Monday, July 18, 2016

Day 9 (July 18th, Abstract peer review day)

I started the day by getting to the internship three minutes late and forgetting that all of the interns and the internship advisors would be in Bob's workroom to review our abstracts thus far. (Thanks Emily for texting me your location. I know you read everyone's blog at least twice a day so you'll get this message, eventually.) Everyone picked apart everyone's abstracts for a total of about 35 minutes. The one outstanding abstract was written by Nieles (note to self: check spelling later) if I can remember correctly. His area of the astronomical imaging internship group involves creating a fun astronomical education game that is played somewhat like Agar.io or Slither.io except with cooler features (images and graphics of the cosmos are added to a collection/ gallery and are earned as rewards, educational information integration in the gaming features and gameplay, etc). I hope I understood his explanation alright. (Note to self 2: check Nieles's abstract again sometime.) I sooooooo want to try out this game once he gets the basic mechanics finished. I definitely would not be able to do what Nieles or Emily are doing if I got in with the Astronomical Imaging advisors. I like working with data and images as well as learning about the stars and their properties. But, I definitely need visuals to work with and pure representative data and coding are not my areas of expertise. I actually have nearly no coding experience at all.


Back to the topic at hand:
 Other than a couple of minor grammar problems, CC and Zihao's abstract was flawless. Madi and mine was alright ... it definitely needs to get cut down and re-worded. I thought we signed up for an Imaging Science Internship, not an English Writing Course focused on the field of Science. (I'm joking of course. It's too serious and quiet in the workrooms with everyone using earphones to listen to music individually. LIGHTEN UP PEOPLE!!!!!!!! Geez!!!)


Madi made Oreo balls and they were delicious! I only had cake balls and weird cheesecake balls before. Madi's recipe trumps them all!


Ok, Ok. I'll try to stay on topic for the remainder of this post. Sorry, there's something about the concept of Monday that I don't like.


                  I had to leave early today for a couple of medical appointments around town, so I was only able to "work" for a couple of hours today. Mr. Messinger introduced another ENVI program to Madi and I today, Anomaly Detection. It functions by finding a mean and standard deviation of the pixel properties (colors and brightness) in an image and then comparing each individual pixel to the determined mean. So, the program pretty much works Z-scores for the entire image. (I remember Z-scores very faintly from the end of the Algebra 2/ Common Core class this past year. I don't really want to relive my days in that class. Moving on -->)  It comes up as RX Anomaly Detection in the ENVI --> Spectral -->Tools. RX stands for Reed and Xioli. Mr. Messinger also showed Madi and I how to create our own chips and how to Profile the data pixel colors (figure out their reactivity to different wavelengths of photons). I think I have my facts straight at this point.
                 Di uploaded another segment of the Gough Map onto my temporary user computer account so I'll "play around" with it tomorrow. Madi definitely has a head-start on the work. And Mr. Messinger confirmed my fear: I should not have tried to reboot the computer in the reading room on Friday. I had no idea that those things were THAT sensitive. Someone else from the internship tried to reboot the Shut-Down reading room computer at the end of the table last week. (It's a different one from the one I glitched, and you know who you are.) and it was also showing raw code. So .... I'll go have a talk with the tech-support crew tomorrow if the computers were not fixed and give them an apology for my ignorance of computer technicalities.

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