Tori DiStefano, Last Month (??)

I haven't been blogging lately because I really haven't been doing anything new. For my 5-7th weeks, I was sorting through files (both virtual and not) finding missing data for my MASSIVE excel sheet (I'm talking 1030 participants). For the manual data, I had to go into the file rooms downstairs. Problem is, my badge doesn't have access to the area, so I have to call and get let in and out every time I go down, which is wildly inefficient. Once inside, I have the code to the lockbox where the keys to the rooms and files are. Being a smart, independent woman, I checked how the locks work. When the door is unlocked, it stays unlocked... or so I thought. Sure enough my first few days I tote my key around to and fro the bathroom (the only place I'd even go downstairs), but the one day I decide to stop, the door locks. Now I am standing here in a tizzy and have to go ask the guy I was introduced to exactly one time how to get back into this room where the key is locked inside. First of all, I was shocked this guy even knew my name when he called for assistance so that was cool. Then, thanks to a whole lot of poor communication, I waited in the hallway for an hour while I was supposed to be actively retrieving the key from an unknown location. While standing tragically in a sterile hallway, a woman decided to do laps to get her steps in and sped-walk past me four times, each time telling me (jokingly) to go somewhere because I made her uncomfortable.

After all my data was collected, I waited patiently for my program, Amos, to be downloaded. Of course, we only downloaded a free trial. I taught myself how to preprocess on SPSS and model on Amos using a fabulous youtube tutorial and made my model!

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Evan Bradley, Week 3 at the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute

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Daniel Cheng, In My Own Room

I had no idea that Pennsylvania is this wide. Within the first hour, my train had reached Philly. But to Pittsburgh, it took another seven. Even before I stepped foot into the Search-Based Planning Lab, I was waylaid by some anxious news. The PhD student assigned to be my mentor, Dhruv, texted me that he, Dr. Likhachev, and most of the lab would be out of town for the entire week. So that was that. Fortunately, it was my first week, the week to be spent learning new material, and Dhruv provided me with plenty to digest. I already had ROS (Robot Operating System) installed, so I looked towards the tutorials that ROS provided. I copied commands into my Linux laptop's terminal to run ROS features. I learned the basic structure of ROS: packages, services and clients, publishers and subscribers, messages, nodes, and topics (which nodes communicate messages over). There was one simple yet interesting program I came across in the tutorials called turtlesim, for which using only 2 comm...

Peddie EXP Summer 2018

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