This week has been busy! I finished my ROV dive watching last week. I have worked on a plan to look at older data taken by camera sled and prioritize what would be more useful to do and how we could compare that to ROV data. Then I spent time with Linda "standardising" annotations (in particular for the numerous maybes). We define several criteria. I am quickly going back to my annotations to make them consistent. I should be finished by tomorrow. In the meantime, I did a poster for the climate change stand on tiny infauna living within the sediment of the seafloor for the Open House (with such a great help from Kelly ... thanks again!!!) and chopped vegetables for the BBQ greek salad for 5 hours.

This week has been busy. It started with me reading a paper that my mentor wants VG and me to discuss/review with him now that he's back from Barcelona. I also started reading another one about alkalinity values... I think I can use it for the introduction and discussion of my paper. I also wrote down the materials and methods section for my paper and I'll try to finish the introduction between today and tomorrow.

BBQ was a huge success! I didn't get much work done in the morning, since I started chopping tomatoes with Claire at 8 and didn't stop making skewers until almost noon! During BBQ I got some people signed up for intern t-shirts, and so far I have 62 orders!

For today I have scheduled a 15.30h meeting with the BOG, it's their monthly meeting so I'm hoping to see my mentor after two weeks!

On other things: I'm planning on going to the California Academy of Sciences tonight, it's the Deep Sea Nightlife event and Dr. Sylvia Earle will be there! Also, looking forward to Open House on Saturday!

This week began with putting the finishing touches on the T shirt design and sending it to the printer only to find out I had to change all the colors. The T shirt project became huge but it was a good learning experience for me. I have never made a t shirt and I never really paid attention to two color design processes since I figured with advancements in printing these days everything can be multi color. I was wrong and it was good for me to learn. Plus, it was a good experience for art direction if ever I find myself in that position.

Alana Sherman asked if they could use what I had so far for my Iceberg illustration as a poster in the open house Climate Change booth. I decided what I had wasn't good enough and altered it a bit so I feel comfortable with it being on display.

Claire asked if I could do a little illustration of seafloor infauna for her open house poster for the Climate Change booth and of course, I was more than delighted to do so. Thanks Claire! Nancy, my mentor, was delighted to hear that I added another illustration project for MBARI (she found out after the fact).

I will be providing coloring book pages for Nettie in the open house kids area which will be line work of some of the technology that I included in the T shirt.

And finally, Ken Johnson told me that NSF is now giving the C-SOBOM project (Southern Ocean global floats) a little bit of money to proceed. Ken is giving a talk at WHOI on Monday and would like to have what I have so far of the illustration for his presentation (This seems to be a reoccurring theme). So he has given me until midnight on Sunday to work my magic. Considering Open House is on Saturday my time is quite limited.

It has been a very busy week...and still is.

Oh Yeah, and there was the BBQ too. I chopped peppers and onions for two hours, which is nothing compared to what some others did. Great job to everyone!

I hit the ground running this week after not really stopping last week. Over the weekend I finalized sampling protocols for my fluorometer, created calibration curves, and dismantled the entire setup. Monday morning my mentor and I loaded all of our equipment, spare parts, laptops, and 5 liters of reagents into the Rachel Carson's wet lab. I spent  the first portion of the cruise assembling our equipment and jockeying for bench space in the lab. By the time I finished up I had just enough time to grab a snack and realize I had left all the check standard in a fridge in the lab, then we were at C1. I was able to dilute a standard from one Patrick had brought for his experiment in between sample injections. At M1 I was still running samples through most of the CTD cast, finishing just in time to fill more sample bottles from a fresh rosette. M2 was a similar story except this time I had enough time to grab another snack before I began running samples. We were running samples all the way back to the dock and finished up as all the mooring lines were tied off. We brought everything back into the Chemical sensors lab and got it reassembled and began running a post calibration curve to make sure things hadn't changed too much.   

The rest of the week has been tied up in soldering together a shield for the arduino we've been using. This will provide a more robust and permanent solution to our instrument interface. Previously everything had been populating a prototyping breadboard. Grilling all of the kebabs and pineapple for the BBQ was pretty fun, Ben had a great system worked out with timing flips and kebab swaps. Things were a bit hectic at times, but it seemed all the attendees were satisfied with the results. Currently I am working on getting python scripts written to correct for temperature dependence of my method and then I will have to run standards at a range of temperatures so I can feed data into the scripts and have a correction factor that allows my data to be compared regardless of the actual temperature it's been run at. 

This week has been kind of busy for me. My mentor gave me a temperature and humidity sensor that I had to adapt to the whole module. Finally started testing the efficiency in the timing of the pump. In few words, what is the best amount of time that I should be pumping in order to get good readings taking into consideration that the whole module has to be low power consumption.

The software part of the module is almost done, I need to work more on the radio communications for the module in order to make the module user friendly. I dont need to do that but it will be a nice thing to do, so I am going to go for it.

After I am done with the pumping time, next step is to think about the water tight housing for the module. I will have to reassemble the whole module in order to fit it in the water tight housing, but that will be ok. Hopefully I will be done with the pumping time today and I can start to think about the housing. Need to hurry up a little bit though days are flying :'(

I've got my hands full of URCHINS! Aboard the Rachel Carson on Wednesday, the crew helped me collect 220 "Fragile Sea Urchins" (Stongylocentrotus fragilis)! Bailey was a HUGE help in the control room, taking frame shots of the deep- sea urchins, and transporting the fat guys (about 4 inches in diameter) out of and into buckets and coolers.  We spotted hundreds of urchins, ratfish, sea cucumbers, sea stars and even a whale bone. It was very interesting to observe the urchins natural habitat, as well as feeding behavior.  We found mounds of urchins munching down on algae.  Fortunately, while collecting, we were able to collect a few strands of the algae, which after speaking with Conner, we identified as Cystoseira osmundacea, "Beaded Brown Beauty".

The next two weeks will involve gradually acclimating the urchins to certain pH levels and, sadly, starving them to enforce hunger and ready to run them through the three Y-Maze treatments.    Data collection time!

I want to THANK all the interns and BBQ Czars who put so much work into the BBQ this week! I heard great feedback!!! I'm sorry Bailey and I could not have been there to help!  

Let's make this Open House 2013 epic!  AND drive safely with all the traffic this weekend!

Unfortunately this week my project has hit a little bit of a snag. The water jet that we were planning to use to cut some of the steel parts for my pressure housing broke, so it will be a couple of days before things can start rolling again. In the meantime I have put quite a bit of work into assembling all of the hydraulic components of the benchtop simulator and making brackets for components to bolt directly onto the test apparatus. I finally got checked out in the project shop (many thanks to Mike Parker!!), so I've had quite a bit of fun in there as well. I was actually surprised to learn that some of the things that I've been doing for years are actually not good for the machine!

Hopefully by next week I will have the benchtop simulator complete and I can start collecting some data...

This week has really gone by fast. Things are starting to get tedious as I construct my behavioral ethogram. I am trying my best to be as thorough as possible while numerous distractions try their very best to thwart my progress. Things are coming together, though, and if I do everything well I could become the world expert on the behavior of Chiroteuthis calyx (one of the benefits of working in a very obscure and unexplored field). I can't thank the members of my lab and my mentor enough for their continued support and help. They are all way busier than me, but still find the time to sit down with me and help. On another note, there is a fire that just started burning out in my neck of the woods by Tassajara Hot Springs and I very much hope that it will be put out soon!     

This week has flew by between my project work, the BBQ and a day on the Rachel Carson. For my project I got to run some test on the new server, Kraken, and the results are great. On Kraken we are not seeing a TPS drop off until around 7000 clients, with the TPS before the drop being around 37000. This is a big increase over pgtest where we saw a TPS drop off at around 150 clients, with the TPS before the drop being around 8500. Also for my project I changed the way information is store in the log files so the files can be read by a log analyzer called pgfouine. With pgfouine we can make the log analyzer information into a html format and look at the information from anywhere, instead of having to go onto the server to do it.

To all the interns the BBQ was awesome, fun and tasted amazing. Although kabobs were a lot of work, I think they came out really well and it seemed like everyone liked them.

Going on the Rachel Carson was an awesome experience, even if I didn't feel the greatest the whole time. Getting to be a part of the "treasure hunt" was exciting and we ended up seeing lots of wildlife. The coolest thing being a large squid we got to see before placing the new bed in the canyon. Also I think the other interns saw an Orca, sadly I missed it. Overall it was a great experience and I hope I get a chance to go back out there.

This week has been a little bit of everything: fun, crazy, productive, and frustrating at times. My mentor came back Monday and we met to discuss future plans since he will be leaving in a week for vacation... I think 3 weeks.  But great news is I have most of the information I need to start choosing engines and motors, clutches and all that sorts of stuff. Anyone walking past my desk would see me looking at motorcycles, jet skis and go karts. We spoke about my presentation and I have a layout for that and just need to keep filling in bits and pieces. It's nice to be moving along in the design and starting to look at actual parts that could be viable for the AUV.

Yesterday I went out on the Rachel Carson with Kendra; I won't go into detail, but it was a blast! Definitely fun to play with urchins all day and help out! We collected 220 urchins and recovered the BRS that had been out for a month. Unfortunately all the but one of the urchins died that was in it, and oh boy did those things smell horrible! I did end up soaking wet though when we went to gather kelp from the beach. (I'm sure the front office people had quite the show with us running around in the water in rubber boots and rolled up jeans.)  

Looking forward to this weekend with the Open House (NETTIE will kill me if I forgot some supplies for the kids craft area, and on that note, her sunny pictures about going snorkeling in Hawaii are making me incredibly jealous!) and then Laguna Seca on Sunday for the Moto Grand Prix!

Another very busy week getting the LISST-HOLO set up to run experiments and trying to overcome lots of silly little snags like maintaining water motion in the chamber and preventing the stampede of copepods off the filter. But I'm starting to actually run organisms through my system! I'm slogging through the holographs now, and hopefully can finish optimizing the batch processing of the holograms by the end of the week... or at least a point where I can focus on running more experiments. The molecular analysis will have to wait, but thankfully my samples can safely be stored in liquid nitrogen until I'm ready.
I've also been getting a better handle on the correlation between LOPC and SHA data, with my analyses from 2009 showing similar results to other analyses from those cruises. There's a bit of missing data in these sets that I will try to track down, but I suspect this project may be an ongoing one past my time here as an intern.

I also got to help out at the Aquarium's Young Women in Science program, which was amazing. A great day out boogie boarding and seeing the huge smiles on the girls' faces was priceless. For those of you women who haven't done this yet, I really encourage you to sign up for the next day in the beginning of August if you can spare a few hours. The BBQ this week was great, thanks to all of you who did so much work! I'm looking forward to Open House this weekend, I'm working at the AUV booths as well as hopefully wandering to take pictures for a bit as well.

My goodness how this week has flown by...
I had a productive couple of days, and will look over some of my data this weekend as I travel to and from Virginia. I ran some samples of my smallest bugs (Micromonas and Ostreococcus) on the ECO puck, and did some backscatter/noise testing on the ECO puck using filtered ASW. On Monday I will run this test again with another batch of fASW, and Test Tank water, for comparison between Wed and Mon, and between the fASW and the Test Tank water.

Today I went out on the Carson for the first time, that was a really cool experience. Oh yeah, I SAW AN ORCA!! After living here for almost two years and spending so munch time on/in the ocean, it is super exciting that I finally had a chance to see one in the wild. We also saw a huge squid at the bottom when the pilots were deploying the second BEDS instrument. When we returned I made some new culture strains so they will hopefully be happy this weekend.

I have recieved many thanks from MBARI staff for hosting a delicious BBQ, I am very grateful to be sharing this internship with so many motivated and helpful people.

I'll miss you all this weekend at the Open House, it was so much fun last year and so cool to see the place transform into an event that reaches out to 4000-5000 of our friends and neighbors in just a couple of hours. You all are going to have a blast, I'll look forward to catching up when I return Sunday evening.

Yikes! How time flies. I barely even noticed the time today because it was just as busy as the rest of the week. I have been bouncing back and forth between data and open house projects. I was extremely excited this week to get updated biomass conversion data for most of my sea cumbers. This means that I can start extracting all of my measurements from VARS and converting lengths to estimated biomasses. I think this is going to be an interesting link in the time series data from station M.

The BBQ was a lot of work this week... but it is definitely fun to see everyone enjoy the fruits of our labor. I am looking forward to what next week brings (including kayaking!!!)

Having returned from the cruise monday night, this week has been short indeed! Much of Tuesday was spent unpacking the Flyer and loading samples/equipment back into the then empty Haddock Lab. With affairs back in order, I could turn my attention back to my dataset - we've at last got the dataset in a form with which we can really clamp down on the analysis. As some may know, not all ROV time is equal, and finding the right way to normalize it can be quite the trick. Having reduced our data down to presence/absence, we've refined some of our correlation and time series tests are exploring some further options that help to illustrate population trends over time.

Hi All. Apologies for the belated update! This week has been much different for me from the initial few weeks. We now have acquired data from the cruises, so this week has been A LOT of analysis. I'm using a spectral analysis software program and MATLAB for spectral analyses of the laser data. This is my first time using MATLAB or any programing software for that matter. I'm extraordinarily thankful to my patient mentor, Ed Peltzer, for giving me the basics of the program and to Alba for teaching me from a introductory MATLAB course she took in Spain (Alba's the best!). I have written the code that will analyze all the spectral scans, and now I just need to apply the code to all the data we acquired. I'm really looking forward to seeing the results of the data! Until next week...

Non research happenings: 1) The BBQ was a smash! So much good feedback (pun intended). Nice job, team! 2) Alba and I went to the California Academy of Sciences Deep Sea Nightlife last night. We got to see the famous oceanographer, Dr. Sylvia Earle, give an inspiring talk, see an ROV (it had nothing on Ventana) and see lots of aquaria...overall a fun night!

Hi, I'm a little bit late too, sorry guys! This week it's been really awesome, because I went for first time to the Rachel Carson, where we could control the camera of the ROV in order to look for the benthic instrument that we had to recover. We saw there a big squid and an Orca so it seems that it was a good cruise to be on.

The BBQ was fun and really gratifying 'cause everybody thanked us! so good job guys heheeh

In other terms, I'm really advanced on my project planning. Finally I have the whole PUCK system working, and now it's time to tune all the parts of the test tool, in order to make them more efficient and able to detect failures on itself. Next week I have a meeting with my mentors to specify how do they prefer the final paper and how the GUI of the test tool should be.
After two weeks going a little bit after my scheduled planning, I've done good improvements this week that allowed me to be on time again.

Wow, crazy week. Sounds like you are all running on all cylinders (obscure american reference meaning working really hard). Thank you for posting. You can see wat Nettie and I have been up to if you go to www.mbari.org/earth and find the schedule for 2013. Nice to see you all at the open house! I am sitting in Atlanta waiting for my connection to Mobile. Two redeye flights in a row, i am a litte tired. Have a great week and i will see you next monday. Hae fun kayaking.

I have been slacking on Confluence updates =( This week has been pretty much, programming (as with other weeks) and figuring out the right data set among the myriad of data and formats. I decided to skip the LRAUV data set( the concatenation itself is time consuming). So I have ventured into getting the rights plots to support my hypothesis.