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Charles Chung - Week 3


Exclusive Rhode Island holidays?

Every second Monday of August, Rhode Island celebrates Victory Day over the Japanese (the only state that has this holiday). I arrived and was confused about where everyone was. I knew that David was on his way back from Virginia so he wouldn’t be there on Monday. I continued to work on boxplotting the data I had collected last week. Then Dr. Swartz emailed me saying I didn’t have to come to the lab today and take the day off. I worked on finishing the last few trials for impact forces and heading home for a long weekend.

On Tuesday, David was back at the lab. We discussed what I had done and came up with different hypothesis, as our old hypothesis was debunked. We kept graphing and comparing the numbers, checking to see for any patterns and proposed a number of experiments to try. I was then introduced to another coding language, R, because MATLAB could be tedious with some of the functions we were carrying out.

During the lab meeting on Wednesday, two undergrads presented their summer work. I was going to create my own presentation on that fifth week. I began to work on my new mini-project to analyze by video the approach angle of the bats and how that correlated with impact force. I wrote up a results report on Thursday and presented my new findings. We discovered quite a few patterns about how bats flew into the plate, making a connection that individuals preferred to come in from the same side (left or right) into the plate, just like how a high jumper does. Another hypothesis was that the higher the tuck distance, the higher the impact force.

I started this new tuck distance project on Friday. To find the data, I had to re-digitize trials to find the frame where the bat tucked its wings and the frame of first contact (I also did the frame of settling for comparison). David also taught me how to interpolate data so that I could get all the points that I could not visibly see on the camera angles.





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