Grants as demotivators

Having a grant rejected is a giant pain in the ass. More so when the rejecting institution fails to provide any feedback as to the problems and promise of the rejected approach. In any event, it also makes it hard to do the utterly necessary work of *applying for other grants*. I wish there was a better model for science than the medieval patronage model so many of us in academia work under. But there isn't, and the market-driven approach makes for shitty science. As such, one eats the pain and continues the slog.

*slogs back to work*

Virtual world stuff

A good fraction of my research looks at, or is predicated on looking at in the near future, the evolution of motor control in simple quadrupeds (frogs). To that end, I've constructed several virtual ecosystems and embedded multiple, competing organisms therein. Most of my work has been done in Second Life. You can visit it here.

Anyhow, although that implementation is in Second Life, I'm by no means committed to that particular virtual world. As such, I'm very excited about several upcoming virtual world products:

Blue Mars





Vast Park



The former is a game world (an entire, empty "planet" on which you can construct large cities), while the latter is an open source development platform. The extent to which I'll be able to incorporate these in my research remains an open question, but I'll be looking forward to trying.

begin at the beginning.

Hi. Thanks for dropping by. You're likely not reading this in anything close to real time, as no one has heard of this blog yet. But just so you don't feel like I wasn't welcoming from the beginning, consider this the oblogatory introductory post.

I'm Corey Hart. Physicist/Neuroscientist. All around geek. Also husband and father.

I live in Philadelphia. I work at Drexel University.

That's enough, I think.

Hello World.

main()
{
printf("Hello World!");
}