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
This week I did a lot more coding. More than I ever did in high school even. Matlab is proving to be quite difficult the more I have to program it, but that was expected. However, I did get to learn a bit more about my project, though I still have a long ways to… Read More
This week at NOAA was another week filled with creating Excel spreadsheets. I am now modeling “bubble” scatter plots to show my infrastructure anomaly results. My mentor, Rick, had me create one type of scatter plot and now I am working on another way to model the anomalies. We created and ordered our CrowdMag T-Shirts,… Read More
Well time is certainly flying by. I really don’t have much to say because this week the time was mostly spent downloading and processing satellite data which we still haven’t quite completed yet. The process is underway and we are getting close. In addition to this, a lot of time was spent reading papers and… Read More
Finally, I was able to pull the first round of results out of the incubator, do a CFU (colony forming unit) count and put the data into a graph in R. Unfortunately my initial count reflected my confusion between bacillus cells that were spread wide and deformed, and fungi. An example of a cell that… Read More
