Arnob Entry #4 - Monkeys next to my lab that I didn't know about

Wrapping up the second to last week in my lab, and it's definitely crunch time. On my last day I will give a presentation at the weekly lab meeting about my research. Hopefully I can finish my research by the end of this week so I can have all of next week to prepare and edit my presentation. My graduate student, Yul, has been helping me with my research the entire time and I am sure that he will also give me feedback on my presentation. My PI Mike has also given me pointers about my presentation and ideas on what areas to focus on. In my meeting with Mike last Monday, he challenged me to think more deeply about the concepts of my research and also to think about areas which I haven't really been focusing on (for example, to analyze the failed trials much more than I have been doing). The 'thinking' aspect when confronting these deeper conceptual ideas has been very difficult, but I also need to create the proper graphical representations on MATLAB which will also be challenging. However, Mike did hint that a high school student usually wouldn't be able to properly analyze research to this extent. I have been motivated by his challenge and hopefully I will be able to overcome it. 

On a completely different note, I was pretty surprised by the news I found out the other day. Many of the lab members work with monkeys for their decision-making experiments. What I didn't know until 6 weeks into my lab was that the monkeys lived in the room across the floor from my lab. Of course I wouldn't be able to work directly with the monkeys but NaYeung, a fellow lab member, said that I could be able to watch the monkeys through some glass wall when she performs one of her experiments. Looking forward to that and will definitely post some pictures (if she lets me take some). 

I don't have any good pictures from the lab this week, so here is a picture of this concert I went to with Jesse. It was the free concert at the Lincoln center that we happened to come across and there was this Brazilian band performing. Their most memorable song was about an experience the band had. They were in Japan on one of their tours and they had a cab driver whose name was Charlie, and the whole song was about their conversation in the cab with Charlie.