E-prime, Voice Key and the Serial Response Box

Northern Teutoburg Forest, Bielefeld

Hello, today I'd like to share with you the solution to a problem I had in programming a simple naming task in E-prime. The experiment requires participants to name a list of common objects while reaction times are recorded. In order to collect accurate to millisecond reaction times you need to connect a microphone to the PC on which Eprime has been installed. To do so, you need to connect the mic to the Serial Response Box that, in turns, is connected to the PC. Once you have done that, the mic can be used a voice key.

This makes collecting naming latencies quite easy, if it works. In fact, at least in my case, the microphone did not detect any signal. This problem was connected to the fact that it is not possible to change the sensitivity of the microphone from the SRB but only using some E-script. The bad news is that this information is not on the manual. The good side is that the e-scritp you need to fix the problem is this:

Debug.Print SRBox.VoiceKeyTripLevel

SRBox.VoiceKeyTripLevel = 0

These two E-basic lines basically set the SRB voice key at the default level.

Cheers

Michele

The “not so secret” recipe for perfect meringues

Meringues - Third attempt

The secret for preparing perfect meringues is to combine several little tips that all together contribute to make this recipe quite easy, also for unexperienced chefs.

Ingredients:

• 3 eggs (only the white, not the yolk)
• 250 gr. of powder sugar

Procedure:

- whisk the the eggs with the sugar

- once the whites are beaten into a firm and smooth foam, make some small mountain out of it and stick them in the (pre heated) oven. I would recommend to put oven paper on the tray.

• 100 ℃ (but even lower it is ok) for 45 minutes
• leave meringues to cool down before to serve

Now let´s move to the tips...

FIRST: use fresh eggs

SECOND: do not use cold eggs. So, do not put them in the fridge (best) or at least take them out some hour before use them

THIRD: use a glass bow to beat the eggs, not a plastic one

FOURTH: always use the same whisking speed and direction

FIFTH: check that nothing apart the white part of the egg is in the bow before whisking.

SIXTH: remember that meringues must not cook, but only dry, so keep the oven temperature very low

The strange case of η²

“Skating ducks” in Schloßhofstraße, Bielefeld

Last night I’ve spent a couple of hours fighting with LaTeX fonts.

It all began because the APA manual does not like italicized greek letters.

Well, not a big issue until you have to report an effect size, that is usually represented by the greek letter eta (η²). In fact, in order to produce an η² in LaTeX, you must be in math mode ($...$). Unfortunately, this mode transforms everything in italics.

The solution consists in using the up version of the letter (\etaup), so that it will not be printed in italic. Thus instead of writing

$\etaˆ2$

you should use

$\etaupˆ2$

In order to write greek letters in up mode, you must have loaded the txfont package into your LaTeX distribution. The version I have used (for MikTeX 2.4) can be downloaded here. Simply save txfonts.cab file in your MiKTeX directory and use the Package Manager to install it.

References

Pakin, S. (2009). The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List. PDF

Guiggiani, M. & Mori, L. (2008). Consigli su come scrivere le formule matematiche.

Fancy Words Cloud

North Park - Bielefeld

“Shadowed tree”

To start with I would like to share with you the program I have used to make the “words cloud” in my home page.

It is called Wordle and generates nice graphics from a bunch of words (or text).

For my “wordle” collection for example, I used the keywords taken from a selection of papers in my reference manager (JabRef).

M.