Week 4: 6/29/09 - 7/2/09

   Finally, I get to actually jump into my project.  We recieved some data from the LISST 100x that we needed to process.  I had to do a couple of things before we could do this .  I needed to research all of the variables involved with the system.  Last week I compiled a list, but now I needed more information on each of the variables.  I thought that this was going to be a simple task, but unfortunately was a bit mistaken. I left my mentors office with four hefty textbooks and a couple of smaller ones with the intention of finding a couple of figures and graphs.  Eee gads that was not an easy task.  I eventually went online to try and push myself in the right direction and I did find a lot of helpful sites that reduced my search quite a bit.  Monday and Tuesday were both filled with this task. 
   Wednesday was kind of cool.  We finally started dealing with the data. The previous sets of data were always skewed in unpredictable ways when the optical piece was used.  My mentor called the manufacturer and got a couple of problem solving techniques.  Luckily the first technique was the one that worked.  The problem turned out to be the fact that the LISST 100x was designed to go in the water where the samples were being collected, so water was required to be between all of the optics to complete the connection. Once water was placed inbetween the lens of the laser and the optics, the data became much more consistant.  We recieved a new backscatter file and began to look at the raw data collected after the water was used.
    We then used MatLab to view the raw data to view a time series. The data was a little strange in that there were some regions that were completely static in values.  This is definitely unexpected since we were dealing with a moving changing system.  Here's one of the graphs that we made.

You can see that there are three regions on this graph that don't really make sense.  Michael, the man in charge (I think) of the SATURN Observation center said that the machine could have been blocked for periods of time and then unblocked, etc.  This theory was supported by the temperature sensor, which showed a spike in temperature, which would occur if everything was blocked with the laser heating eveything up.
   We spent Thursday trying to solve a way to put the time measurements in a scale that makes more sense.  The units involving time were the dayours and the minute-seconds.  We spent the  morning coming up with a way to break this information up into the units, days, hours, minutes and seconds.  The last task of the week was to make a time series of the processed data.  We have a program that came with the LISST 100x that luckily processes the data for us.  We then have to upload the processed data into MatLab and make graphs with it.  We had a HUGE setback during this process however.  Somewhere, the processing data somehow multiplied the number of data points so where we once had 2070 raw data points, we now had 8331 data points.  So now the next frustrating step is figuring out what went wrong and where it went wrong.  Once these two things are figured out we then have to devise a way to fix the problems. Oy. I am definitely frustrated from dealing with computers all of the time.  I've gone from checking my email maybe once or twice a day to working soley from my computer.
   Thursday night was another organised event which was WAY cool.  I went to a Timber's game with three other iunterns and a couple of the staff members of CMOP.  This was my first time at an outdoor professional soccer game.  It was super cool and awesomely sunny so I had a great time.  I was reminded about how much I miss playing soccer.  Maybe I'll join an adult league when I get home or something.  We then went walking through the city for crepes and the VooDoo Doughnuts. I got to try the infamous bacon doughnut, which is not as good as it sounds let me tell you.  It wasn't that the doughnut was bad, it just wasn't very good.

It was definitely odd.  The other interns bought doughnuts that were a little more standard and loved them so I always have something to look forward to next time. 

   I still have yet to check out the cupcake scene in Portland because I have been so swamped but do have high hopes for next week.