This week has been very short and Monday wasn't too productive with all of the meetings and NASA interns. However, it was very nice to meet them! I am bummed I couldn't go out to dinner, but I hear that they are coming back for the Hopkins and MBA BBQ, so that would be nice. As far as my project is concerned, I think that it is coming along well. I am now counting Nanomia bijuga, a Siphonophore, which is completely unrelated to my Cephalopod study organism! Why you might ask? The plot thickens! Tune in for your answer next week on the thrilling weekly updates of Ben Burford.

As of Monday morning my internship has taken on a whole new level of excitement. The Princeton journal Discovery: Research at Princeton is writing an article on Ken Johnson's C-SOBOM profiling float project and they have requested permission to use my illustration to accompany the article. I have been given the green light for this project and my deadline is July 10, one week from today! So I have put everything else on hold while I frantically complete this illustration. I have had a couple of meetings with Hans Jannasch, the lead engineer, who has graciously provided me with 3-D drawings of the float and positioned them in the perspective I need using the program Solid Works.

I am also organizing the 2013 intern T-shirt design. Everyone seems excited by this project and a couple of people have come up with great design options. There are multiple artists in our group which makes this extra fun and gives us the opportunity to make an interesting collaboration. In next Monday's meeting we will hopefully all decide on the final design concept.

Hi All, this week has been exciting to say the least. Monday and Tuesday were daylong cruise aboard RV Rachel Carson with the ROV Ventana. Bailey joined us on Monday's cruise, which turned out to have a number of technical glitches that interfered with the communications between the ROV and the control room. The ROV had to be surfaced to test connections and problem solve. Alba joined us on Tuesday, which went much more smoothly. We had no comms problems and got all our test data. I now have spectral data to analyze! That means I'll be learning to use Grams (a spectral analysis software) and Matlab very soon. Most of today will be spent demobilizing equipment from the ROV.

Meeting the NASA interns at Dinner on Monday was fun. I like hearing about all types of scientific research. And space related research is particularly enthralling so hearing about their projects was exciting to say the least. Funny enough, I applied to intern at NASA this summer. If any of the marine sciences folks in this group are interested in the interning with NASA, there are many ocean-related intern projects as part of the NASA Develop program (http://develop.larc.nasa.gov/projects.html). I encourage you to apply next year if you're interested.

While short, this week has probably been one of the busiest so far for me.

Monday and Tuesday, I finally got the LISST-100x off the AUV and hooked up to my laptop with copious help from John Ryan. The few baseline measurements I've run look promising, and I'm hoping to get a few more background measurements in today before I start running my experiments. Yesterday, I also talked to Hans about getting the LISST-HOLO, a holographic imaging system for larger plankton, set up, so I hope to start working with that soon as well. Jim is also talking to someone else about another holographic system which is more sensitive, but I'm starting to wonder if I'll have enough time to do much with this last system while still completing a full experiment. I am also working up comparative data from the LOPC on Dorado and the SHA molecular analysis from the last four years, in the hope that we can get a better understanding of the accuracy and resolution of the LOPC data. On the biology side of things, I've gotten probes made up for hopefully any organism we could hope to test, as well as setting up all reagents and instruments for optimal use once I start running samples.

Outside the lab... meeting the NASA interns was great, it was cool to see the level of enthusiasm they had for their job, as well as their excitement in seeing what we do. I'm looking forward to seeing them again at the Hopkins BBQ. It was also great to have the CV workshop on Monday, especially considerations when applying for positions internationally.

What happened since last Thursday?
Well, it has been very straightforward: watch videos and more videos, and so on....Linda has come up with some deadlines and it will be tight to gather all the data on time. Sp really I have been glued to the computer screen of the video lab. I should have most of the data from 2006 to 2012 by the end of this week. However, there are some videos that are not clear in terms of what can be used as quantitative data and as Linda is on holidays, I will have to discuss that with her next week. So it is likely that I will spend next week watching those videos.

A short week, but an exciting one nonetheless - I've started to look at some quantitative measurements of our midwater data, examining correlations between taxa over space and time and attempting to glean trends that we can pursue with more pointed tests. We've delved into some new graphics that are useful for visualizing taxa abundances over large amounts of time, including a particularly nifty seasonality plot with by-year layers since 1989. Today I'll be heading down to the video lab to examine some of the extreme records showing up in our data, a trip to the source of the VARS database that I don't get to make too often. In addition, we got to meet some of the NASA interns, had a CV workshop, and have some started some prep for our 6-day Western Flyer Cruise next week!

FEA Simulations for the pressure housing are finally done! (Again.) I had a couple of concerns about how some alignment bolts in the assembly may have been taking too much of the axial load, but Gene and I have figured out how to avoid that problem. We are still waiting on the steel shipment to come in from Ryerson, so I've been keeping myself busy with other projects. I finished writing a labview module in anticipation for the pump efficiency tests that I should be running, and I've wired most of the sensors that I will need for as well. I am still waiting on one converter for a high precision position transducer, but aside from that most things are ready to go! Today I will switch gears a little bit and start working on a particle counter that uses the coulter principle.

This week I counted phytoplankton, and counted, and counted some more, last week I used a hemacytometer for the tiny guys, and this week a Sedgewick counter for my dense population of Heterosigma akashiwo, a 18-34 um phytoplankton. I actually found that procedure extremely tedious and frustrating, as I trust the flow cytometer to give accurate counts, but the person I have been working with on plankton counting has strongly suggested it's best to have a human count in the mix in addition to the multiple sensor counts I'll have for each population by the end of the experiment. So, it's been pretty frustrating/physically tiring sitting still that long on a single task.

Oh I impressed my mentor with my initial bench-top tests of the ECO puck sensor. Project validated! Ok not so much, but it's still great to both be stoked on the same data sets. Today I am ordering optical black out materials to reduce noise from the sensor for bench-top testing.

Oh my babies are growing up nicely, too! Two of the generations have crashed, but the other 12 are where they should be growth-wise, which makes me feel better about spending my weekends coming into the lab to measure their growth.

Although a short week, it was very busy and productive!  Monday was spent dividing up my urchins (Allocentrotrus fragilis) into containers with different pH water flows.  The containers are divided equally amongst four different pH levels provided via tanks in the Sea-room with tubing running into each urchin container. The urchins will be ready to experiment with this coming Monday, after a week's worth of acclimation.

Before this glorious Wednesday is over, I will have my four Y-mazes constructed and ready to use Monday to perform my experiment. I will also have obtained a good idea on water flow rates through my mazes in relation with my urchins and a familiarity with their response to kelp.  Flow rate in the Y-mazes will be determined using colored dye injected into the water flow through a long PVC tube (same material I used for my Y-mazes) and measuring the front, created by the dye, with a flow meter.

Its been a short but productive week, I have solved some of the errors I was running into last week. I figured out how to produce a couple more useful graphs using pgbench-tools. Now I've started to run more pgbench test so I have more data to put into the graphs. I will also be starting to run some of the pgbench test on different machines, pgtest and the new Kraken server. Along with this I will continue to read more into system admin tools and stats produced by the pgbench test.

Meeting the NASA interns was awesome, they are working on some really interesting project. I did find it funny that I understand more about their projects then I do about some of our projects. Sadly I wasn't able to go to the dinner, so I didn't get to talk to them a lot but I look forward to talking to more of them at the BBQ.

This has been a short week but very productive. I finished porting all the serial tests to TCP/IP communication, from the PUCK test tool that MBARI developed to the new PUCK v1.4 test tool.

By now all the tests are working except all related with memory access, 'cause I had some problems with memory read/write operations and this didn't allowed me to follow working on it.

Actually all PUCK host memory problems are solved and I have started again to work with memory tests. I'm on 50% of the tests that must be done to detect PUCK v1.4 compliance, although this last tests are going to take much more time to be programmed due to I've never worked with this kind of utilities (Zeroconf, walking 1's and 0's test).

In other terms, on Monday we had the meeting with NASA interns. It was really interesting 'cause we could talk with them about our projects and hearing about their ones. In my case it was awesome, because most of their work is based on electrical and telecommunications engineering and I was really interested on all that issues!

This week I finished the write-up for the GOC intro page, and am working on the formatting and media portions.  I am looking at different web pages for inspiration, and checking out the source codes for their interactive components.  The tutorials are ongoing, but I'm starting to understand and apply the lessons as I work on the site.  I can understand how people spend hours upon hours working through code, but Dreamweaver is nice because I can almost automatically see the changes I'm making.  I also visited the video lab for footage from the expedition.  I am interested in making short clips that explain some of the oceanic processes that may be confusing to the general public.  I'll choose a few of those today and start scripting.

Otherwise, going to dinner with the NASA interns was fun, and I look forward to seeing them again at the BBQ! Also, I am getting some great ideas about the kid's booth at Open House, and am still looking for volunteers!

This week has been short and not so productive for me. Monday's weekly meeting took up most of the morning, and then we had the meeting with the NASA interns. In between I think I checked some calculations and compared them to others Monique was doing. Turns out I'm missing denitrification values in my model, so now I'm reading a paper that hopefully will explain what am I supposed to do! On Tuesday I went on the R/V Rachel Carson with Wilson, and after he explained his project to me about three times, I think I finally got it. It was pretty cool to see the raman laser in action; we got to see some fishes and jellies in the ROV images, but not too much because Wilson's mentors were zooming in the tube were they were measuring the absorbance of the laser in the decane or water. Also, as previous experiences have not turned out very well, I had the brilliant idea to not take half, but one pill of bonine the night before and another one that morning before the cruise, so you can imagine my condition. Even though I fell asleep 1000 times in the control room, Wilson was not able to take a picture of me in such a deplorable state. Today I'm finishing reading the paper I started on monday, and I want to re-do calculations and re-check if I'm missing anything.

I liked meeting the NASA interns; I had no idea a project like this existed, so I'm considering applying for it in the future. Dinner went well and I was able to chat with the ones around me. As they outnumber us, I suppose it will be on next week's BBQ were I'll get to know the rest of them.

This week has been a bit hectic since it's so short.

I started off the week by mixing up reagents I was running low on. I began trying to determine the detection limit of our method and so far it looks like the single digit nano-molar concentrations we had been hoping for will be possible. We still need to check again with freshly made standards but the results are promising. I've spent the past 2 days collecting data on the temperature dependence characteristics of our reaction/equipment  and writing python scripts to process all of the data. I ran into many issues getting python and it's libraries to do what I want but I am finally able to automate much of the processing. Miguel offered some input on basic programming techniques and it was helpful having someone to bounce ideas off of.  Later this afternoon I plan on running some of the sea water collected from M2 near the surface. This water should have very low ammonia concentrations in it and will ultimately serve as a standard/carrier fluid for our experiments.

Well, I dont know if to call this weekend productive or not. I finish putting together the second prototype which uses another kind of sensor. This sensor is the Telaire 6615, this sensor is better than the K33 ELG that I was using before; it does not let any air to enter unless it is going inside the tubing system. Right now I am trying to make the Teflon AF tubing to equilibrate the carbon dioxide level. I was able to equilibrate the Co2 levels just on an air atmosphere; however when I try to do it underwater it does not go so well. If somebody could teach me a lesson or two on that could be fantastic because this is not my area of expertise.

In addition during this weekend I will try to work on the loading code from memory, the radio communications between the sensor and the base, and finally the user interface that will allow people with no programming skills to actually start running the sensor without any problem.

In addtion i have to add that meeting the  NASA interns was pretty awesome. I wish we could go to their facilities one day

Though this was a short week, it was very productive!  To begin I think I found my life calling. I was out on the Rachel Carson on Monday and absolutely didn't want to get off! I love it out there! I went with Peter Brewer and Wilson!!! and I got to see some troubleshooting and work done with the Raman Laser. Got filled in by Wilson and it seems that they fixed some problems there were having with the Laser and had a much smoother day of testing on Tuesday. It was my first time seeing the Ventana deployed and due to circumstances I got to see it twice in one day! SOOO cool! Saw some squid and some dolphins. 

I met the NASA interns only briefly while out to dinner, but I'm looking forward to meeting them again and maybe discussing projects. Needless to say I think I enjoy it here at MBARI wayyyyyyyy better, but spending a good portion of my childhood as a space enthusiast I understand their love!

As far as my project goes... guess what-->still doing calculations. But we are at the point were I'm creating a bunch of graphs having to do with thrust and power and velocities and messing with numbers to see where the sweet spot is! Next week we will be looking at motors (gas and electical-have a pretty sweet idea floating around, but I'll share that later if it works) and propellers and batteries and all the fun stuff.

Oh god, I've missed the deadline for Confluence updates by a lot. Nonetheless, these are my updates. Although it was a short week, I've organized my plots to transect similarities so that I could analyze them easily. My concatenation of the LRAUV data has not been fruitful, and Monique has been out of town so I'm looking forward to get that over with. I have read couple of papers regarding physical-biological coupling in Monterey Bay, that way I have more information about physical seasonal properties and the biological variations that go along with it. I have noticed a prominent trend in backscatter and nitrate fluctuations and shelf slope variations in the Northern side of Monterey canyon; about from Watsonville to Santa Cruz area. My next take would be to do some concrete analysis, like spectra density and EOF.

The NASA interns were cool, and I felt pretty excited when explaining why we love the Ocean as much as they love space.