On Monday, I got back midday from Oslo to find the ethics application waiting for me. I thought this might be a zombie that I would never be free of (and it still might be the case), but it turns out that it was a technicality. While we had submitted a risk assessment, we had not used the correct form. So, it was simply a matter of moving the information over to the correct form and it was submitted again....

This week ended up being a lot of review on the ethics application. I had assumed that once I had written things up that it would just go further to the committee. This was a wrong assumption. The application was then looked at by several people in the department. They had questions, very good questions. This helped me to understand the process within the group and build a better experiment. I also learned that there were different ways of phrasing things that worked well for a English version of an application (as opposed to using a similar phrase from my Norwegian applications)....

It was important to not spend too much spinning my wheels this week. So, naturally, I started this week out with a flat tire. It seems that thorns on trails that can cut your hand can also pierce bike tires. After getting the tire fixed (it’s one disadvantage of being abroad, you have no tools to fix flat tires), I made it to the university to truly begin the week....

Week 2 in Hertfordshire was spent trying to understand what is going on with linear and slow in and slow out motion. It also saw me looking at how I can integrate things better with other parts of ROS. Monday was spent mostly looking at the difference between the linear movement and slow in, slow out movement ramps. This first involved fixing the linear movement to work correctly. Then, I turned to graphing the movement for both curves....

What’s all this then? It’s a quick summary of I have been doing in Hertfordshire. This thoughts are based on scribblings from the my journal that I have been keeping. But severly edited to limit your boredom. I arrived on Friday. It took much longer than I expected. The flight was delayed and it was a long trip up from Gatwick to Welwyn Garden City (WGC for short). I found the place I’ll be staying for the next 16 weeks....