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.