This site is dedicated to the research facilities at the Utrecht institute of Linguistics - OTS. Our laboratory facilities are available to all UiL-OTS researchers including (under)graduate students and visiting affiliate researchers. We also welcome LOT affiliated graduate students, and researchers from other institutes (primarily LOT institutes) to use our labs for their experimental research.
To see what research facilities are provided select Facilities in the side menu panel. This gives detailed information about each and every facility. From the menu you can also access the facility reservation system, the participant recruiting system, a list of howto's for experimentors and various other information.
Alex Manus will be away Thursday June 20-June 26.
Ao Chen will be away June 14-August 1.
Alex Manus will be away Thursday May 30.
Ao Chen will be away 25th May-1st June, and June 14-August 1.
Martijn van der Klis will be away April 24-May 14.
Alex Manus will be away Wednesday May 1.
Ao Chen will be away 29th April, 8th May, 13th May, and 25th May-1st June.
Iris Mulders will be away April 11-22.
Alex Manus will be away Monday April 15.
Martijn van der Klis will be away April 24-May 13.
We're very happy to announce two more additions to the lab support team as of April 1:
Martijn van der Klis, programmer, will be making a bunch of infrastructural improvements in the lab in the realm of participant recruitment and bureacracy, websites and web-based experimenting. Martijn will also be helping out with programming experiments and some technical support.
Mattis van den Bergh, methodologist, will provide methodological and statistical advice.
See this page for office hours and contact details.
Ao Chen will be away March 15-19.
Iris Mulders will be away March 20-25, and April 11-22. If you need to use the UiL OTS adult-participant database
during these times, please let her know beforehand.
We're very happy to announce two additions to the lab support team:
Our new lab technician/programmer is Alex Manus. You can find Alex in room 0.01 on the ground floor, or catch him running around in the labs.
Alex will be replacing Theo, who will be leaving us April 1st.
Also new in the lab support team though not new to the labs: Ao Chen (room 0.09) will be temporarily helping us out, mostly with babylab-related matters.
Since the Linux update of May 15 we still encounter the same problems as mentioned in the May 5 message although much less frequently. For the phonetics lab and eye-tracking lab I have updated the graphics system again. Please inform me of any unexpected system behaviour.
Lab support staff will be away on holiday at:
All Linux systems in the lab have been upgraded to Ubuntu 12.04. Please let us know if you run into any problems with the new setup. I apologize for the inconveniences and the loss of data you may have experienced.
We still have a major problem in the phonetics lab with the Linux systems. The graphics system appears to crash from time to time, causing a forced log out. The patches I applied didn't do the trick. To stop wasting time I will upgrade the systems to the latest available release of the operating system.
Theo will be away for the next two weeks due to family circumstances. If you experience urgent technical problems in the lab, contact Sjef at DG_GW_Labman@uu.nl.
Lately we are experiencing serious network problems. Trafic from and to
the server on which the Linux systems depend is very slow. We advice you
to stop experimenting (under Linux) until the problems have been fixed.
Update: after moving to a different file server, network delays have improved, but
the network is still not completely reliable.
The computer in the Babylab (K.11) has been replaced. Boot up is now much faster. The new computer also handles the video recording. The second PC that was until now dedicated to video recording has no purpose anymore and will be removed in a few weeks. For more information see babylab forum messages main PC replaced and how to create video recordings.
The Flex-lab (K.03) has been set up and is ready for first use.
The EEG-lab (K.13) is ready for use. Some test sessions have been done.
During the first week of January 2012 we are closed for maintenance. Only the babylab remains open. The other labs, the practice room and the open access desks cannot be used during that period.
Some operations may be finished in a half a day, others will take longer. We'll announce it here when a facility can be used again.
The introduction days for first-year students are going to be extra noisy this year, so the labs will be closed during this time (August 15-18).
As of this date the keys to the research labs (basement K.03, K.06, K.10, K.11, K.12, K.13) and the keys to the briefing/meeting room (basement K.05) and conference room (ground floor 0.06) can be borrowed from the janitor's office at JK15A room 0.02, between 8.30h and 17h.
Staff, student assistents and students of the Linguistics master can still borrow lab keys from the key safe in the basement of JK13.
Some of you will have noticed it there is a new tech guy in K.01. His name is Sjef Pieters and he is a Windows system administrator. Sjef will subtitute Warmolt who is recovering from his operation. Sjef will also look at how the uil-ots lab computer systems administration is organized. He will produce an advise on how to set things to improve the situation where too much time goes to client system administration where it should go to research support.
Don't hesitate to ask Sjef if you have any questions concerning the the Windows systems in the labs or the labs themselves.
The defective lab PCs in the practicum room have been fixed. Also on all systems (except for babylab) we have upgraded the Linux OS to Ubuntu 10.04 and several fixes to the Windows installation have been applied. Please keep informing us of any problems with the systems you run into.
Some lab users still think it is acceptable to pull out the power plugs and/or network plugs because they need to plugin their laptop. This is not allowed and we won't tolerate it.
There will be construction work happening in the labs in K.13, K.11 and K.03.
The builders will probably start somewhere in the week of October 25, and
the building activities will probably take about three four weeks. Noise is to be expected.
We will update
with more specifics as we get them.
UPDATE Oct 26: The workers will start Wednesday Oct. 27 Monday Nov. 1 at the earliest.
UPDATE Oct 26: In the same three-week time period, noisy construction work will be done on the walls of the canal surrounding the building.
UPDATE Oct 28: The builders will start working on K.11/K.13 on Monday, Nov. 1.
UPDATE Nov 3: The builders will be working until November 30. Contact lab management for a more detailed planning if you need it.
You may have noticed the lab website (http://www.let.uu.nl/uilots/lab/) was very sluggish recently. The website has now been moved to a new server. The new address is http://www.hum.uu.nl/uilots/lab/. If you had turned on automatic login for the old webpage, you'll have to login again (with the 'remember' box checked).
Lab support staff will be away on holiday at:
The PC at cabin 1 has been replaced by PC work6. This is a temporary measure. This means in the practicum room work6 will not be available for some time. Also work3 is under repair.
Phon4 and phon1 are still giving trouble. We have thoroughly checked phon4 but found no malfunctioning hardware or software. Please report if the problems persist. It's uncertain what causes phon1 to refuse to boot at first attempt. For now if phon1 doesn't want to boot (white screen) just press reset the button.
New button boxes have been installed in phonetics lab and eye-tracking lab. The new boxes have two buttons, but we also have boxes with 3, 4 or 5 buttons. Please do not sticker the boxes. Use the pre-printed paper covers that will be made available in the labs and downloadable as pdf from the resources section. See the forum for more information.
The systems in the phonetics lab seem to be a bit unstable lately. We're planning an upgrade of the Linux OS. Please report any problems you run into using these systems.
The Psycholinguistic Utrecht Newsletter no. 2 is out!
This site now hosts an overview of psycholinguistic publications by the psycholinguists of this institute. Please send your additions to Iris Mulders!
The four systems in the phonetics lab have been replaced by new ones. Please report any problems you run into with the new systems. The open access workstations will be replaced by new systems next week (week 36).
Four workstations (work7..work10) are now equipped with (two-button) button boxes. In the next months we will replace all button boxes in the lab by new ones. Please do not write on or sticker the button boxes. From now on I will take away button boxes that have stickers or writing on them. I'll keep them in my office until someone comes to clean them again.
Until a more suitable place is found on the UiL-OTS website the Psycholinguistics Utrecht Newsletter (PUN) can be downloaded from this page (lower right box). Editors Sharon, Elise and Annemarie wish you fun with the PUN!
The Corpus Gesproken Nederlands now is accessible from all lab PCs under both Windows and Linux.
The two babylab PC's have been upgraded too. Please report all problems or weirdness you run into.
All lab computers except those in the babylab have been upgraded. They now run Ubuntu 8.4 Linux. Please report all problems or weirdness you run into.
Attention! On Friday the 19th of December I will start upgrading the Linux operating system on most lab PCs. Until I'm finished none of the lab computers should be used. The machines can't all be upgraded simultaneously and the specials have to be checked afterwards, so it may take two or three days. During the upgrade you are not allowed to use the following systems:
Not affected are:
If you do use the systems before I'm finished your linux account will get garbled and you will loose data.
Users of the phonetics lab (K.10) will have noticed it is cold in the lab. At this moment it's 12°C. It will probably get much colder than last winter because the building's hot air system is broken. The janitor will setup a temporary heater in K.10.
For a while it hasn't been possible to map your Fourier account under
Windows. The CIM UNIX department has solved the problem. To map your
fourier account (if you have one) under Windows open the Map Network
Drive dialog, choose a drive letter and in the Folder field
type \\fourier-let\name where name
is the user name of your Fourier account (not your Let-Arts user name).
Our new experiment laptops (all three) now have Ubuntu Linux next to Windows XP. They are ready for running (FEP) experiments in the field.
A new data server is available for researchers. It is not intended for backing up your C: drive but for storing data used for or resulting from your research. Depending on actual usage we may ask you to clean up old data or have it moved to tape/dvd. This storage facility is primarily for data you work with, it is not intended as a permanent archive.
All PCs in K.06 have been checked and brought up to date. Some program installations previously failed on some systems. All should be fine now.
Experiment laptop 1 now also runs (real-time) Linux. I'm not yet happy with the installation and am using laptop 2 as a test system. Once it is working satisfactory I'll do the others.
The problem of USB sticks not being accessible from the Linux lab PC's has been fixed. Only a specific type of user had full access, regular users did not. The fix also allows formatting floppies and ejecting CDROMs.
You now can search this site using the search thingy on the right-hand side.