Hello friends

We have just entered the month of July and it is past the halfway point. I feel like the program has been moving fast, and at the same time, very slow. I feel like I am starting to feel a little bit of burn out since there is much to do every day. Don’t get me wrong, I am enjoying what I am doing, but I feel like there is a lot of material I need to or want to know with not enough time to fully understand it.

Let’s get to the more fun topics. Since it has been a while, I’ll give you a run down on what has happened.

Thursday:

We went over HCI and looked at the different kind of studies. We started with ways we can mess with a study to get more favorable results. There are tons of ways you can mess with a study throughout the process. In addition, there are different ways you can conduct a study. Like how it can be experimental, quasi experiments, observational, and correlational. This wasn’t entirely new, but it was kind of surprising.

Following that we had a Luncheon Lecture with Dr. Stephen Gillbert. We got to learn about some of his research and how he ended up here. I was very interested in his research on creating voting machines. There is a lot of problems that can come with voting machines such as accessibility, malfunctions in voting numbers, etc.

We then went to Forker to do a pilot run with the EEG. We had a little bit of a malfunction because I made a mistake in the code. We were able to fix it, but used the hard code I wrote. We are hoping to do a full test run eventually. It is now down to getting the Biosemi trigger connected to the PsychoPy builder. Once that has been done, I feel confident things will work out well.

At 4 a group of us went down to Des Moines. Harrison and Rodney got their haircut, and Lydia and I went to my apartment to do a little bit of studying while we waited. Once the two of them got done with their haircuts we went to Ingersoll to get some food. We didn’t back to Ames until later, but it was a really fun.

Friday:

We mostly worked on out MCA in Machine Learning. We are getting ready to put our models into a Unity world and have them drive a car. My hope is that my car can be a tank and more specifically a TANK! I would play World of Tanks Blitz with my dad when I was younger and always enjoyed it (even though I got blown up the most). The most annoying tank was a Matilda, so for memories sake that is the tank I am hoping to use.

Also, I have really picked up cooking. Today I made pan fried cod. I had to baste the fish in butter and that was an experience, but it was kind of fun. So far, I have cooked chicken, beef, and fish on the stove for dinners. I am excited to try out more recipes later on.

Weekend:

We didn’t do anything massive over the weekend. On Saturday I went to the grocery store with Alee and Andrea, which was fun. Then later that night we all went to a park and roasted marshmallows. I was extremely paranoid because I have been watching Supernatural with Alee and all bad things happen in the dark in a secluded place. Obviously, nothing bad happened. Then Sunday I did some cleaning and worked on the MCA presentation at VRAC. Other than that, there wasn’t much going on.

OH WAIT! This weekend was the Gymnastics Olympic Trials. I am extremely excited that Suni Lee will be going back to the Olympics since she had some set back this year. I remember watching her 3 years ago when she went to Tokyo and won the All-Around Gold Medal. It was amazing.

Okay now that is all.

Best,

Sophie

PS. Hope you enjoyed that Bon Jovi reference