Monthly Archives: March 2011

It is a week since the successful ELCA festival (don’t tell me you haven’t seen the pictures yet; they are below) and everything has gone back to normal again. Mark is trying to convert the videos taken to manageable sizes (watch out as some may be posted on YouTube in due course), photos have been distributed and it is more or less business as usual.

Don’t get me wrong here; this is still more exciting than an ordinary day at the shop. Marijn and Christos are making the final preparations on the uStim, our flexible neurostimulator, which soon will be tried out in vivo; Wannaya and June are working very hard on the circuit design and layout generation of the analog bionic ear; Marcel is working towards the completion of his PhD thesis and having the forms filled in to also publish it as a book — the first on Structured Design of EMI resilient analog circuits; Senad is wrapping up the simulations on a L2-optimized wavelet filter, to appear in a paper currently under review for prospective publication in IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems; Duan is designing a proof-of-principle experiment of the world’s first subsampling jitter-compensated software defined radio; Andre is trying to improve the efficiency of an RF energy harvester for a batteryless ultra lowpower radio; Yongjia is working hard on the circuit definition of an asynchronous level-crossing ADC for analog-to-digital conversion of non-stationary signals, such as ECG, EEG, ECoG, etc; Mark is thinking about how to combine an energy harvester with an ultra lowpower ultrawideband tag, but also a little about his exciting holiday ahead; the many MSc students are working hard on their MSc project and I am working hard on my invited presentation at the International Symposium on Medical Information and Communication Technology. If you want to have a glimpse of what I will be discussing there, check out the following movie/documentary of "2057 The Body"

Reading back the above, I feel a little like Sheldon, viz. Sheldon Lee Cooper, B.S., M.S., M.A., Ph.D., Sc.D., a fictional character on the CBS television series The Big Bang Theory. I received the first three series for my birthday. So Marijn, if you wish to organize a geeky lunch break, count me, and the DVDs, in!

Wouter

As must have become clear from the previous posts on the blog, the ELCA festival has been a big success. It is only two days ago, but I am already dreaming about next year’s edition!  To once more underline the success of the festival, it won’t do any harm to post a couple of more pictures…  

Marijn

Yes, a great night to remember! Not just because of those unforgettable songs and dancing, but we also raised money for Japan!

Some pictures of the ELCA Festival: 

Entrance

Prepared in the afternoon

Box for raising money

Wouter’s smile after everything got ready

Backstage

First band

Three 

Michael Bleeker’s dancing!!!

Crazy audience

Irish song — ELCA band

Cees’s band

"End of the world" — ELCA band

Yongjia

Last Friday, March 18, the Pub of the EE building of Delft University of Technology turned into a majestic rock temple. A broad spectrum of performances was offered to the audience, ranging from a clarinet concerto, via opera, flamengo, Mr. Micro, famous covers (from both the ELCA band and the ETV band) to societally engaged rock songs of Three and Ignoramus. Hopefully, Marijn, Senad and Yongjia will post some great pictures soon.

So why the title of this blog then? Well, I was reading the thread at nu.nl about the latest situation in Japan, where the offical number of dead and lost people has now crossed 20,000 and I was thinking about an emotional Paddy at the ELCA festival, who has lived in the devastated area for quite some time and was not able to get in contact with a few of his Japanese friends over there since exactly one week. He fears for their lives and spoke the following memorable words: "You may think Japan is far away. Yes, that is indeed the case. You may think Japan is rich and should be able to take care of itself. Maybe they indeed can. However, if we were in their shoes, which is not a too unrealistic scenario since the Netherlands is threatened by water both from the see and the rivers, we would wish the Japanese would also think about us and help us." I fully concur with this.

We have not yet counted the money collected, after which we will transfer it onto the Japanese Red Cross, but if you’re reading this blog — and I know you do — and would like to make a donation as well, please do so. The bank account of the Dutch Red Cross that has been opened for Japan is 6868.

Thank you very much.

Wouter

The 2011 ELCA music festical will be held on Friday, March 18th, at 19:00 hrs. Last year, it used to be an activity for people to enjoy music after a year of research. This year the theme has changed. While we were preparing for an evening full of fun, a tragedy happened. After the earthquake, Japan has been bruised again by the wave ‘Tsunami’. More than 10,000 people have been swept away. Nuclear reactors are at the verge of exploding. People in that area can hardy find clean food and water.

We cannot not just watch the news and go to bed without worrying about the Japanese people.

Then a discussion arose in our research group. "How can we help?" The result is: we will dedicate our performance at the ELCA festival this year to Japan. The price of the beer will be 10 cent higher. This is for a donation; the money we get from the drinks will go to Japanese people. We know this is not gonna be big money but every Euro counts.

Dear readers, please come to the ELCA festival in the Pub, Mekelweg 4, Delft, at 19:00 hrs. We have prepared a Japanese song for this. 

Each glass that you drink is meaningful. It is the drink of kindness driven from human symphathy inside you.

Let’s sing together for our Japanese friends letting them know that they are not alone.

See you on Friday.

June

 

If you, just as many members of the Biomedical Electronics Group, have a fascination for the intricacies of the human brain, you may be interested in this podcast from Nature: Neuropod.

Particularly interesting is the feature of January 2011, on why music is so pleasurable, or to find out how to treat tinnitus. 

Wouter

According to a recent research from the Times Higher Education Magazine the reputation of Delft University of Technology is ranked as 49^th among reputations of the world’s best universities. In this ranking, based on the opinion of 13.000 academics around the world, rather than universities’ performance, four Dutch universities, led by TU Delft, can be found in the top 100.

One can argue about the value of reputation ranking but in my opinion many young students will choose their university based on this subjective quality, which will lead to higher economic value for the universities.

Independent of any ranking, I am convinced that the members of the Biomedical Electronics Group will continue to contribute to the science and to society and thereby add to the value and reputation of TU Delft.

Senad

Dear all,

As you have noticed, not much has been posted to this weblog recently. This is most likely because most of the active bloggers of the Biomedical Group are also musicians in the ELCA band and this is the "silence before the storm", so to speak. As already announced in June’s post, the ELCA festival is upon us in (now) less than a week!

Another reason of the radio silence is due to the earthquake and successive tsunami in Japan, followed by another earthquake. Everybody held his breath when Mother Earth rumbled.

Wouter