Blogs

 This week I continue to work with the 3d images for a best assessment of the system, and continuing to clean up bad data to SATURN-03. My next step will be take the standard deviation of the temperature between CT13 & Thermister13 data during each data. Improve a new code for better assessment of the images and look the errors distributions during the summer and winter periods. 

All day Monday I worked on my final report and read more primary literature.  Tuesday and Wednesday I was at Sharp and continued to test different parameters on the biosensors.  Some of the sensors were functionalized (probes attached to the surface) alongside of a synthetic molecule called MCH that previous literature reported would decrease the amount of non-specific binding of the targets to the probes.  The little preliminary runs that I performed did not show this.  I did find some optimal parameters for the biosensors:  2XSSPE buffer, 75 Hz, 75 mV.

This week my mentor Wendy, Sean, and I all went out to Soda Bay to collect more samples, GPS mapped where we got our samples and took pictures of where we got out samples. We also did tests on our sample sites. I had a great time. This time we walked down the river instead of walking through a clear cut. It was much easier and faster then walking through the clear cut.

This week I worked on my presentation most of the time. On Wednesday we had a SEM session at Portland State University. There we looked at some Soda Bay samples and some of my mentor Wendys samples from Yellowstone. On Thursday, Jared and I did our presentations. All of the interns and Vanessa went to OHSU and got a tour of the whole school. That was very interesting.

My GUI (Graphical User Interface) has gone through several iterations this week as I slowly get it to work.  This is actually my first time programming a GUI, so my coding progress is less steady than I would like.  Errors popped up a little too frequently for my taste week.

This week was a sucessful week for Suzanne and I. We started off the week by decideing to send out samples for the Columbia River site back tothe primate center to make sure that a mistake wasn't made since out first sequencing came back as P. Putida.  We knew that this just meant a mistake was made or somewhere along the line our sample was contaminated.

This week I worked on and finished a page which shows a report of the statuses of all the instruments in the Saturn observation network, much like this page - http://www.stccmop.org/datamart/observation_network/dailyreport only it is automatically generated based on the data that a user enters into the Deployments page which I finished last week. Building the table was very challenging for me since it involved many loops and the logic was hard to capture in programming language, but I'm glad I finished it.

Up until last week I made many trips to the OGI library and was busy researching CDOM. One of the most interesting things I learned is that CDOM affects the level of atmospheric oxygen. It does so by limiting the photosynthesis process that occurs underwater, as it limits the amount of light that penetrates through to the organisms and plants underneath that need light to produce oxygen. I found this interesting because I never thought that CDOM would have such a large effect on the atmosphere, let alone have a direct impact on human life.

Well, I said that I was going to blog more but that didn't really happen. I've been pretty busy with my current project which is creating time series for data from cbnc03, am169, and SandI for all of 2009. Last week the EARTH workshop was here and I was able to participate on Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, Monica, Julia and I gave a presentation to the teachers on our projects and how we see the CMOP data being used in the classroom. The teachers seemed to really enjoy our presentation and asked a lot of questions.