Great thoughts of Fleeting substance

I think school is trying to kill me, these weekends aren’t good for my heart.

Okay, bad news first. My adaptive processing project completely fell apart this weekend. Essentially I discovered that, contrary to what I had originally thought about my project, there really wasn’t anything that could be done with an adaptive filter. I was after a fix for two problems that can crop up in cochlear implants, one of which turned out to have a solution so simple it’s essentially trivial, and the other of which didn’t have a solution at all, nothing could be done to solve it. This meant that I really didn’t have anything to do in my project, which meant that all of my effort on my project up to this point had been a complete waste. I might as well have not even thought about the project until two weeks before it was due, because it looked for a while like I was going to have to start over. I destroyed a textbook in frustration, but it was a cheap one.

Well, I talked to my expert today, and he gave me some hope. He gave me a *third* thing that can go wrong in cochlear implants, and this one *can* be solved, at least in theory, with adaptive processing. So that’s great then! I have a project again.

I’m still struggling with some other aspect of the project, though. I need to figure out a few adaptive algorithms to throw at the problem, but I have access to so little data that there essentially aren’t any adaptive algorithms developed. I have a couple little ad-hoc thingies I threw together, but nothing that has any sort of proven track record. I’ll talk that over with my professor on Wednesday. He gave me some suggestions last wee, like using a blind algorithms, but even blind algorithms assume you have access to the output signal, I don’t even have that.

Past that, too, there’s also the problem of hearing the difference between two sounds. I’ve done some preliminary tests, and I can tell you that it’s actually quite difficult in many instances to tell which of two sounds is ‘better’ or ‘more recognizable’. I got some help with that from my professor, too, though, so that’s good news. It looks like I’ve gone from ‘completely doomed’ to just ‘not looking bright’, and I can take not bright. I get a C in this class and I will march forward with my head held high. This has been a really grueling semester, I won’t feel bad to see it go.

Other things, briefly, I gave blood on Wednesday and nearly killed myself eating a couple of times this weekend. As it turns out, I really just can’t eat food in volumes like I’m used to. So a couple of times I was just munching happily along on something before I realized that I had passed ‘full’ and ‘stuffed’ a while ago and was now rapidly approaching ‘immobile’. I guess I just have a smaller stomach than I think. Gotta keep an eye on that.

Okay, back to work. It’s a good thing I’m used to this by now…

-N