Hi all! It has been a couple of days, but I have been well. Today was our last day at the Wuhan Summer Program, so we have been very busy finishing it all up. We all had our final presentations this afternoon, which took a total of about 3,5 hours. We were the last group to present, so everyone got really excited once we were done :) After the presentations we all went for dinner and drinks, which I just returned from now. We had Beer and Baju, which is a local drink of about 42% alcohol. After drinking many beers and shots of Baju, we all went back to our rooms. Since we are flying to Beijing at 9AM, a shuttle bus will come and pick us up at 6:45AM. It will be a very short night. Especially since we still need to pack! I'm sorry that I do not have any new pictures.. Many were taken today, but none with my own iPhone/Camera. hopefully I will get to post some of those soon!

So tomorrow we will arrive at Beijing. Linzhen is coming with us, and in Beijing we might get to see Bo and Na, who both study at Northeastern as well, and maybe even Prof. Lin, who is our supervisor. It would be both ironic and exciting, since I have not seen my own supervisor since February! We will probably stay in Beijing for about 5 days, so I should have plenty of time to write to you again when I'm there,

I hope you are all doing well. Thank you once more, for showing your interest and reading my blog. The number of visitors keeps surprising me, so I will try my best to keep you all entertained :)

For those of you that have been following me for a longer time, here is that video I took of the Shanghai Sightseeing Tunnel. It is not that exciting, just mostly strange :) Enjoy!

I hope I will get to write to you again soon.

Take good care, and please know that I miss you all!

I saw this text on a t-shirt today, and I figured it would be a nice way to start today's blog. I think that we can all agree that well hidden begin this humorous "Engrish", lies an unmistakable truth. No matter where you go in life -- whether it's the tiny town of Zegge in the Netherlands, the lovely Boston in the US, or the rather overwhelming Wuhan in China -- it all begins with you as person, and the steps you want to take. I did not intend to make this sound so dramatic, but all of a sudden I just realized where I am right now. I'm spending over a month in China, while I get to explore a very interesting and different county and cooperate with students from a wide variety of nationalities. I would have just never imagined this. Not even three years ago. I have never been very interested in long term planning, which might be risky, but it seems to be paying off every single day.

Anyway.. I as you can tell, I am doing quite well. After the opening ceremony on Monday, we got to meet the other international students who came to visit Wuhan University of Technology. Most of them are American and study at different universities across the country. All of them are from different field though, which means Dave and I will be working with three Chinese students / assistant professors from this university for the next 10 days. After another overwhelming lunch, our work on our project began. Each of our three colleagues had come up with a specific project they wanted to work on. The only problem is that the actual program only grants us about 5 days to complete all the work. Because these ten days will include a two-day visit to the Three Gorges Dam and a final day for presentations, the schedule is extremely tight. But we will do our best.

The three experiments we will try to complete are:

1. A driving simulator study, focused at comparing calm vs. angry driving (road rage).
2. A driving simulator study, focused on designing and testing a lane deviation warning system.
3. A real world driving experiment, aimed at driver intention monitoring.
   

More information on these experiments will follow as the days go by.

If you read my last blog, you will understand why I was hesitating to volunteer as a test driver in this particular environment. But I will do it. I will be driving a car that has been completely modified from it's original (a Volkwagen SAnTANa), with wireless cameras, steering wheel and pedal sensors, and a decent sized computer in the trunk. Too bad they forgot to install the rockets. I think they would be quite useful, especially since I'm pretty sure that they did sacrifice the airbags. I believe this experiment will be planned for day 3 or 4 of this week, so just shouldn't be my last blog just yet.

Today we have been working on Experiment 1, Road Rage, which is not quite done yet. This basically means that we are already behind schedule, but whatever. We have worked hard, and that is all we can do. The picture below shows the simulator we are working with. It is quite impressive. It has a giant 180* screen (it didn't fit in the picture) that is powered by 5 big projectors. We then get to drive a real car that has been modified to have sensors on just about every thing you can control.

In order to evoke anger responses, we went through a variety of things. Dave chose to listen to a special playlist he created on his iPod, of songs that never fail to pump him up. Another guy choose a clip from the move Anger Management, which he considered to be really frustrating. They also showed us a clip from Chinese origin they that downloaded from the Internet which involve a lady and cute little bunny. I would not dare to go into details, but all I will say is that I quickly refused to keep looking. I guess the clip would have worked great for me.. Urgh.

So by now that day has almost come to end. Day #6 in China. It has been a long day since we basically spend 12 hours of it in the lab. The only breaks we took were for lunch and dinner. Tomorrow we start "early" again, as I have completely grown out of the habit of starting work at 8:30.

I will try to get back to you tomorrow night.