I use my phone a lot for communicating with students in the lab - including a middling amount of coaching how to handle various command line operations* - and for a lesser amount remotely managing servers and the like. (No, it's not my first choice, but sometimes shit happens when I'm out running, or at lunch, or whatever. It's not uncommon that one of my students will take a picture of the error message and text it to me.)

Swype is great for communicating in English, but I miss my old G2 (or even my Samsung Galaxy Relay) pretty intensely when I'm doing anything administrative or gods help me writing code. (And Swype was actually easier to use on a smaller phone - I love my Nexus 5, but the screen width slows me down a bit.) ...and really, the ability to do this kind of stuff is one of the reasons I was a fairly early smart phone adopter a decade ago. Hm, I could hang around the lab babysitting a build, or I could go hiking, and check the progress every time I get a clear signal.

* All of my students doing bench work are also in out Python club, and are increasingly comfortable working at the command line, but none came in with much of that sort of experience. They're adorably enthusiastic.

And just as there are a lot of people who dismiss claims of global warming - often because it makes a nicer story to them than otherwise - there are people who really like the idea of some kind of apocolyptic scenario. This is distressingly common. Don't see much of that getting past peer review. (I don't pretend peer review is a perfect process, but it's a somewhat workable coarse filter.)

(The data on ocean acidification, BTW, is pretty well documented, and pretty major. Taking a peak at what's been going on with oyster farming in Puget Sound gives a nice taste of where that's going. Of course, I work with marine molluscs, so this bit naturally stands out.)

Most of the public debate is on pretty different subject matters than the scientific debate. The response of people who are invested in disbelieving climate change to the actual science is kind of horrifying. (The wife of a dear friend - and really, I quite like her - went on at some length about how scientists shouldn't comment on public policy, and shouldn't even comment on science as it relates to public policy last time I was visiting them.)

Not just willingness to learn, but active interest in continuing learning. ...and I've found a lack of that in older folks, true, but also in kids fresh out of uni.

It also depends on the scientist.

I was a software engineer for most of a decade. Then I was a computational biochemist, and now I'm a neurobiologist.

My computer background opened an amazing number of doors for me when I decided to go into research. There aren't a lot of people who can deal with both computers and biology well. (Though, sadly, there are a lot of people who are equally half-assed in each, which predictably produces a full ass...)

I am not a physician. I am a neurobiologist. I work mostly on motor control. (And I teach neuroanatomy, though atm only at an undergraduate level.)

First things first. It's darned early days in all of this, and recovery from brain injuries is often fairly unpredictable. Even if she doesn't get significantly better - which may be fairly likely, and I don't have enough information to comment - what's hard now will likely become easier via repetition.

I'll generally agree with the comments that you're probably going to be better off dealing with specialists than trying to get a commerical EEG type device to serve in its place. Though down the road, it might make for an interesting project (and increasingly there are cool things being done with consumer hardware.) The expensive proprietary devices may or may not be optimal... but let everyone catch their breath first.

Where I think some research could benefit you all a lot is making sure she's seeing the right specialists. Getting in touch with the right people at your local academic hospital - which might, down the road, turn into your not so local academic hospital - is, long term, probably the most useful thing. As other people have mentioned, rest and support can be more useful than trying to fix everything right now. But if you're going nuts looking for options, see if you can start figuring out who, reasonably local, has a serious background in this type of injury, and see if you can get them to look over her MRIs. It can be pretty easy to end up sticking with a suboptimal doctor out of inertia. Asking questions and calling around can really end up being the thing that makes the difference in the long run. (And here I speak from personal experience from my own history of spine injury.)

If you'd like help navigating the process, drop me a note.

I was just at a symposoium where one of the PIs in whose lab a chunk of this work was conducted was presenting.

It is really promising. However, it's *seriously* early days yet, and spinal cord repair is not the same thing as brainstem. The problems are related, but I'd be pretty shocked if we were looking at any of this being done at brain stem levels in humans any time soon.

I can re-check the research, but IIRC, most folks even, after they've had some months to get used to their new situations prefer to live than to die. (It's easy to project what you think your preferencs would be... but you in the situation is not you watching it from outside. I haven't been through anything nearly this severe, but I dealt with a spine injury which I was told meant I would never live an active life again*... and mostly learned not to try and second guess future me.**)

* This turned out to be incorrect, but there were some years in there that were chock full of suck.
** Which doesn't mean I don't have a living will, but did influence how I wrote it.

And OMG, you might be in danger of getting pushed halfway back to *second*. Eesh.

And perhaps treat the women in tech as actual human beings? Admittedly, I've had a great many pretty awesome male coworkers, but I've also run into a fair bit of crap, and it does get exhausting and demoralizing over time. Neurobio is just so relaxing by comparison.

Like, say, men who make random generalizations about women?

"He." *snork*

Last I head, the applicability of laws relating to whether transfer of medium for personal use had not been tested for ebooks. (Not, I'll admit, that I'd hold my breath for a good outcome in the current climate regarding such things.)

The problem of course is that I do seed torrents.

This was my stance for a while, though my workaround was to buy hardcopies of the book and then pirate a softcopy (mostly for reference books which I didn't want to haul around). And then I decided I didn't want to devote the space or weight to the hardcopies.

It's not ideal, but there are too many authors whose work I really like some of whose work is under DRM. (And it's all fine to rant at the authors, but until they're really quite popular they aren't really empowered to fight this on their own.) So I am very loud about preferring non-DRM'd books, and will buy them preferentially. And I do not share non-DRM'd book I have legally purchased... and seed torrents of those I pirated. It sucks, but it's the best compromise in my specs.

Oh, and so not a "bro".

I keep having conversations with my students where I explain why they shouldn't pirate books, or at least should make sure that the authors are getting paid (for instance, buying a legal copy then pirating / cracking it if it has DRM to get a useful one.) ...and yet I have a lot of trouble trying to work up enthusiasm for telling them not to pirate textbooks.* Particularly problematic, as I've shown a few how to torrent. (Heck, I've shown faculty members how to torrent.)

* As opposed to professional reference books.