Saturday, August 16, 2014

August 15th: Day 30 Week 6: I can't believe it is over

This is it. The final day. I can't believe I spent my whole summer on this and now it is done. I may never see some of these great people and friends again. I DON'T want to go back to school and stop the research that I have been doing. This is something I could do and hopefully will do for the rest of my life. This has been the best summer ever and I will miss it very much!!!! I would like to thank everyone that worked in the Carlson Center this summer for making this such a great experience.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

August 14th: Day 29 Week 6: Run throughs

This morning started off with a run through of everyone's presentation and I thought it went very well. Everyone did a great job and I'm so excited for tomorrow. We all went to Java's for lunch, for the last time :( and it was good and sad. I can't believe this is coming to an end. It was the best summer I've had in a very long time and I don't want it to stop. After lunch, I began adding a slide about a conclusion, like I was recommended and came across an epiphany in my and Jacqueline's data!!!. But you'll have to wait to see the presentations tomorrow to see it...

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

August 13th: Day 28 Week 6: Dry Runs

The presentations were due today. After I turned them in, I did my own run through in the room next door and it was really sloppy. Then I saw Vicky and she offered to do a run through together in the conference room. That went well but was cut short because I made lunch plans with Lindsay and Wes. Then we did Vicky's presentation after lunch. After that I had a meeting with my advisors and we did another run through together. I had to fix the presentations and give them back to Bethany for revising.

August 12th: Day 27 Week 6: More finishing

Oh my gosh! I am on such a time crunch now. I didn't realize it until this morning. I have a billion things to do today that have to be done by 8:45 tomorrow morning. I have to write the letter, do the blogging, go though my data, finish my two time logs, finish both presentations and do the survey. I am going to panic

August 11th: Day 26 Week 6: Presentation

Today I am finishing up everything because our presentations are on Friday. It is becoming a time crunch but luckily I have most of the stuff done. I finished up all the pictures and worked on what I was going to say on each slide.

Sunday, August 10, 2014

August 9th: Day 25.5 Week 5ish: Darien Lake

After all the scheduling and planning, today was the day that we got to spend at Darien Lake. Our unofficial field trip that was self organized. 7 of us showed up: Vicky, Maryam, Lindsay, Rory, Adam, Alex, and myself. It was a lot of fun and I finally got to ride the Ride of Steel since every time before it was either closed for maintenance or weather. However, today was beautiful without a cloud in the sky all day. Plus, we all luckily liked roller coasters and so it was easy to keep together  and do the same things. After, we had planned to go to the OneRepublic Concert which was amazing. Lindsay and Rory did not go and Adam sat in a different area because he had reserved seats, but Rachel and her friend came just for the concert. American Authors were great and Script was amazing because the lead singer came right up next to us on the lawn seats and we were able to take great pictures. Alex's selfi was the best thing ever and we all laughed our heads off. OneRepublic was great and it was an amazing performance. I am so glad we planned to do that.




August 8th: Day 25 Week 5: Symposium

Today was the RIT Undergraduate Research Symposium where undergrads working at RIT share their work through 15 minute presentations. Because I had spent so much time over the week, I was able to come in at 10 to see the first presentation I was interested in. Unfortunately I actually had work to do on my own presentation and didn't want to spend all my time at the conference so I had to go back and forth. I did get work done by testing myself multiple times and although I didn't have time to analyze all the data, I did get the data I needed. At 3 was Maryam's presentation and she did a GREAT job. She was the best one I had seen and her work was really interesting. At about 5, several interns went to the Carlson building's fishbowl to watch Star War's 4. I had never seen it so that was cool.

August 7th: Day 24 Week 5: More presentation

I continued working on my presentation today but a question came up about how to display my data best. I would prefer not to spew out statistics or show a chart that the people have to look through but other than that I have no ideas. Also, I don't know whether to caption the pictures or not. However, the most important "breakthrough" I found today was about trying to find significant data. How many more blinks does it take to be significant between the book and the screen? for example. I will find this out tomorrow by testing myself multiple times and finding about how much variation is just random between the tests.

August 6th: Day 23 Week 5: Presentation Work

Although I had hoped to find more test subjects today, what I really worked on was my presentation. Jacqueline and I had an agreement that she would write up the lab report for our first test while I worked on the part of our presentations that we are doing together. So far it is working out pretty well but I learned I need to take pictures of everything we typically use on each slide. We did test a few more people, but not nearly the numbers I was hoping for initially.

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

August 5th: Day 22 Week 5: Yay test subjects (again)

After yesterday's realization, Jacqueline and I made it our goal to get test subjects today, and that we did. I think we tested 8 people today on the eye tracking machine. It would have been 9 except that one of the girls that came down wore glasses and was uncalitibratable with the eye tracker. We were very accomplished. We even got well into our lab report on the first testing thing and finished our final abstracts. It was a good day in terms of productivity. I hope to get 10 more test subjects everyday through Friday because that will put me at 50!!! We'll see if that actually happens...

August 4th: Day 21 Week 5: Today it hit us

Today we didn't do much again. I made good progress on my presentation and what I was going to say. I actually made two power points, one with what is going to be shown and one with what I'm going to say so that it helps organize my thoughts. However, towards the end of the day, Jacqueline and I got hit by the realization that we need more test subjects for this experiment. We have less than 15 and that is not nearly enough data to use. Tomorrow we will find more people.

Saturday, August 2, 2014

August 1st: Day 20 Week 4: The Last Barbecue

Today was the last barbecue we would have because of the undergraduate research symposium and the final research day. Unfortunately, I didn't get to stay very long because I actually had a lot of work today (but I'm not really complaining because having something to work on is always good). I had to look at the stats more as well as add in the full experiment statistics into the spreadsheet and export the video's of where the subjects were looking onto a flash drive so that I could watch them on my laptop. It was also bring your friend to the internship day and while several people did bring people, the one person I texted to come never replied back. Oh well. It was fun anyway

July 31st: Day 19 Week 4: Stats

A few more people came through today but the majority of my time today was spent copying down statistics from the BeGaze on each person's test and reinserting them into a Google docs so that I could compare all the information. Eventually I used some simple math to determine how many blinks per second and minute there were so that they would all have a common factor to compare by. Then I did more simple math in order to subtract the book's numbers from the screen's and turned the negative cells blue so that it was easier to compare which was larger.