Day 30 (Aug 16 - Last Work Day)

The majority of the work today has been doing last minute run through's of our presentations. Everyone's sounds very put together and knowledgable. We are all still working on fluency and where to fix our "scripts".

Dr. Messinger really liked Madi and my presentation when we went over it with him in the morning. We just had to fix a couple of slides that had been messed up when the slide show was converted from Google Slide show to Microsoft Slide show.

We went to Global Village for the last time and have been enjoying our last day together as High School Interns.

Tomorrow's the big day. All of us are nervous and excited.

Day 29 (Aug 15 - Varsity Swimming Starts Today)

Madi was able to work more on the power point over the weekend while I was in Canada. She has a way better idea of how to do presentations than I do.

I finally typed up a suitable script for it and now we just have to practice... a lot. My flashcards for last Friday could not hold enough information and were a pain to look back upon to read.

Now I know that I also have to edit my script. I forgot to put in a section on Classification processes. But Madi and I were able to present in 15 minutes and maintained everyone's attention.


I have to leave early today to swim. yay. Good news: I won't have to run in scorching hot weather. Bad news: I haven't been running all summer, only swimming. As per usual, I will be the snail in the group. (This is why I like academics-based activities, like this internship, better.)

Day 28 (Aug 12 - Better Day)

Making flash cards (should have done this before the peer review...)

Editing slide show to fit my needs (there was way too much writing)

Happier by 11:00. Swimming after internship is a great physical stress reliever, but I tend to mentally wander and don't pace correctly and lose track of number of laps. (not good during sets) Then I am physically and mentally incapable to doing much of anything productive once I get home. (This includes packing stuff for the next day... I've been pretty good by 1/2 way through the internship. Then I forgot to bring the double batch of salsa that I made for today's cookout. Damnit!!!)

My mom brought the salsa... Good news: everyone loved it. Better news: I got to make another batch this evening.

 Presentation try 2 was better than try 1. It still needs a lot of work though. Our slides were better presented, but I definitely saw our fellow interns' eyes glaze over by 15 minutes. Dr. Easton was coming down to the auditorium to check out the presentations but we had already finished. He got my email and told me to talk to my advisers if I was interested in continuing work with the center in the future.

Now I have two questions in my heading running on never ending repeat:

What do I want to do for the rest of my life? (job)

Where do I want to go to college to get to that point? (RIT? elsewhere?)

At least Madi and I don't have any videos in our slide. But it's still difficult for me to explain the Spectral Profile graph and the Hyperspectral Cube. not to mention I forgot to properly label the Spectral Profile. Oops. Atleast our presentation is 20 min. instead of 30.

Day 27 (Aug 11 - Presenting is Not my Cup of Tea. It's extremely bitter coffee)

Blunt version: Presentations are scary.

I understand the idea that sharing knowledge furthers the search and discovery for other people. But I never liked the spotlight. Spotlight = Limelight for me. 30 min. presentation. Madi and I need to cut that in half by using an actual script. I had one bad year of presentations already. I don't need that for next Wednesday.

I stuck in way too much writing into the slide show. We confused our friends with what the goal of our research group was about.

We need to practice a lot tomorrow and finish our edits.

Day 26 (Aug 10 - Doc. Restoration)

Most of the day was continuing to revise the power point presentation. So far so good with it. Madi and I should just practice now and look for how the flow feels... and then some.

Wednesday talk was by Dr. Roger L. Easton. Madi and I met him earlier this week through Dr. Messinger. I would say he is a bit difficult to describe. He is very knowledgeable and experienced, outgoing and very pleasant to be around. I think that's its because of people like Mr. Cullen's, Mr. Pow, Dr. Messinger, Dr. Easton and all of the other people who work in the center that I am considering Imaging Science for college. They contribute a lot to society and have fun with what they do. (Most of the time that is. I know through the summer work that that imaging processing can get tedious and repetitive very quickly. But knowing that there is still so much more work to do out in the world with this knowledge is motivation enough and interesting to know about. (Repetitive and improper grammar. Sorry readers.) I look forward to talking with him more tomorrow about his travels. We had to cut him off short when he started to get into his trip in Georgia (not sure on the spelling, it's an ex-Soviet country North of Armenia).

Tomorrow's plans:

• work in the morning and practice presenting/ visit with Dr. Easton
• lunch: practice informal presentation of slide show amongst fellow interns
• Work on revisions after practice presentation
• Meet with the Doc. early afternoon to run-through presentation
• Break time @ end of day and sometime before lunch?

Day 25 (Aug 9 - Planetary Model)

Everyone is working on their final presentations. I still find it difficult to work on it. It's almost done now, Madi and I need to get in our results pages, fine tune the other slides, and practice presenting.

Day 24 (Aug 8th - Back to Slaughter Hall/ Bye Bye 21st Century Music/ Presentation Slides started)

Morning:

• updating blog
• We have a Document Restoration professor coming in for a Wednesday talk this week.
• Morning meeting with Doc. M: going over specifics of slide show: exactly what each general program is:
• Classification
• Principal Components Analysis (PCA)
• Signature Detection
• Spatial Processing
• Starting the slide show presentation. Work on the Gough Map is temporarily suspended. If there is extra time, then we will continue with last minute processing. Approximate number of slides established, labeled, and bulleted where possible.
• I'm realizing that perhaps presenting to a knowledgeable audience would be way easier with Madi and my level of knowledge than with a more general public audience. I had this idea in my head for the longest time that presenting to a general audience would be less terrifying than presenting in front of a knowledgeable audience because I could b.s. my way through something I don't know. Oh that young, ignorant, immature of brain of mine from way back when. (Ok, maybe five years ago -ish. Just a personal reflection here.)
• Madi was between working and talking/ laughing with Cici. (My point of view)

 Afternoon:

• Alice, Maria and I stop by the Physicians Assistant section of Louis Slaughter Hall (more like an adjacent building that can be accessed through Slaughter Hall). I was there during College and Careers for a P.A. panel. Maria brought up how she was interested in maybe going for a P.A. program when I shared a (somewhat) brief synopsis of each of the panels I had attended. I couldn't give her a very good description of the RIT P.A. program, so I thought maybe I could help her track down one of the presenters during C&C and have her give Maria a brief rundown of how to get into RIT's P.A. program. The department is more specific than either of us realized... A lot of shadowing appears to be in order before applying.
• I continued working on putting more stuff into the slide show. Goal: a rough draft slide show done by Wednesday. Putting some images in now.
• Maybe work on 2-day College and Careers EXTRA blogs later? (Gotta figure out a better way to transfer phone pictures to a PC...)

Listening to the 60s, 70s, and 80s music for most of the day. What can I say, I like my parents' music. I get a bit tired of 21st century country singers, love songs, and boy bands sometimes.

Day 23 (Aug 5 - Hit the Trails Running)

RU Symposium today:

• Breakfast at the Louis Slaughter building (home base for the simposium). Met up with Emily, Maria, Zihao, Niels and Alice. Eventually met up with Madi and her friend, Hannah, as well as Aaron from the Fast Forward program (and outdoor grill friday).
• Emily, Maria, Zihao, Niels and Alice went to a 9:15 talk
• Cici and I got caught at the the beginning of a rain shower while walking back to CIS from the Slaughter Hall. (We interns now have the inside joke that it stands for Louise Slaughter, not a butchery for pigs and cows. Mmmmm, bacon and burgers.
• Cici, Madi and I plan to see John's talk about "Music Source Identification and the Linear Mixing Model" at 12:00
• Cici and I made it on time, Madi and her friend were late and were kinda locked out of the presentation : }. Whoops.
• Excellent lunch presentation by Doctor Susan Spencer, Ph.D, President & CEO, ROCSPOT. I am still suspicious when I think of business and business people. (I have probably seen too much Marvel and other shows/ movies with corrupt businessmen. BOO TRUMP!!! Where has the term "noblesse oblige" gone off to? Come back!!!) To hear and see what she has accomplished and is still working towards really moved me to reconsider RIT as a college to apply to.
•  Afterward, Niels, Maria and I got stuck with some other people in the Art Gallery (where lunch was being held) by a rain downpour. I had an umbrella with me but it could only hold one person, maybe two.
• I managed to get Madi and my additional 30 slides to Doc. Messenger before we both had to leave at 2:30. I ended up meeting him in the reading room right before I left for RIT College and Careers.

Summary: not much work was done today due to the Symposium. I managed to take a second look at my MF and ACE results from the other day and put some of the better ones in the slide show to send to the Doc. I also managed to run MF and ACE on another image with little success, I think I did something wrong again. MADI HELP!!!!!!

Day 22 (Aug 4 - Fast Forward Presents...)

I started my day by correctly predicting to be two minutes late to our morning meeting in order to grab a couple of teas for Madi and I at Starbucks. Our morning meeting pretty much went over the Fast Forward presentations that will be given this afternoon and then the Undergrad Research Symposium tomorrow. I hope John is doing okay with his data and presentation... Dr. Messenger is almost done with the presentation (I know I said this yesterday). Madi and I need to stick in some good blur and divides and ACE/ MF's into our Google presentation to send to the Doc.

Madi plans to bring a friend for tomorrow's symposium. I only plan on going to see one of them at noon and people were kinda supposed to sign up for this event. So I planned with her for her friend to take my name-tag to go see the different talks after I see John's. (I still plan to take the complementary breakfast and lunch.)

I took a second look at all of the processed rules from the MF (Spectral Match Filter) and ACE tools from yesterday. I cleared up the two main splotch areas (more squiggly S's) and still couldn't get the blotted out castle label. Now I really need to get this stuff into Madi and my slide show to send to the Doc.

(look at black ink splotch in the middle of the image and the slight shadowy area below the castle in the upper left) 

(I got something, I don't know what it is though. This is our results most of the time with images of the sea.)

Day 21 (Aug 3 Testing, Testing)

Our day started with a trip to the library. Dr. Adwoa Boateng gave all of us a presentation of the RIT online library website for scholarly research materials. The computers at the RIT library didn't like Madi nor my logins/ passwords so we had to watch and could not follow along with her. She was very passionate about her work and very kind about helping many of us to first find some good scholarly article databases: PubMed, SciFinder, JAMA, ACM, IEEE Explore. (I don't know what any of these acronyms stand for.) OOh, and Turnitin.com and Retraction Watch (the soap opera channel for famous people caught plagiarizing and other unethical publishing practices). We all thanked her immensely for the help

Madi and I did not get much done yesterday. We ran a few programs on some of our images and had Di load another one of his fabulous codes onto our temporary user logins. (I still need to check that out.) Dr. Messenger is planning to send the powerpoint presentation sometime at the end of this week or beginning of next week and needs one blur and divide (or subtract) and an ACE or MF. ( Adoptive Coherence/Cosine Estimator and Spectral Match Filter. I know I know. I'm throwing these acronyms around and not explaining them. Both of these last two acronyms helps to find the center of data clusters (spectral coordinates of pixels). It helps with pixel/ color classification and identification stuff).

I had a huge headache after participating in a color imaging science experiment and then listening to the weekly Wednesday talk. The experiment brought me back to my photography class (again) and how a good picture is taken and what it would look like. (Thank you Mrs. Burger. Everyone who has had you at Brighton misses you a lot.) It took me 1/2 and hour to complete in a dark room setting. Niels went later and was 15 minutes late since he couldn't find the building : P. Ah well. I did volunteer to to take him there.

The weekly talk was about one of the professor's studies in Africa. He was looking at the dynamics of the Lake Kivu System in terms of biodiversity, terrain, and environment effects.

• Apparently there is about $20 billion worth of Methane trapped in the bottom layers of water in the lake that locals can benefit from. The lake is stable due to horizontal water circulation instead of vertical water circulation (water molecules continue to move as they normally would, just in a different direction). The water temperature gets warmer as one moves deeper into Lake Kivu, probably due to nearby, underground running magma. Due to this and immense pressure, methane and CO2 are dissolved in the water in the deeper levels of the lake. With different temperature levels and different pressure levels, different amounts of CO2, methane, and other minerals and gasses are dissolved in different water depths and maintain different layers due to different densities. (Run on. Sorry.)
• The biodiversity is low in this lake probably due to methane release into the water when the lower levels of the water are churned/ mixed up. This action would destabilize the water in the lake and the different materials dissolved in the different levels would float up to the upper 50 meters of the lake, killing much of the water-life (Cichlid fish species and algae). Some of the different species of Cichlid fish would have managed to survive such events and continue to reproduce. Thus there are only about 15 species of this fish in Lake Kivu while Lake Kivu's run-off and children lakes hold over double the number of Cichlid species.
• Other parts of Africa had similar concerns about the trapped methane in lakes. Lake Nyos in Cameroon endured a land slide that deposited a lot of sediment into the bottom of the lake. Nyos is way more shallow than Kivo, so much of the methane trapped beneath the water was released due to the resulting vertical circulation and into the river valley close to Nyos. Over 1500 people died from methane inhalation plus wildlife.
• Another concern is if volcano lava from nearby volcanoes could ignite methane-saturated lakes if lava were to flow into the lake (it happened before in 2006 or so). The observed lake from around 2006 was alright when large amounts of the nearby volcano lava flowed straight into it because the lava only traveled about 100 meters deep (the lake in question was I think over 300 meters or something.) So the people living in the city and other areas on along the coast were safe (other than the 75 people who died when the liquidy lava field rushed into the city at 70 mph). It is possible however that magma can leak into the lake from the lower levels though.
• The professor and his team took some sediment-core samples and found that Lake Kivu has the most diverse and abruptly striated sediment layers.
• The locals have already begun methane extraction from the lake and had to revise their plans slightly as to limit the amount of vertical circulation. (Vertical circulation=lake instability=methane released from solution=mass death).

All of us interns started to watch "The Dark Knight Rises" at the end of the day.

Day 20 (Aug 2 - RIT +1)

I brought Jaqueline to RIT today. I met her through my Photography 2 class back in my sophomore year. She graduated from Brighton a year ago and last I had heard, she had not yet chosen a major. I though imaging science might be interesting to her since she loved math (although MCC calculus was really difficult this year) and she loves photography, both of which are a part of the area. She still doesn't have her driver's license so I drove both of us. (Hey, I'm pretty decent at stick shift. At least I don't stall the car every day anymore.)

Both Jaqueline and I ended up knowing Madi's +1, Molly. I was a counselor in training (CIT) with her two summers ago at Creative Themes kids summer camp in East Rochester. Jaqueline attended the camp for a good six or so summers and had met Molly there as a fellow camper. (I was the only CIT in our 4 week session that had not attended the camp in over eight years. I went there for a couple of summers then my mom found other cool camps for me to attend after my primary school years, such as the WE@RIT program during the summer of my 7th-->8th grade. (Women's Engineering @ RIT.) It was a lot of fun:

• building and shooting off rockets during lunch
• building workable stop-lights by sautering stuff to the a mini-motherboard (thing)
• trying out the HARRIS skateboard assembly line
• building and running solar-powered cars [I remember accidentally mounting the solar panel backwards on the car. So, instead of the car moving towards a light source, it moved away from it : P.]
• checking out different inventions being worked on that summer by grad and undergrad students [Hydrogen powered car engine]

(Sorry, rambled)

Morning outline review felt brutal. There were at least twice as many eyes looking at each one. Not to mention Yiqun and Mat from my school came at Zihao's invitation. They were a part of last year's CIS H.S. internship and are two of the smartest engineers in my school (from my point of view). They both are brilliant builders and testers on the Brighton Science Olympiad team. Summary: nerve-wracking hour.

Madi and I then took our friends to see Mr. Messenger to give them a run-down of exactly what we do and why we do it. (Thank you Doc!!!) He also showed all of us some pictures his trip to Oxford and other places in England during his conference over there a month ago. (Bad grammar. My bad.) He had pictures of Stonehenge, Brexit protesters, and Hogwarts (the parts of Oxford used to shoot Harry Potter) while searching for a picture of Oxford-David's $200,000 spectral imaging machine. (Sorry to make our friends sit for another hour of presentation.)

To summarize the day: no work was done. We gave Molly and Jaqueline a taste of ENVI's classifications and the rest of the day was mostly fun stuff. I felt really bad during lunch because Salsarita's didn't have food to fit Jaqueline' s lactose intolerance and nut allergy diet. I had completely forgotton that Jaqueline had developed lactose intolerance her senior year. No one really knows why. She had brought food just in case.

When we got back to the imaging science center, we all played Volleyball, Frisbee, then some Contact. Twice I ended up tracking down the COL (color imaging science) center. I don't remember why the building's acronym is this. and Jaqueline and I ended up trekking accross campus 6 times. (Hey Coach Christina, I got my walking cardio in for the day and am ready to swim.)

So the day was mostly fun stuff and not much serious work : )...

Day 19 (Aug 1 - CC's In, Madi's Out)

Morning Meeting:

• Time sheets
• Outlines tomorrow (meet in the reading room first, slasaritas for lunch, freshman promotional video)
• Wednsday library research (1 hour)
• Friday RU Research Symposium
• Aug 17th: make sure visitors get a parking pass, starts at 9, ends before 12
• Estimate last week of hours
• CC reviews her trip

Mr. Messenger:

• Tomorrow: give RIT +1's a synopsis of what we're doing
• Create chips for the+1's to try

To Do:

• Create more sea chips =
•  compile chips for +1's =
• continue running programs =
• maybe ask Di to review how to use his Matlab code

After lunch, CiCi and I headed down to 1255 at John's invitation to play some fun improv games. These included a short-term memory game, a party game where the host had to guess what his/ her guests were, an interview game where the interviewee had to guess what the job was he/ she was applying for, a game like "Whoosh". I got out pretty early into the memory game and it took me a while with the the host game. I knew that John was impersonating a boyfriend or something, one person was a lizard-man, and the last person I thought was a human magnet or glue-girl. Turned out she was Velcro.

CiCi did way better with the memory game. We both ended up leaving a little early because she was meeting a friend for lunch at 1:30. (She only snacked around noon.)

Worked on compiling all saved images into power points in the afternoon. Did not finish this.