed to leave at 7 the next morning, so I can't imagine what I was thinking being out that late at a bar, but I felt like I had to go out with a bang if I wasn't going to see Philadelphia for probably the rest of my academic career. We got to talk to our favorite bartender, Jeff for a couple hours and danced a bit before finally heading out at about three in the morning. By the time we got back to campus, I was ready to pass out. Unfortunately, I still had to pack. Running drunkenly about my room I gathered up my things and cleaned stuff, all the while drinking as much water as my stomach could hold at any given time. At that point I got a text from Tatiana asking if I was still up and telling me I should come hang out with them in their room.

I finished up my packing and went downstairs and watched them play hearts for a while, lamenting my inevitable departure. At about 4:30 I walked Debjani to her taxi a couple blocks away, headed back, and then said my final goodbyes. Listening to a somber mix of Gaga and folk rock, I made my way to the train station where THIS time I was ready with lots of cash to pay for the ride.

Right next to the entrance to the train station I took a picture of the sunrise in Philly.  So gorgeous.

And wouldn't you know it, I got on and off the train and no one asked me for money. Not that I can complain, of course, but after the scare going from the airport to Penn it's a little bit ironic. Oh well! I said my goodbyes to Pennsylvania as I walked through the airport and took one last look at the city before heading to my terminal.


 I was still a little drunk at this point so I had a hard time staying awake while I waited for my flight to board, but I made it. I actually woke up just in time to board my plane, which kinda freaked me out. But after my 20 minute nap I had no more apparent need for sleep so I just stayed awake for the whole plane ride. We stopped in St. Louis where I had to take a small cab over to another section of the airport, get my luggage, then check my luggage BACK in again (GRRR MONEY AND FEES. RAWR) and then I boarded an itty-bitty 6 person plane. There were two people flying it in the front seat, and it was just me and an elderly lady who teaches at the high school in Kirksville sitting in the passenger seats. After some ridiculously terrifying turbulence and an explosion of one of the engines (not really) we landed in Kirksville. I've never been so excited to see Kevin in my life. He drove me home with all my luggage and I lived happily ever after. The end. 

And Then It Happened

Today was the greatest day ever. Abigail planned on having the group do a talent show at 8 and we ended up actually going through with it and letting Jessica attend the event (Jessica is the IRCS activities coordinator). But first...

Cognitive Control, conceptual retrieval, and creativity

Sharon Thompson-Schill

The front brain controls goal-directed behavior. The back brain processes stimulus-driven behavior. <- Very simplified. 

The frontal lobe acts as a filter for incompatible stimuli according to the goal. Ambiguity in language processing is an example of this kind of filtering. Broca's area has been linked to this process of weeing out unimportant information. Unlike what was previously thought, Broca's area is not all-important for language production. Upper posterior area of Broca's area is very active in referential ambiguity. What Dr. Thompson-Schill has found is that decreasing the functioning of the prefrontal cortex makes it easier for people to come up with creative ways to use ordinary objects. Evidently, the PFC is what blocks creativity by filtering out information that isn't relevant, so you perceive less about things when you're an adult and you've learned the correct associations to make. As expected, children are better at coming up with creative uses for things than adults are. 

Motor Control in Brain-Computer Interface

Timothy H Lucas, M.D., PhD

Previously it was thought that certain areas in the brain were very specific to their function, and that similar functions were grouped together in the cerebral tissue. This is not the case. Motor functions show up all over the place in the brain, not just the primary motor cortex. By injecting stains into the brain (specific areas) you can see after a couple months where that stain has traveled to learn the associations that area has with parts of the spinal cord and other parts of the brain. They do this in macaques and then sever their spinal cords and take out their brains and slice them up (muahahahaha!) to study them. By doing this, they can find out where the motor control neurons are for whatever part of the body they're interested in. Then, they implant electrodes in living monkeys' brains, find out where their control centers are by restricting their arm movements to 2 dimensions, and measuring neuron activity during various movement the monkey is trained to make. Then, the chip learns how to interpret those signals. The researchers then paralyze the monkey's arm and connect a robotic arm to the chip, and the monkey uses his normal brain powers to reach the robotic arm to a piece of marshmallow and brings it to its mouth. It's pretty cool. Oh, the things we do for science.

After the lectures, I was determined for my scavenger hunting team to win, and we were still missing a few pictures from the list. While everyone was going out to the farmer's market, I decided to take a small detour to take pictures of everything I could find before meeting up with them. I got google map directions to a few things and set out to find them. But I didn't find any, because I'm directionally challenged, and I can't find my way anywhere even after being in a city for two weeks. So, I ended up somehow in the middle of the city next to that fountain everyone takes pictures with.

Being the loner that I am, I didn't get to take the pic with anyone. But it was still beautiful scenery, so whatevs. I'll have to come back here at some point with Kev and we can act like super tourists together. After hitting the fountain on accident I decided to go meet up with the group at the farmer's market, where I bought a giant thing of gouda cheese (gouda is good-a) and a massive heart attack cookie of epic deliciousness. 

WHAT IS THIS IT'S TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE

After hitting the huge market we went further downtown to East Philly to see the Liberty Bell. On the way there we perpetually complained about how we didn't have enough time together and about how sad we were we only had a day left to hang out. Anyway, the Liberty Bell was pretty cool, but we got there five minutes after the exhibit closed, so we had to look at it through a glass window. Not cool.

Finally, Rachel, Tatiana, and I broke off from the rest of the group to visit the Boathouse Row, one of the items on our scavenger hunt. We were on a tight schedule or we would have waited to see it at night, when they light it up and it shines out over the water. That would have been something to see! But alas, we had to leave to go and meet everyone for dinner and then get ready for the talent show.

Unfortunately I forgot to bring my iPod to the talent show, but the videos are being uploaded to YouTube as I type by Jessica, who got video for everyone. We had a lot of performances, and only 2 people in the whole group decided not to do anything for the show. On of my favorite performances was Matt's, who wrote a poem that was several pages long and recited it for us out of his journal. He also promised he was writing a poem about everyone at the IRCS summer workshop, so I look forward to reporting about it! There was lots of music, singing, dancing, some handstands, eyebrow choreography (it happened), zumba, and we learned how to count to a hundred in Japanese from Louis. 

After all the skits, something amazing happened. Abigail told me to start playing "I'm Yours" on my ukulele, and *everyone* joined in and started dancing, and somehow, harmonizing. Usually when you play music in groups of non-musicians you get a couple people singing, and maybe one person that can harmonize. No. We had a whole group of people in three-part perfect harmony singing and dancing to the same song. It was like we finally crossed over the threshold of sort-of-not-being-good-friends to holy-crap-we're-all-in-love-with-each-other and it was amazing. The rest of the night was a blur of singing and piano playing and music and awesome. I'm going to miss these people soooo much when I leave. 

I'll have links to the videos as soon as they're up. 

To Be a Linguist

Today was a major day for learning about linguisticky things. Unfortunately, though, I'm tired of typing about lectures so these are going to be kept really really short.

Motor intelligence in machines and animals

D. E. Koditscheck

Spacial memory is thought to be held in the hippocampus. We watched a bunch of robots climbing walls using technology that mimics the physiology of gecko feet (layers upon layers upon layers of folds inside folds that allow them to use London dispersion forces to stick to surfaces even if they are smooth at the macroscopic level). The current trend in robotics is the development of proprioception, so that robots know how they're 'feeling' and how it relates to their environment, and how they can use that to their advantage. We learned that most robotics research money comes from the military, so they can't always do the kind of research they want to do (unless it aligns with the military's goals).

Recognizing emotions in speech and text
Ann Nenkova

Dr. Nenkova's area of specialty is emotional intelligence. She wants to help solve the problem of automated telephone systems not being helpful to customerss. Her research is pertinent for care navigation systems, call centers, and computer assisted tutoring systems. There are a lot of things that have to be taken into account when computing emotion, like hesitation, tone, speed, etc. The tools she's using to develop a lot of her data are social media and user-generated content analyses. She also wants to apply her research to people that have medical conditions that affect the way they talk and express their internal states. She would like to develop a system that consistently rates patients using models from many doctors to sort of integrate that information as a way of concretely describing the state of a given patient. Apparently she's using twitter hashtags to see what words are more often used by people describing themselves in whatever emotional state. For instance:
Just got a coke zero. Hurray. #happy
It's a stupid example but that's the gist of it. One of the problems that needs to be figured out is which element of speech can best predict the emotional state of a patient. She's making some headway.

After our lectures, we essentially had a free afternoon, except that Ivy, Jose, Ashley, Rachel, and I were to be following Joe around the sociolinguistics lab. It is only now that I realize who was in the lab and the amazing man we got to meet; William Labov. I've actually been taught Labovian theories of linguistics and I think had I realized who I was meeting I may have exploded. We explored the lab and Joe explained the work he was doing to us. There's a huge closet of recordings that have been taken from people around the country in various years, ranging from people born in 1888 to 1980something. Each recording from Philadelphia is being taken by Joe to be digitized, scripted, analyzed, and then fragmented for analysis of the vowel sounds. Afterward, he charts on a graph using spectrographs where the vowels are being articulated in the mouth, and tracking the movement of all those vowels to measure sound change over a long period.

After dinner we held a discussion about ethics regarding the advancement of cognitive sciences and their effects on medical procedure and stuff. One of the major problems we discussed was wheteher it would be ethical to use technology to increase brain functions in school students or in other cases, because the procedure might be considered analogous to illicit drug use. However, the discussion quickly turned to a question of whether people are responsible for their actions, and then developed into a massive discussion on the possibility of the existence of free will. I have a really radical view on free will, so I spent most of our time explaining myself. The gist of my view is this: the universe is never random, and at the most basic level there is no randomness. Because of that, any layer of complexity above the most basic fabric of the universe will inherently not be random. Subsequently, cognitive processes are a derivative of physically measurable reactions in the brain, and since that complexity is not random, it cannot be changed by 'will,' so I do not believe in free will. It's not something I can say with 100% certainty obviously, but that's how I think about the universe. Huzzah.

That night we played mafia and then I went to sleep. 

:)

It's Not Always Sunny in Philadelphia

It rained today. All day. A lot.

Regardless, I didn't let that stop me from having a good day. Unfortunately one of the bad things about having a chock-full-of-everything day every day for a week in a half is that it's really taxing on your brain and eventually all you want to do is sleep. The fact that it was cold as crap in the lecture room today, dark, and raining outside did not help my drive to stay awake and pay attention to lecture. Nonetheless I did the best I could. At least we had a cereal breakfast today; I got to put chocolate syrup all over my oats and honey. Lectures!

Word learning and phonetic development in infancy

Danial Swingley

Dr. Swingley investigates infant language perception. Babbling begins at 7-9 months of age (usually), with the first words following between 9-13 months. Infants learn phonetic categories, word forms, phonetic patterns, etc. The way he figures this out is using eye tracking. Even before infants can produce speech, you can ask them to look at something specific on a screen or just mention a word like apple, and the infant will direct its gaze to the corresponding picture or object more than other objects. This occurs around six months of age. Initially when babies are born they have the ability to distinguish between all human speech sounds, even if they are only subtly different (aspirated /t/ versus unaspirated, etc.). However, we know that this ability is lost with time and that eventually we have a really hard time distinguishing sounds that are not present in our mother tongue. Dr. Swingley wanted to investigate when this happened, and found that infants began to lose the ability to distinguish sounds in other languages starting at 8 months of age. 

His theory is that children use distributional learning by seeing how sounds are clustered statistically under certain conditions to learn which words are possible in their language. At a very early age (again, 6-7 months), infants show a preference for words that are spoken in the language that they've been exposed to; and not only that, but words which are phonotactically impossible in their mother tongue do not have this same effect of preference. However, there are other ways in which infants might learn this skill, and no one is sure which one is right. An alternative would be that the infant pays attention to the mother's clear speech, or might have a better set of dimensions for comparative analysis, or may learn from context. 

Definite descriptions and domain restrictions in online processing

Florian Schwarz

Dr. Schwarz is a formal semanticist. Formal semantics seeks to formally represent the meanings of words in an accessible way. Inherent in this is the idea of compositionality - the idea that meaning of complex expressions are related systematically to their parts and how they're put together. Indexicals (words that have no meaning without context like pronouns) play an important role in semantics because they are difficult to represent and draw their meaning directly from context. 

Then we took my Semantics and Pragmatics class from a couple years ago over again and learned about implicatures, quantifiers, and all that other great stuff. Then he added a whole bunch of variables and it looked like he was doing algebra but with linguistics on the board and it's been too long and now I can't remember how to explain anything. Something about places having a value 's'...? 

Also, while processing language, there is a "Principle of Charity" in which if something isn't entirely understandable, the brain will make its best approximation and understand the utterance in a way that may or may not be correct. 

______________________

Next we got to take group photos and we all wore our T-shirts so we'd feel like a cohesive group.

We had a chance to go to two of four labs; Singley's, Brainard's, Schwarz's, and Trueswell's. I pick Singley and Schwarz because their work seemed more relevant to what I was studying and more cool. Both had eye tracking equipment, though Dr. Singley's was much more sophisticated. It looked like this:

Specifically we got to see an experiment testing how the placement of prepositional phrases affected the way in which people categorized objects and meaning. Essentially, by hearing a prepositional phrase first instead of last, you will delineate a domain in your visual field for processing in a different way than when the prepositional phrase is not fronted. It's hard to explain and I don't have a powerpoint that I can just go through, so we'll move on.

After the labs our scheduled social events was dinner at Dahlak, an Ethiopian restaurant. I'd never had Ethiopian food so I was really excited (and a little nervous). We walked up Market a few blocks from campus and walked into a musty old restaurant. It was dark and kind of dank, with a dilapidated piano stuck behind a wall and a bathroom with no soap or toilet paper, as well as a kitchen cut off by nothing but a towel hanging down from the door post. It took half an hour to get our waters, but in the end I think it was totally worth it. In case you've never had Ethiopian food, the setup is thus: there are wicker baskets which act as tables, and little stools situated around the baskets which are what you sit on. There are no napkins and no utensils. They give you a large plate of injera (a spongy crepe-like bread; it's really flexible but not stretchy) which is what you use to eat with. The food comes in a large circular metal basin, and it somewhat resembles Indian food in that there are many spices, but there is not as much meat and no rice. There's just a bunch of sauces with a little meat in some of them, vegetable curries, etc. The injera is used to pick up whatever food you want to eat, just like picking it up with your hands, and then you eat the injera with the dish inside it. If stuff gets on your fingers, you just lick the food off! It was a really weird new way of eating food.

Ethiopian food is a little expensive, but it's definitely worth trying at least once. I was absolutely stuffed by the end of the meal and there was still food left (and we were sharing that dish between 5 people!), but a girl named Abigail from the IRCS group wanted to go to swing dance and convinced me to go along. We caught a bus downtown with minimal time for digestion, and because it was raining, we were pretty wet when we finally walked into the Ethical Center (not sure why it was being held there but whatever. Also, what's an ethical center?), paid our dues, and went into the dance room. There were two instructors who were extremely enthusiastic about what they were doing, and that made the lesson a lot more fun. But as fun as it was, I couldn't figure out how to move. I just don't think I was born to make my feet do unusual things. The people I went with got it pretty well though!

For some reason we decided to walk home in the rain. So we walked 15 blocks or so back to campus, and we were all incredibly wet. My shoes were especially soaked, but luckily I'd packed 3 pairs of shoes. Muahahaha.

Luisa and I have decided to do a song for the talent show on Thursday. Sooooooooo Imma learn it on my uke and she's going to sing and it's going to be wonderful! Sleep time.

Not Enough Time

There is not nearly enough time in the day/this program is not nearly long enough. When it hit me that there are now only four days remaining before I go home, I became really depressed. I'm just now getting to know everyone and settle into life in the big city! Nonetheless I will continue to enjoy my time here.

Today we did a lot of REALLY COOL THINGS. And you will have to keep reading to know what those really cool things are.

This morning started off kind of slow. One of the professors who was supposed to come and lecture was sick today, so we only had one, and then we were free to nap and lunch before coming back for a tour of two different labs. Here's a summary of this morning's lecture. It's short, because I was half asleep.

When the shoe fits: word learning in naturalistic learning environments

Lila Gleitman (was sick) so given by John Trueswell

Dr. Trueswell is the director of the program here at IRCS and on the Linguistics faculty here at Penn. However, his main area is psychology. He is interested in how children acquire language and investigates the bootstrapping phenomenon which is thought to be one way in which children acquire language starting with very little. There are several models for how children learn their first word. One of the models is the Single Meaning Hypothesis, which states that children hear a word and make a single hypothesis about what it means according to the word's referent in the child's environment. That word will be attributed to something readily accessible. Later, if the child's hypothesis is found to be incorrect, the child we reconsider how he/she understands the word and attempt to make a new connection between the word and his/her environment. This theory is much more supported and logical than the other, which is the Multiple Meaning hypothesis. In the Multiple Meaning hypothesis, it is thought that children hear a word and keep several objects in mind about what the word could refer to. Later, when the child hears the word again, it compares the objects it sees at that point to the objects he/she sees (sorry, I keep referring to children as 'it.' Whatevs.) to the objects that were present before and narrows down the possibility. This seems really cognitively taxing and there isn't very much evidence to support it. 

There was a lot of stuff about adults acquiring words according to high-information and low-information trials during an experiment and yadda yadda no one wants to hear so I'm going to move on.

_________________

We didn't get to hear the lecture I actually wanted to hear this morning, which was about how the mind processes difficult words. That is, words that have long length or that are comprised of several constituents, or that have complex irregular morphology. Anyway, we got some nap time so that was nice. I napped and then went to lunch to talk to the professor about language acquisition and we had a really good discussion. One of the best things about this conference, I have found, is that the students are actually all willing to participate in discourse no matter the topic. Everyone knows everything about everything. Except linguistics. The non-linguistic people keep asking questions that make me really anxious to spew information out about language change, acquisition, morphology, and culture and stuff. Fortunately I've been able to keep my mouth shut some of the time so as not to look like the most annoying person ever. Today we covered the topics of how the brain processes morphology, how TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation, which you will read about in a sec) affects language processing, and some other cool topics. 

After lunch we split up into two teams. I think I forgot to mention this, but there are two scavenger hunt teams and there are 11 students in each group. There's the red team, and the winning team. I'm on the winning team. It's actually become something of an obsession; we have to take pictures of certain things and people around the city and I've gotten like 20 points for our team because I'm not good for much else. But we get a prize and I want the prize. 

SO we split up into our teams and headed in opposite directions to different labs and then switched labs later in the afternoon. They were both really awesome. The first one was the TMS lab. Dr. Roy Hamilton demonstrated the TMS technology and explained how it works and what it is used for. For those who don't know, TMS is used to depolarize (i.e. fire) the neurons in the cortical tissue of the brain in a centralized location. The machine uses two coils which, when run-through with an electric current, create a magnetic field. Faraday's principle states that the oscillation of a magnetic field generates an electric current at a distance proportional to the square of the distance from the magnets, so using that idea they localize the magnetic field to stimulate various parts of the brain. Before this is all done, an MRI scan is taken of the subject's brain. Then, using little headbands and plastic ball things, they use a computer and an infrared scanner and a couple tools to match the position of the subject's head to their MRI scan on a computer screen. Then, by using a metal rod tool, you can see exactly what part of the brain you're going to stimulate (in 3 dimensions, no less) before you fire up the machine. The TMS can be applied at various frequencies, strengths, and durations, elements which are controlled very carefully. Some types of TMS have been known to cause seizures, though the probability is only about 1/700. 

This technology has been used to treat depression and aphasia, though aphasic studies are still in their infancy. The FDA has approved TMS for treating depression as a refractory treatment after at least one medication has failed. Dr. Hamilton gave us a demonstration on one of his colleagues and I got a video. Also, he demonstrated the brain localization technique on Tatiana, one of the women here at the conference. (Side note... at what age does a girl/boy become a woman/man? It feels weird to refer to myself as a man but I'm definitely not a boy...)

Watch this video... the guy's hand will move when Dr. Hamilton uses TMS over his motor cortex (at least, the part that is used when moving the hand). 

After the demonstration, we went upstairs to the conference room and talked about all the possible applications and issues with TMS before heading out and over to the hospital to meet Dr. Branch Coslett, MD.

This was less of a lab and more of a conference. We sat in a conference room around a table and discussed two case studies with Dr. Coslett. He gave us the symptoms a certain patient had and then asked us for what we thought might have been wrong with his brain, which was really cool. We all threw out diagnostic ideas and shared what information we knew about what areas of the brain affected specific behavioral patterns and cognitive processes and learned a lot from each other. We're no diagnosticians by any means, but it felt like we were on House. After 'diagnosing' the patient we got to look at MRI scans of their brains to see where the damage had actually occurred (they were stroke patients, forgot to mention). 

After the discussions we went back to eat dinner on campus and I slept for a bit back at the dorm. At seven we were scheduled for a screening of the documentary The Linguists. The documentary was about two linguists, their travels all over the world, and their work on documenting dying languages before they go extinct. This is one of the things I really want to do at some point in my life, and it definitely looks even more interesting than I thought it was previously. Not only did we get to screen the film, but one of the linguists from the film, Dr. David Harrison was there to talk with us and answer our questions about his work and about linguistics in general. After watching the film we discussed for about another hour about how to get out into the field, find funding, and function on such trips. It was a really, really cool experience. Then we got pictures with him! 

Finally we all headed back to the dorm, but none of us were really up to sleeping after our mentally stimulating discussion so we met on the third floor lounge to... play ukulele and sing songs. I taught someone else how to play 'Over the Rainbow' on the uke and right before going to bed, someone decided we needed to have an IRCS talent show on Thursday evening. So that's what we're doing, apparently. Sleep time.