Day 37: Presentation Day!!

         All the presentations went so well today. Im so proud of everyone! We gave Bob, Joe, and Bethany their presents and they loved them :) This was such an amazing experience and i'm so sad it's all over. I will definitely keep in touch with all of these kids. Jeff and Karen were so helpful all summer and I thank them. Also, all the guys in the lab were so fun all the time! I'm also really glad I met Liz becasue she is such a brilliant and lovely person. Well, this is my last post. Goodbye!

Day 36: Last real day :(

        This morning it was just me in the lab. I ran through the powerpoint 2 times to make sure I knew it all! Then I went down to Ed's lab and helped create a photoshopped picture of all the interns! It was so funny, but it turned out really well. Then at 11:30 all the interns went down to the fishbowl to eat some pizza for the last time together :( We had some quality bonding time with Joe, Bob, and Bethany. Then at 12 all the interns went down to the auditorium for a practice run. The sound wasn't working so that was kind of annoying because our powerpoint had sound. After we had our practice run everyone left :(

Day 35: Practice makes perrrrfect :)

         Liz and I spent all day tweaking our power point to satisfy Karen and Andy. Then at 1 Liz and I presented our power point to the lab in the auditorium. It went really well. Im really excited about it. Yayyy!

Day 34: Cramming/ Freaking out

          Liz and I once again spent all day working on our powerpoint, rehearing, and freaking out. We want it to be perfect :) It seems like we didn't do anything from that one sentence summing up our entire day, but we did! Trust me! Oh, we also soldered for and hour-ish. Yes, I know. We're still soldering.

Day 33: Back again?

          So I was supposed to be gone Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, but then we got back at 11am today so I decided to come in to work because Liz seemed stressed. When I got in she said that Jeff, Karen, and Andy had basically made her change the entire powerpoint. It sucked because our powerpoint was so good, but the changes they made changed our powerpoint for the better I suppose. Anyways while I was gone Liz made 3 graphs for our powerpoint and they were beautiful :) Kudos Liz <3

Day 31 & Day 32: Vacation YES!

          I'm in Fair Haven, New York camping with my friends :)!!

Day 30: Work, work, work!

          Ok, so this is my last day here before I go on vacation for 3 days. I should be back Monday. Today Liz and I wanted to get as much work done as possible so that when I leave maybe she can just continue working on our powerpoint. We spent all day working on our presentation. We skipped a FREE lab lunch to do work. weird right? I know. It was depressing, but we needed to do work! While the entire lab was out to lunch Liz and I recorded videos for our powerpoint that demonstrated how to calibrate on Yarbus and how to put on the mobile eye trackers. Then we went to the lab meeting where we spent time talking about that awfully long chapter. When we got back Jeff informed us that he wanted us to present our powerpoint for him and Karen at 5:00! So we got back quickly to the lab and buckled down to finish what we could of our powerpoint. The presentation was kind of scary! But when we finished I was so happy because I was finally on vacation!

Day 29: We are just so productive!

          In the morning Liz and I unwillingly cracked open the chapter of reading Thomas gave us for the Lab meeting. I for one think this was the most grueling of all the readings yet. I actually quite enjoyed last weeks reading about magic! However, this week we once again had to read about driving...This time though we weren't learning about angles and turning, but rather steering and urban driving. Explaining the chapter that way doesn't quite express how long the chapter was. The steering section had about 10-13 sub-sections that were each about a page and a half long. The urban driving section didn't have quite as many, but mind you there were still a lot! Afterwards Liz and I went back into the lab because Bethany told us she would be bringing a potential student by soon and that we should give her a little spiel as to what we're doing in the lab. Just as she came in though Carmen told me she needed me to participate in her experiment. So I had to go and leave Liz all alone to speak to the girl :X She doesn't like speaking to people alone. I felt kind of bad.          

           At noon Bethany took all the interns and the girl out to lunch for freeeee! That is at least for us! The Imaging Science Department paid as usual :) When we got back, Liz and I did some solid work on our powerpoint. Since I'm not going to be here Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday we want to get everything important done before I leave. Then when I'm gone Liz can touch up our powerpoint because she loves working with it and relax a little! As we were working on our powerpoint we noticed that none of our pictures were cited. I asked Joe if it was necessary to cite all of our pictures since we were using them as backgrounds and he said yes. So when Liz left I spent about and hour and a half searching for all of our pictures and citing them. One our our slides is about motivation so we have a picture of a man running. However when I typed "motivational man running" into google it showed me this:

I could not stop laughing. If there was a hippo chasing me,
I wouldn't be running, I'd be SPRINTING!

I found all the pictures except one. When I got bored of doing that I read some more of the article we didn't finish in the morning. I stayed here until 8pm and might I add, it was just too late!

Day 28: Half Day

          I was only here from 8 to 11:45 because I was going on a road trip with my friends! We were going to Georgetown (DC) for a college visit. In the morning before I left, Liz and I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to draw some sort of conclusion from our experiment. Hari finally helped us by showing us this new way of analyzing our data. We used the area of interest (aoi) method track the man-bag in the progressive commercial. We decided that for each subject we would only look at one of the commercials (the progressive insurance one). This commercial seemed to be the best choice for us because Flo (the lady in the commercial) directs the audience with her words to pay attention to the man bag. We wanted to see if the non-sound subjects noticed the man-bag at all. We began collecting data when  I had to leave. Liz continued.

Day 27: Field Trip! (numero tres)

          This morning we had our field trip to Melles Griot. It was slightly boring because on the tour there was not enough room for everyone to be able to see everything properly. It was also really hard to hear the guide because the factory had this constant buzz and our guide wasn't the loudest of people. However, this field trip differed from the other factory tours because Melles Griot doesn't mass produce lens's. The only make one is there is a demand. The process to make one of their powerful, high quality lens's seems much more intensive than all the other companies. After the tour Bob and Joe took all of us to Peligrinos (a sub shop) for lunch. Elaine and I split a salad and a buffalo chicken sub. That sub was delicious. I want another one :)

          When Liz an I got back we soldered for  quite a long time because we wanted to finish. Sadly however, we didn't :( We're going to finish tomorrow (which if you check the date on this blog is actually today! hehe)

Day 26: Some fun stuff

          This morning Liz and I once again helped Melanie clean the "back room". Instead of wrapping cords we went through all these old papers in a box. Some of the interesting things we found in there was $16 in cash, a picture of Jeff with some hair, and a newspaper clipping of step-by-step instructions on how to ballroom dance! We also found an article from 1970 just hanging out with all the other papers in the box :) After cleaning out the box of papers, Jeff taught Liz and I how to solder. It's fun and of course I messed up! But Jeff showed me how to fix it, so no worries!

          After soldering Liz and I decided to go to the free picnic lunch for all the undergrads. We got there an hour late so of course all the food was gone! Instead I got some food from Java's and Liz had the lunch that she brought accidentally which turned out to be quite handy. When we got back Liz and I started Yarbusing the driving videos again! Then it was time to go homeee :) <3

Day 25: Cleaning!

          I've noticed that the titles to my blog posts just keep getting more and more creative :) Anyways this morning Liz and I cleaned the "back room" from 9 until noon. By that time our backs were killing us from rolling up cord after cord. On the bright side we definitely earned our lunch which was a delicious sandwich and then a bagel because I was STILL hungry. Astounding riight?! I'm constantly surprising myself.

          After lunch I looked over the powerpoint and brushed up on the article for todays lab meeting. The lab meeting was far more interesting than usual! After discussing the paper for a short while Jeff just showed us videos of magic tricks since that's what our paper was on. The rest of the day went quickly because It was only 30 minutes before I had to leave!

Day 24: Reading Dayy

         This morning I got here at 8:30 and to the daily morning meeting. Bob informed us of all the free lunches available to us this week. We also gave him some feedback as to how the the Xerox field trip went in our opinion. The general consensus was that it was much better than the RPO one! Then Liz and I began reading our article for the lab meeting. At 12 all the interns went downstairs to eat because the grass(our normal eating location) was wet from all the rain we've been experiencing.
         Liz and I literally read all afternoon! We finally finished and we feel great :)

Day 23: Field Trip! (numero dos)

         This morning Liz and I sort of just sat around because we didn't have access to the SMI and Karen wasn't here yet with the dongle. When she did get here, she informed us that the dongle was with Hari and he was missing in action! We waited around until 11:15 because thats when we were leaving for our field trip to Xerox. Our first stop however, was free lunch! It was a sub place called Amiel's. It was pretty good :) 

         Though we had another party bus, my experience at Xerox was much different from the one I had at the RPO. At the RPO we were toured around the factory part and didn't get to hear much about the research that goes on. Xerox on the other hand spent most of the time (about 1.5 hours) we were there visiting talking about the innovative and exciting research they were doing with imaging technology. I was thoroughly impressed with the type of ideas they were engineering. Of all the ideas they presented to us, my favorite was the non-invasive medical video which measured how well a person was breathing. This is very important for babies with fragile skin who don't do well when they are poked and prodded! After multiple presentations from some scientists and engineers at Xerox, we were escorted to another building to see the factory part of the company. This was also quite interesting because we learned about a printer that can print 600 pages every few seconds and costs $600,000! By the time it was time to go we were all ready for a nap.

except of course these two crazy kids

         When we got back Liz and I unfortunately found out that Karen had sent out another reading for Tuesday's lab meeting. This one is sooo long! I've been reading it and it's ruining all magic tricks for me :(

Day 22: (:

         Today was actually quite fun. In the morning Liz and I tried once again to get BeGaze working, but unfortunately couldn't successfully do it. We got annoyed so we asked Dennis to teach us some java! I have a test today which is the main reason I wanted to do java, but I also want to write a program for Liz and I to use to help analyze our data from the experiment. At 11:30 Liz and I went down to the front of the building to have our weekly intern grill/cookout session.
           When we got back at about 1:15pm-ish Liz and I decided to take another stab at the dongle/BeGaze issue. 45 minutes later it still didn't work so we learned some more java from Dennis while waiting for Jeff and Karen to show up. At 2:30 some kids from a camp at RIT came into our lab escorted by Bethany Choate. We explained to them what we do in the lab and showed them the two different types of eye trackers. We had one of the visiting kids put on the mobile eye tracker and walk around with it on. Then we put it into Yarbus for them and showed them the finished video. They seemed mildly interested which was all we could ask for. After they left Liz and I tried every method possible to get the rendered video over to Bethany. It took a while because my USB was being dumb and it didn't help that the movie was quite big. Now I'm blogging because I have to leave at 4:30.

Day 21: Productivity? Of course!

          This morning Liz and I changed our powerpoint to reflect the ideas of presentation zen. It took forever, but now our powerpoint is AWESOME. Although, that shouldn't surprise anyone because we're AWESOME people so everything we do is naturally going to be AWESOME. While making the AWESOME powerpoint this person asked us to be a part of his experiment. So I left for about 5 minutes and did that. And then Liz did it. Afterwards we went to free lunch and watched this British guy talk about something. Everything is so much more interesting when someone has a British accent <3

         After lunch we were supposed to go to the Kids Lab and use the SMI but some lady was in there....we had it reserved. Jeff showed us that we could use one of the computer in our lab and still be able to analyze our data from the SMI machine. He also informed us that we had to use the DONGLE (coolest word ever right?) to get permission to download the software. While that was happening we were told by the same guy who ran an experiment on us that we had to put fliers up all around campus. That was a nice break because we are so used to staring at a computer all day, everyday. Now I'm blogging again. Oh I still have the DONGLE and I don't know what to do with it.

Day 20: Sleepy

          LIZ IS BACK :) Clearly she's the one who typed that........ Anyways, now that we've established that she's back, I can tell all you avid readers how my day was. The morning was slow. Both of us were really tired, so it was hard to concentrate. Nevertheless, we persevered because we are champs. We had our daily morning meeting in which Joe spoke about our end of the summer presentations. Liz and I are just so efficient that we already have most of our slides done. Then, being the nice person I am, decided to leave one Yarbus video for Liz to suffer through. She seems to think that it wasn't bad, but clearly she's delusional. ;) While she Yarbus'ed I attempted to read Karens article.

          Then the two of us decided to go to the Kids Lab and use the SMI machine to analyze some data. We were zoning out a bit so we got coffee and some food. It was a nice little break. Afterwards we continued to work oh so diligently. At noon Liz and I parted ways because she went to lunch with her father. 

           At 2 everyone in the lab besides Dennis went to our weekly lab meeting. It was quite educational, but we were just so sleepy. Now I'm blogging.

I want a cupcake.

Day 19: Yarbus

        I got here in the morning at about 8:30 and I have been Yarbus-ing all day. Luckily I'm basically done now. The only video I'm having trouble with is Jeff's close calibration on July 27th. In order for a calibration to be acceptable the calibration numbers must be above .8o, but ideally they should be as close to 1.0 as possible. Whenever I try calibrating his close calibration, whether it's the beginning calibration or the end, I'm getting numbers around.60. I checked to see if the corneal reflection was visible in all of my calibration points and it was. I'm slightly confused, but i'll just deal with it tomorrow because I'm bored. I did 5 Yarbus videos today and it takes about 30 to 45 minutes for each video to get created ("rendered") so while that happened I read the new article Karen gave us for tomorrow's lab meeting. This one isn't quite as bad as last weeks was, but it calls for me to apply some of the concepts that they sort of explained in last weeks article. Unfortunately I didn't quite understand last weeks reading so it's hard for me to apply those concepts to this weeks reading. I'll figure it out though! The interns, and when I say interns I actually mean Elaine, Halle, and I, are going to see a movie tonight so I'm leaving now.

Day 18: Excellent. It's Friday!

         Well, today was day 1 of 2 of Liz being in Illinois. It's so boring when you don't have anyone to talk to! Anyways, I Yarbus'ed for like 3 hours this morning before lunch. It was brutal. I did get 3 videos made which is pretty satisfying. I left at 11:30 to go to the weekly grill/cook-out session. It was a well needed break! I stayed there until like 1:30 :x, but we had lots of fun GNOME BOWLING!

It's a master-piece.

What a pro. Also those are the GNOMES ^!

         I came back and got a nice surprise visit from the head of the MVRL department (lab?) He seemed nice, but Jeff asked me to explain to him everything that was going on in the lab. I usually do well when I'm speaking to random people about things that I have little or no knowledge about, but Jeff caught me completely off guard. So I probably sounded like a complete idiot! I then proceeded to Yarbus once again. However, this time the rendering of the completed movie was going to take like an hour. So I started adding some fun facts to our end of the summer powerpoint. But then I got bored so I went to visit Halle's lab where there was basically a partyy! I stayed there until my movie finished rendering and now I can't bring myself to Yarbus anymore today... I might just read the new paper for tuesdays lab meeting, UGH. Oh and Yarbus, our pet dinosaur from the Christmas Tree Shop died today. 

Notice how he's all deflated?...I blame the boys in our lab.

Day 17: Progress.

        We finished running all of our subjects today which felt really good because Liz and I no longer need to keep the experiment a secret. So our question is: does sound affect (effect?) people's eye movements when watching commercials? And if so, does that make it harder or easier to remember all the commercials? What we did was test 8 subjects, 4 girls and 4 boys. 2 of the 4 girls and 2 of the 4 boys watched an entire episode of Jeopardy! in silence (that includes the commercials too)! We apologize to those of you who had to endure that. It was sort of awkward just having to sit there in silence (lol). Once we were done with the SMI a camera crew moved in because they were doing some work for the dermatology experiment that's going on. There have been so many camera people in our lab recently!
          After lunch Liz and I did Yarbus. It was for the driving study. And once I'm done with this blog I'm going to resume doing those because I'm not getting picked up until 4:45! Alright well, now I'm done with this blog  so I'm actually going to Yarbus. Oh we did get slightly bored today so we photoboothed!

Fishiesss

Day 16: Finally!

       Pretty much all day today Liz and I ran our experiment. We were really excited at first. But, then we realized that we had to sit in the kids lab for each 30 to 40 minute subject. It got boring and tedious really quickly. Don't get me wrong though! Liz and I were actually super excited, at first. Luckily, we had multiple visitors throughout the day :)

Hey kids!

        We got free lunch again today (win!) because most of the interns decided to go to the entrepreneur movie/presentation session. I think I'm going to make this a weekly deal. It's pretty sweet. The presentation was surprisingly helpful. Last week and the week before were pretty bad, but we endured them for the food. But, today's gave Liz and I some helpful tips on how to make our final presentation powerpoint excellent. 

         About an hour after getting back to the kids lab some lady told us that she needed the room. We said ok, but she could've been nicer in telling us to leave. We didn't know you had to reserve the room or that there was a calendar!

         Anyways, Liz left at 5 and I had to stay until 6:15ish :( I found stuff to do though. I read all of Hari's iViewX manual on the Wiki because Jeff told us to comment on it. I think he did a great job! Though I was having loads of fun being in the lab all alone that late, I was ecstatic to leave!

Day 15: Lab bonding (ish?)

         So we spent about half the morning trying to figure out what to do (haha). We settled on re-learning how to use the SMI machine because we are going to need know how to use it for our experiment. It took another 15 minutes to transfer our video to our USB because it's so long. When it was finally done we went over to the kids lab and did the SMI stuff! Then we ran Kurt as our first practice lab rat because he isn't in the real experiment. He was actually quite entertaining to watch because he's such a complainer.    

         At 12:15 Kurt drove Nadya, Jon, Liz, and I to the King and I because that's where we were having free lunch while discussing the Carlson Center for Imaging Science's Person Ethics and Professional Integrity code. It was a fun trip.

         When we got back at 2:00 all of us went to the lab meeting where Jeff decided to have us, the interns, summarize what the obnoxiously long chapter was about. We each said about 5 words because thats all we comprehended from the chapter. I left at 4:30ish because I had class at night :(

Day 14: Field Trip (numero uno)

        Today before all the interns and some undergrads went on a field trip to Rochester Precision Optics (RPO) Liz and I brainstormed some things to talk about tomorrow at our weekly lab meeting. This wasn't a very productive time because we were anticipating our vey first field trip! When it was 10:10 Liz and I went down to the lobby-ish area and met up with everyone.
        Bob and Joe got us a party bus and we'll have the same one every field trip (thats something to look forward too!)

this is our beautiful party bus. Jealous? You should be :)

The field trip was quite interesting and I definitely learned a lot. As a visiting present all of us got these AWESOME pens!. They're the kind that have all the necessary colors in just one pen! Amazing right? I know. Bob and Joe treated everyone to Pizza Hut for lunch and although it was disgusting I still ate :) But, seriously Pizza Hut's food is always dripping in grease. Yummmm...jk
       Well, when we got back to the lab, we printed out our surveys and we felt really productive. It went downhill after that. Glenn told us how to play angry birds online so we did that for a while. Then we basically had a jam session before and after Karen taught us how to use a new feature of Yarbus(fuuun). We analyzed Jeff's driving video and criticized his driving as well :) Though truthfully, he is an excellent driver. Currently I'm listening to Taylor Swift while writing this blog because I have nothing else to do. Hopefully tomorrow we can start our experiment! Wooo

These are addicting little cookies. I resisted. Liz couldn't.
What makes them even better than normal teddy grahams
is that they are MINIS. They are literally adorable. How could you eat one?

Day 13: TGIF woooot!

        Before lunch I started the article Karen assigned us for the lab meeting on tuesday. Then I went to the cook out with the other interns and played some apple to apples and Frisbee. After lunch I continued to read the article. I didn't finish :(

Day12: Almost friday!

        The morning started off really well! Bob surprised all the interns with donuts and needless to say they disappeared immediately! Before lunch we were really quite productive. We completed our after survey which felt pretty good. We spent the rest of the time before lunch trying to figure a question to answer for our experiment. We did the scientific method out of order again (haha), but we are hitting all the components it calls for.
        After lunch we had to help clear out the room for a photo-shoot for this dermatology magazine (i think). Liz and I got to model a little which at first was funny, but then got slightly annoying. While the photo-shoot was going on, Liz and I got a head start on the end of the summer power point because once the driving data comes in we may not have enough time to do both.
        Since our pay cycle runs friday to thursday I had to make sure I finished my 40 hours today. I finished it at 4:26ish but then my mom couldn't come get me until really late because she got pulled into a meeting. I ended up getting a ride with Evelyn, because she's such an angel ;) Anyways today actually went by pretty quickly! However, I'm really glad tomorrow is friday. It's been a long weeeek.

We figured this would be a good idea because no one ever knows where Jeff is and everyone always need to see him. He's an important man :)

Day 11: Making some progress

         This morning we went to visit Alex's lab up at remote sensing. He seems to be building some kind of computer which is really impressive! Of course, our work down in the MVR Lab is much more impressive ;) We started the day with Liz re-writing her blog because her computer deleted it all and didn't make a draft. I on the other hand, continued to make our movie on iMovie and we actually finished it today which was really exciting!
         Afterwards, we went down to the fishbowl to get some free food and watch a movie on entrepreneurship. This week's video was actually quite interesting. Then Kelsey, Liz, Elaine, and I all took a little adventure/ walk in the sweltering heat around RIT because the building is always so coooold. We like to cherish the heat when Rochester gets it!
         When Liz and I got back to the lab Jeff planted the idea in our head to go and try to burn some more paper with this very large and therefore more powerful lens he gave us! We were outside again for about 20 minutes and decided to quit because we were having absolutely no luck with getting that piece of paper to burn. We decided to get a head start on our powerpoint because on the last day of our internship when we have to present, it is necessary to have some sort of visual for the audience. Logically, we chose to do a powerpoint to display our findings. Then we continued doing work for our final advertising project. In order to test the lab rats on the video given to them, Liz and I created a survey/ quiz for them to take. Once again I cannot elaborate too much because we don't want anyone who is a potential lab rat to know anything crucial about our experiment!

Day 10: Doing some work

         We (the interns) had breakfast this morning and I brought in some blueberry muffins. I thought most of them were burned and therefore warned everyone that they may not taste good! To my delight, everyone seemed to enjoy them (although they could've just been eating them to be nice :)!)

         Liz and I got right to work. While she continued making survey's for our project, I read another article Andy told us to read. It was quite informative and could really help make our project more sophisticated. Afterwards the both of us continued to make surveys and once we were done with that, we planned out what we were gonna do for the rest of the day.

         In the afternoon Liz and I learned how to use iMovie from a YouTube video. I know how to use moviemaker, but iMovie apparently is completely different! After our little lesson in iMovie, we had to look for an episode of the Big Bang Theory on YouTube. Much to our disappointment, there were no full episodes on YouTube. We ended up using an episode of Jeopardy! While the episode downloaded, the entire lab had its first weekly lab meeting in the fishbowl. We discussed an article Karen told all of us to read and everyone in the lab went around and told everyone else what their different projects were. The meeting went from 2 to about 3:30! When we got back the entire episode was loaded. What went on after that is top secret because if any of the interns were to know what we did after loading the episode we wouldn't be able to use them as lab rats!

Day 9: Buckling down!

        We surprisingly got a lot accomplished today! I got to the lab early (8:15!) today because we both needed to read an article for Karen that ended up being short, but very dense. After our morning meeting we met with Andy who was really helpful in figuring out how exactly to set up our advertising experiment!

We spent about an hour with him and then really got to work on our project.

        We spent about an hour looking for advertisements for fast food chains, soda, cell phone companies, and car insurance. It was a lot of fun because we were on YouTube the entire time :) Afterwards, time seemed to fly. We created multiple versions of a survey that is to be given out to each person participating in our project. Since neither of us like mac's it took us a long time to figure out how to do everything. Today was quite the productive day.

Day 8: Harry Potter Day!!!

        Well, I went to bed around 5 am yesterday night (or this morning??) because I was up watching HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS PART 2 and I'm not exactly sure how I'm functioning. Nevertheless, I showed up to work today 5 minutes early. Woot! During the morning meeting Liz and I volunteered to show all the interns our lab (MVRL). No one looked too excited to come see everything! I feel kind of bad because the whole time I was explaining the eye tracking device, I was speaking with a monotone. It was just too early!

        Afterwards Liz and I researched all day. Seriously. We took a break for lunch, but really I just swallowed my sandwich in one bite and took a little nap for 20 minutes! No worries though, I got up in time to go right back to work. 

        I think we've finally decided on a topic to research: advertisement and how people's eye's react to certain ones. We don't know yet what type of advertising we'll be studying, but a couple of ideas are television commercials, website advertisements, etc. This is going to be an awesome project so stayed tuned haha :)

Day 7: Boot Camp Day 2

        Oh geez! Today was a day filled with information. From 9am to 4pm Jeff and other people working in our lab spoke about the work that's going on. The good thing about our lab is that the people in it are actually quite interesting and animated so it didn't get boring too quickly :) Also, Liz and I had to present a brief explanation about the layers of the cornea and some details about Lasik eye surgery.

        For lunch Liz and I snagged some pizza from the fishbowl because it was for us(!!), but then we went out to the intern cookout and had more food! We stayed there for about an hour and then went back into the presentation.

        After the presentation was over, lots of people spoke about their projects and some of them sounded slightly intriguing. I left at 4:30 because I had to get prepared for HARRY POTTER <33333

Day 6: Boot Camp Day 1

        Today was really over-whelming. Lots of information was being thrown at me and it was slightly hard to comprehend. From 9am- 12pm Jeff was explaining everything from parts of the eye to the sampling and alias theory. Luckily, after the 3 hour session Glen, Mike, and Karen explained everything in simple words for Liz and I! We also went on this fantastic tangent where I got to use a lens to burn paper!

      At the end of the day we called a bunch of lasik eye surgery locations to research a question that the people in boot camp assigned us. The question was to determine how deep into the cornea surgeons cut. Of the 5 locations we called no one could give us a straight answer as to how deep they cut (thats slightly concerning! haha) We're guessing that they just don't want to give out the measurements.





Uni: The result of using a very powerful lens to burn paper (with Jeffs  help of course!)



Day 5: Still at the lab!

        From 9 am right up until 12pm Liz and I read the most grueling article by Keith Rayner titled 20 years of eye movement and reading. You all should go look it up and if you have some spare time, read it... :P. Afterwards we took a deserving break and made the trek uphill both ways to global village for some lunch. I once again ate a peanut butter and nutella sandwich. It is seriously the greatest combination of deliciousness.

        When we got back Liz and I buckled down and analyzed all our data from the word search. We decided to come up with a question for our research after we analyzed the data because all the possible questions we could think of were really general. After analyzing Kurt, Mike, and Karen's eye movement over the word search we decided to include another lab rat: Nadya. Our question ended up being what type of strategy is the most effective when trying to find as many words as possible in 5 minutes. Mike and Karen's strategy seemed to be the more effective one, but further experiments will help us draw a more valid conclusion. Karen and Mike used a scanning method where instead of going into the word search looking for a certain word, they just looked for words in general. When they think they found a word they would glance back to the word list and see if it was an option. This resulted in many more eye movements from the word list to the grid. Kurt and Nadya, on the other hand, went into the grid of words looking for a specific word and didn't try looking for another word until they found the one they were looking for. We came to that conclusion because both of them looked down at the word list far less frequently than Mike or Karen.

        At the end of the day Liz and I went to see Karen and told her all about what we discovered today. She answered a lot of questions we had about the article and gave us some useful ideas to further expand our little project into something longer!

Day 4: The spill...and other things

        Nothing too eventful happened today. Oh wait, just kidding! I spilled my entire 500 mL water bottle all over the contents of my purse. It was great. I spent a solid hour drying everything out because my cell phone decided that it wanted to break. Of course, I made sure it didn't because my parents refuse to buy me a new one until I go to college. The spill was probably the most stressful part of my day, seriously.

        All the interns went down to global village to eat lunch together again and I had a peanut butter and nutella sandwich (yum!) Personally, I feel like we should choose a closer eating location because when it's 90 degrees out walking all the way down there is a pain in the neck! 

        In the lab, Liz and I continued our experiment with tracking eye movement while lab rats (Mike, Kurt, and Karen!) completed the word search in 5 minutes. All day we basically had people do word searches and then took their videos, compiled them together in Yarbus, and made a movie. We have yet to figure out what exactly our question is, but we'll think of it eventually-as in tomorrow.

Woot! Friday/Day 3

           I was on time to the morning meeting today yayy! Actually I was 5 minutes early. When we went down to the lab Karen told us that we were going to be designing our own little mini experiment! Liz brainstormed a bunch of ideas ranging from the word search (which we ended up doing) to birdwatching! Designing and executing an experiment wasn't quite as easy as I thought it would be. We had to take into account many factors that I took for granted as just normal behavior. For example, when calibrating I thought that people would know to move just their eyes rather than move their head along with their eyes. By moving their head along with their eyes it made finding good points difficult. However, most people including the two of us move our heads subconsciously with our eyes. Ok well before we could even begin the actual execution of the experiment we had to sit down and design what exactly we wanted to do. We contemplated having the lab rat hold the word search at an angle and then complete it, but by doing that we weren't getting a good corneal reflection. Then we tried placing the word search on the table and that also didn't work for the same reason. The last possible solution was taping the word search to the wall and having the lab rat stand up and do it. This solution worked best because we could see both the pupil and the corneal reflection. 

        When we uploaded the scene video and eye video to Yarbus for the first time, Liz and I immediately noticed that the calibration target was placed too low and therefore the video wasn't displaying all the calibration points on the target. We did manage to pin point 7 calibration points for my video and 4 calibration points for Liz! However, we did only have 13 points on the target...! The second time we executed the experiment things went much better! We changed 4 things. The first thing we changed was the size of the word search. We enlarged it so that the letters were easier to see on the scene video. Second, we created a calibration target with 25 points instead of 13. Then we decided that it would be clever if we numbered the points on the target and say them out loud as the lab rat fixates on it. When I uploaded my scene video to Yarbus, everything was much better. I could see the pupil, corneal reflection, and everything in the scene. I ended up setting 23 of the 25 calibration points and they were evenly spread out resulting in reliable crosshairs. 

             At 10am Liz and I went to our very first Ph.D defense! The person defending his research is named Grigorios Tsagatakis! That's about all we comprehended from the defense haha :) After sitting through the defense Liz and I decided to reward ourselves with a rice krispy treat and some Reeses peanut  butter cups! For lunch all the interns went down to global village, rearranged 3 of the tables and pulled up some chairs to have bonding time! I ate a Dibella's sub (only a quarter of a foot though) and granola bar for lunch. I'm sure you all were dying to know exactly what I ate ;)

        

Second Day!

        The morning began with me writing a blog because Liz and I couldn't find either Karen or Jeff. When we didn't show up for an hour people apparently went searching for us! Whoops. Well, after that Liz and I with lots of help from Karen decided to conduct an experiment where we would track people's eye movement while they read/analyzed different texts and images. I was going to be the first person to go, but then Jeff asked me to come model for a dermatology magazine! It was an interesting experience. All I basically had to do was stand behind a dermatologist, look at a screen, and pretend I knew what I was looking at! After that was over I went back to the experiment. Liz had the eye tracker on (which is surprisingly lightweight and comfortable) and I had her read some posters for comprehension, analyze some images, and try to read text that was on a colored background. When she was done it was my turn. I did all the same texts as her. When we were done taking the video of our right eye, our job was to upload them to the computer and use Yarbus to calibrate and look for differences between my eye movement and Liz's while we read. Because we are still learning how to use the program, the calibration for both of us took quite a while. Hopefully we'll get the hang of it soon! Anyways, we concluded that both Liz and I read similarly however, Liz tends to re-read passages every time she reads, while I only re-read when I'm under the pressure of comprehension. Additionally, we learned that the eye when reading makes patterned movements and when looking at images makes quick movements to what we deem the most important parts of the picture.

        For the second part of the day Liz and I analyzed the eye video we took of Jeff on wednesday. We compared the accuracy of three types of calibration techniques. Our conclusion was that the head tick and 5 point calibration is slightly more accurate than the head move. We then took pictures of the three types of calibrations and posted our very first wiki! You should obviously go check out the masterpiece! :) 

First Day!

        The first day went pretty well. I mean I got to the very first staff meeting 2 minutes late so that was slightly embarrassing, but otherwise the day was fun. Joe and Bob sent us on a grueling campus wide scavenger hunt and being the genius I am, wore jeans and a cardigan when it was like 80 degrees outside. Needless to say I got hot in about 5 minutes! I did however learn a lot about the campus and can now navigate to just about anywhere. My group didn't win, but I will find a way to get one of those imaging science t-shirts. You can always use an extra shirt! 

        Meeting Jeff and Karen was interesting again! They seem like really fun people and I'm eager to start working with them. I'm most excited to start my own project because I have so many ideas running (haha one of my ideas is running) through my mind. I suppose I still have time to choose a topic, but I just want to get started! Karen and Jeff showed Liz and I exactly how to use the eye tracking camera and also how to use the program Yarbus to compile all the videos and audios we took while Jeff was wearing the camera. The program was slightly overwhelming because there are so many different things you need to remember, but Jeff assured us we would be getting lots of practice! Liz and I also met the other people in the lab who seemed a little grumpy, but Karen said that's only because they've been analyzing the California data and doing the same thing over and over again for a while. 

        Ok, well I'll be writing in this blog every day recounting my exciting experiences in the MVRL! Bye...for now!