Well this was the shortest week so far. Happy 4th of July folks. This week was spent processing more satellite data and well this process can be a timely process. These downloads can take 30 min to 6 hours. Once downloaded, we then have to use Python scripts to go through and actually process the… Read More
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a whole book about outliers and how their surroundings helped make them successful. Clearly, he never took a statistics course. Outliers, in statistics, are bad, and so they are in our research. They skew the results giving us an unrealistic mean. This week was all about finding those outliers and getting rid… Read More
This week I worked on creating a Hub for all of my files. I coded the hub file to gather data through other files with the dates specified in the hub. The resulting file took at least 5 minutes to run the first week of all data sets. So, due to having some errors here… Read More
Walking around the hallways of NOAA, you sometimes happen to stumble upon some pretty interesting and often off-the-wall conversations (and no, of course I definitely am NOT eavesdropping…). This particular week I walked past two rather distinguished looking men and heard one of them say “…it’s not rocket science…”. When I heard that, I couldn’t… Read More
Five weeks down, four to go! Field work on Monday started off with having to reroute as soon as we got going, thanks to a helpful sign warning us that 285 is closed near our research area due to the Weston Pass wildfire. Fortunately, we were able to turn around and take 70 and 91… Read More
Round two of my experiment is in the incubator as of 20 minutes ago! Our new design idea has accounted for the factors that may have influenced our last experiment such as the condensation in the jar was contaminating the plates. The solution to this was to place a blank petri dish at the top… Read More
This week has been going well. My mentor Rick Saltus was out on Monday/Tuesday and of course we had July 4th, off. Tomorrow (Friday) Rick, Manoj, and I are going to visit an Iron Dike up near Ferncliff, CO (40 miles North/West of Boulder). This Iron Dike is supposed to have a high reading of… Read More
So I know that technically, today is Thursday, not Monday, but man, it sure feels like a Monday. On the first actual Monday this week I spent roughly 6 hours transcribing the worksheets and surveys that we had our subjects fill out. The final Word document was 30 pages long. At times, I felt like… Read More
Alright! Week 4 was a banger! For starters, I got my first data sheet on Excel. At first, I didn’t know what to do with a 900 by 300 worksheet! After a few YouTube videos and some nudges from my mentor, I was able to organize the data into something usable. So that’s good. However,… Read More
I decided this week to gather samples from an area that had been giving me headaches while mapping them from Google Earth. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reading on beaver ecology. Soil, foliage, wildlife, it’s all there. But none of the literature or photographs do reality justice. In one… Read More
