Obviously, much of the week was consumed with the holiday weekend. We spend much of having BBQs with various friends, but on Tuesday we took the munchkin to the Aquarium. She really liked the colorful fish:
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She was also a big fan of the penguins playing in front of her:
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And petting the starfish:
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though we're mainly glad she didn't try to eat it.
 
In work related news, I completed my front-identification system only to realize I had no baseline for comparison. So I've written a program to allow a couple of the scientists to go through the raw data and tag where they believe the fronts are. Then I can compare my results to theirs to measure the accuracy of my system. I'll get tags on Dorado and Martin data and use those for interpolating tags in Tethys data.
 
I've also started writing up my work for a journal article we hope to submit once all is said and done this summer.
 
In the coming week I'll be meeting with a couple of scientists for the tagging. I'll also be working on integrating the results from all the various CTD measures that Dorado, Tethys, and Martin take into one comprehensive estimate of where a front is located. Once that is done, I have some papers on detecting fronts using satellite SST data which I will use to start the process of integrating mooring, SST, and Sergey's LCS data in with the AUV & Martin data to further enhance the picture of where a front is located. The eventual goal is to be able to do this in something close to real-time as the data arrives on-shore. Eventually I will also develop an in-situ version that could be placed on Dorado itself.

Most of this week was spent in Las Vegas with friends...I won't upload any pictures.I also flew from Vegas to the Grand Canyon, which was pretty awesome! Flew over the Hoover Dam, landed near the national park, quick bus/walking tour of part of the park, helicopter ride over/through the canyon, back on the plane, in Vegas by bedtime.

Yesterday I formatted some of my data to run it through PRIMER. While the analysis is still showing discrepancies based on the year sampled, my efforts to standardise/clean-up the data appear to be working somewhat. Fingers crossed when I've gone through all of the tapes I'll be able to say for sure what effect environmental factors are having of the faunal composition of each canyon.

Next week will involve going through more videos...still a long way to go but I'm getting there. 

So I am doing another dive- I'm proud of myself though..... I didn't run screaming . Dive 231 is going much faster than the previous one. I am on day two of annotating the dive and have made it through nearly five tapes. The measuring will go much faster also, since there are fewer sea cucumbers in this dive. Next week I will begin the dissecting of the specimens sampled on the last trip to statin M. This means I am doing lots of reading up on the anatomy of a sea cucumber so I am able to locate the gonads and be able to tell if they are full of gametes or not. I will also begin to analyze my data to a small degree so that I know what I am doing later when my mentors are not here and I am writing my paper. I am also hoping to begin the time lapse photography next week, but we will see what happens.

I had a very lovely weekend with my fiance and out families. We went to the beach and had multiple bbqs and ate way more junk than we will ever need My kind of weekend. Oh and the aquarium was awesome! as usual

This week I have been in Costa Mesa (LA) at a workshop on the affects of ocean acidification on the shellfish industry. It has been really exciting and interesting, and has given me plenty to think about in terms of my internship. I'm learning about how scientists interact and make decisions, and how the stakeholders and community use that information.
No pictures, but the hotel and the food have been fantastic. The people are interesting. I have plenty to work on next week, pulling together information and data!

well starting with holidays I spent great time in riverside and disniland. back to work , I was succussful with another spawning experiment. at last manage to collect  some female gametes. also I continued my work on age determination. now I'm looking in to banding patterns of test plates. hope to finish as much as samples during next week.
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During this very short week I have continued DNA extractions for tubeworms from sites I don't yet have samples for, although next week will require some freezer-diving to complete the collection. I have also been trying to finish PCRs for the COI and cytB genes for all the DNA samples I have so far, and I am almost there. I am also editing DNA sequences.

Next week I will work on primer design and hopefully get reactions to work for more nuclear genes. I will also work on sequencing the remaining COI and cytB reactions, and editing the sequences.

Hope everyone's holiday was fantastic!

Although this has been a short week it has been a fruitful one. I was able to prepare and get my preserved Atolla samples in to the histology lab at CHOMP. The slides should be ready in the next few days and I am beyond excited to get them back! I was also able to procure some small medusae and ephyrae from Monterey Bay Aquarium, which I intend to "feed" to the Atolla and closely monitor their reaction_._ Unfortunately I have had a die off in one of my kreisels so currently there are only four Atollas remaining. Not to fret, these deep-sea jellies have made it for 3 weeks in captivity, which is longer than expected. So I am still positive and striving to keep the remaining individuals for as long as possible. Next week will be a very exciting one, which will likely provide a wealth of new information on these mysterious Atolla jellies.

Have a great weekend!

Yesterday, I generated several figures from the CH4/N2 and CO2/N2 profiles I've produced, which will be used in two of the upcoming publications from the Brewer lab. It always amazes me how much effort each one takes, but I've been chugging through the massive spreadsheets I've made fairly quickly now. Today, all three of the computers that I normally work with had various technical issues, and so I spent the bulk of my day trying to resolve those rather than working through my new set of samples. It has been a fairly frusterating process, but hopefully everything will be up and running shortly. Next week, Peter Walz will be back in lab and I will hopefully be able to chemically and mechanically describe the physical processes clathrate hydrates undergo as they are recovered from the seafloor using these profiles, videos of their acquisition by the Doc Ricketts and thermodynamic calculations.

Over the past week I have spent the majority of my time refining the ctenophore categories I organised previously. My groups have decreased in number from approximately 35 to 18 as I became more familiar with the organisms.

After considering other conflicts of interests, we've decided that it may be easier to look at different taxon, as Ctenoceros is already well documented. At the moment I am adding to table that Steve created documenting many of the known ctenophores, and their morphological characteristics. My task is to add more morphological characters and input the categories I defined from the VARS data.

Next week I will likely be using high quality lab photos to add further morphological characters to this taxonomic table, hopefully shedding more light on the relationships between these taxa.

The last week has been short and sweet. After a good little trek with Kristian and Katie (Loweth)on Sunday in Big Sur, it was time to finalise a few things before running the batch classifier. This is essentially a method that I will test to see how successful the classifier at doing its job autonomously without my aid. The image library I have created should be adequate for AVEDac to detect and differentiate between species against a unannotated data set. The tricky part is trying to minimise the amount of visual noise the detector is picking up. It is involving a lot of editing of the images (with a hint of patience) and re-testing. I am happy to see how well AVEDac can track a mobile organism, and even more happier that I have finally managed to get the classifier to differentiate between a Rockfish and Squid!(I basically just removed the 'squiddy lookin' rockfish from my image library!). Hopefully I will find some squid using this method. If this is a success, then it means I can use it for more and more data. While there are still a few bugs in the AVEDac tool, my mentor has been a hero and was working hard to correct the glitches and help process the data from home!

Monday is a big day. I plan to test the batch classifier against a data set and see if it can detect and classify by itself! I am also planning on meeting up with a researcher who I got in contact with from Hopkins Marine Station to have a chat about a few things regarding squid behaviour!

This week is a Short week, back from the long holiday. Enjoy the holiday, one day of them was in Yosemite, awesome national park. Thanks for my mentor getting me there.
This week, I donot have much work done, still figure out the beagleboard and have hard work to boot the linux system. Spend two days finding related websites and documents, and learn by myself to fix the problem. Still ongoning...
Also, I start to learn some software installed in the board system, like ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ), Universal Backup Device sever, USB Flash Drive, National code for C, C++.
Learn Embedded Linux development using Eclipse, a little long time working on studying.
Working on the wire of McStar hardware, and prepare for the test next week.

Next week:
The main thing is to do the real test .
Monday Meeting with Wayne and Gene, plan the test in the following weeks.
Start to fix all the electronic stuff in McStar, and get it ready.

HOPE NEXT WEEK< EVERYTHING GOES WELL.

Well I nearly forgot about the update. Short week but still productive. I finished designing a mounting board for the various electronics that will be mounted on the lid of the aft dry box. Yesterday I received the fiberglass that was needed to create the mount and today I cut out the design and drilled the necessary mounting holes. To my delight the dimensions were correct, so the mounting board was successfully screwed onto the lid. Next week I will be attaching electronics to the the mounting board so that I can begin connecting the plumbing and wiring. This week I also created a power point with conceptual images of the main tasks that need to be completed for this project to be a success. Next week I will also begin understanding the Wave Glider communications to ensure that our OA system can speak with the Wave Glider communications and command.