Day Thirty-four

I spent nearly all of today in the Physics Assistance Center (PAC), because its more comfortable than the lab and there are knowledgeable people constantly on hand. Most of my day was spent finishing up my presentation: changing pictures, fixing citations, formatting, etc. Once it was done I went through a practice run with Marc, and changed my speaker notes and some details according to his suggestions. I'm definitely glad that there is more practice before the final presentation; presenting is not my favorite activity. Soon after that I showed my power point to Joe for approval and then added a couple more slides.

Day Thirty-three

This morning I blogged, did some reading for my presentation, and asked Marc questions when I got confused. At one an astrophysics research meeting occurred. Dr. Jake wasn't there, which was unfortunate because in discussing the best approach for the brightness plots his input would have been helpful. Dr. O'Dea suggested a new way to calculate the errors, however.

Day Thirty-two

This morning I came in and went through the code, blogged, checked email, etc. Once Preeti got in she and I discussed the brightness plot errors and my presentation. Dr O'Dea happened to walk by while we were near his office, so I was able to borrow his notebook to photocopy some equations I need to check the code against. I then went back to the lab and sent Preeti the slopes from linfit. These were incorrect however, since both x and y needed to have log added, so I fixed that and sent a new message to Preeti. I also stopped by the physics lounge to ask Marc some questions about jets and whatnot.

After the five o'clock meeting Emily and I went to the Insight Lab wing night at Buffalo Wild Wings, which was good.

Day Thirty-one

I drove myself to work this morning, where I was pleased to find doughnuts for the second day in a row-- courtesy of Bob this time. Following the intern meeting I read through the code for a while, making sure I understood the surface brightness profile plot completely. I went to Preeti's office and asked her some questions around eleven, and then went to coffee time. Once we got back I had time for only a few modifications before it was time for lunch in the form of free pizza at the last Wenedsday entrepreneurship movie. The movie was somewhat interesting. After lunch I added the error bars to the plot and sent a few examples to Preeti to see if they looked okay. I then read about AGN's in the textbooks Marc brought in.

Day Thirty

Ed brought in doughnuts this morning! Following an intern-run intern meeting (since Bob and Joe were both out) I finished adjusting the scales on the plots and emailed Preeti to let her know. I also kept trying to make adjustments for the jet that is too long for the program and blogged for yesterday.

Once my preparations for my afternoon meeting were complete I helped Kelsey and Halle glue cut-up mouse pads to the bottom of Nadya's Polynomial Texture Mapping device. This was particularly entertaining because the adhesive was an aerosol and kind of went everywhere. I would therefore reccomend caution to anyone sitting outside near the CIS building.

At three o'clock I met with Preeti and Dr. O'Dea to discuss the plots. Dr. O'Dea explained that the errors on the jet width plots are still odd, and that because the widths appear to be smaller than the beam size, they are not deconvolved and the plots details are untrustworthy. Because of this it cannot accurately be established whether or not the jets are expanding. The Jet Surface Brightness versus Jet Width plot is therefore also untrustworthy. Therefore the paper will just state that jet expansion or lack thereof could not be verified using these images. Preeti is now having me add error bars and a linfit to the surface brightness profile plot, to gather more information there. I also need to check the units on that plot.

Day Twenty-nine

This morning I came in a bit late because of my road test (which I passed!). Upon checking my email I found an email from Preeti requesting changes that Dr. O'Dea suggested be made. After working on those a little I went down to her office for clarification on some things. My new tasks seemed easy enough, but as usual complications caused them to take far longer than expected. Part of what I'm doing is changing the x-scale on one of the plots, but because it is a contour plot this is apparently all but impossible. I intend to finish these tomorrow morning though, so Preeti and I can meet with Dr. O'Dea in the afternoon. Dr. O'Dea actually makes me rather nervous, since he comes across as very intelligent and has pointed out many of the errors/problems I've had to deal with so far. Hopefully these plots will finally be what he and Preeti need.

In the midst of this Bethany came by the Insight Lab with a potential Imaging Science student, so Emily, Jason, Matt, and I described our projects for this summer. We then went with the other interns, Bethany, and the prospective student and her family to Crossroads, where we got free lunch.

Day Twenty-eight

Today wins the award for busiest day thus far. I got in early to blog for yesterday and do some reading for my presentation. After the intern meeting I went over to the undergraduate research symposium with Emily. We listened to presentations on everything from the astronomy and education research some people in the Insight lab conducted to a presentation on how ant behavior can be used in optimization and applied to image processing (that one was really cool).

Lunch was included in the symposium and consisted of a variety of Asian dishes. After eating, instead of listening to the keynote speaker, Marc took Alex and I on a tour of building 8.

A gigantic slide rule.

View of the floor from the third floor.

An alternative version of the traditional RIT map. Watch our for Larp Land.

Sign on the supercomputer's room's door.

(Part of) RIT's supercomputer.

We returned for some more astronomy talks and then hurried over to see posters in the Innovation Center. One discussed goldfish training...

At around three several of the other interns and I headed up to the roof to watch the airplane that was doing a remote sensing collect fly over. Liz and I actually got to take measurements for the experiment, recording temperatures of different water.

The very end of the day brought an email from Dr. O'Dea with feedback on the plots. Now new alterations must be made on Monday. I need to work more on my presentation as well... lots to do!

Day Twenty-seven

Today featured our last field trip for the summer, to Melles Griot. Although Melles Griot has different specialties, the tour reminded me a lot of Rochester Precision Optics. Our tour guide spoke very quietly and quickly but the tour was otherwise very interesting. After the tour we had lunch at Pelligrino's.

Before and after the trip I spent my time researching background knowledge for my presentation (so I can answer questions, hopefully), working on my presentation plan, blogging, and cleaning a few things up in the code. Until Preeti gets back to me with news about whatever feedback she receives I have nothing I actually have to do with the code, which is cool. I tried to implement a second rotation for one of the jets to account for a bend in its structure, but this is more complicated than I anticipated, so I'm still thinking about alterations needed for that to function properly.

Day Twenty-six

I started today by brainstorming for my presentation and getting its preliminary organization laid out. It seems like a lot will need to be background information, but I'll figure out a balance as I put it together more. After the intern meeting I blogged and started commenting the code. Next I got linfit working and ran a sanity check to make sure some of the weirder plots were still getting appropriate slopes calculated.

Preeti circulated the plots I sent her yesterday to get input from others, and mentioned the potential need for a different plot, so I am waiting to hear more about that.

Lunch today was the College of Science Summer Undergraduate Researchers picnic, which was nice.

I also changed the plots to stop neatly as opposed to trailing off at the ends, which was pretty quick. There are only a few details I need to ask Preeti about. For the remainder of the afternoon I read about galaxies in a really reader-friendly textbook that Marc brought in, and looked through a paper that is relevant to the one I am doing work for.

Day Twetny-five

Today I came in early, blogged, and started working through an email of suggestions Preeti sent to resolve the error problems. After the intern meeting I finished going through the suggestions, which took a surprisingly long amount of time. Because using certain keywords had bizarre effects on the plots I looked into what was causing what. Some emailing back and forth with Preeti led to plots using the standard deviation error from the gaussians fit to each slice of the jet for the error bars. One input, MEASURE_ERRORS proved to be what caused the weird looking plots. Once set as a small enough number, however, it stopped causing problems. At a meeting at 3:30 it was decided that sigma, the background noise calculated for each image, should be used for that value. After the meeting Marc showed me examples of how to comment code until Preeti came up to have me make a few changes to the plots. At the end of the day she had me send her a group of plots for each of several of the jets to review and discuss with others. Apparently this is nearly complete; now only the slope of a certain plot is needed. That's my goal for tomorrow...

Day Twenty-four

I had to reorient myself with my project this morning; after a week away I needed to go back through and remember what I was thinking last Friday. I spent the morning getting the error bars working on the plot and trying to figure out why the errors are so small. That's right- the plots claim to be so right that they have to be wrong. Unfortunately it ends up that I overlooked the right error retrieval keyword, which I found out when Preeti stopped by after lunch and Chris piped in with a suggestion. Preeti also had me change how the error is plotted over the jet width plot and asked for some changes for the sake of aesthetics.

During another meeting in the afternoon I was told that a plot of the jet brightness should be added, and that jets that have a bend should be rotated and measured in two steps. Since the code for the additional plot is already in the program it should be easy to add. The biggest issues will probably be formatting. Double rotations pieced together are a bit more confusing though.

Jake is back! He attended the five o'clock meeting and looked over my most recent plots.

Days Nineteen through Twenty-three

~~Evelyn goes to West Virginia on a mission trip with her youth group to do home repair work~~

(and misses all her fellow interns a lot, of course)

This post is included for numbering purposes.