Peddie EXP Summer 2018

Summer is over :( This week, after analyzing my conclusions and graphs, I gathered some of the videos, photos and analysis to produce a presentation for my experience. For Wednesday’s lab meeting, along with David, I presented myself, the EXP program as well as what I had worked on and learned over the last four weeks. For the rest of the week, I started on my poster. David showed me some examples of posters he had presented in the past made using Adobe Illustrator and helped me get started with it. I decided to try and do the poster completely on Illustrator than PowerPoint to customize whatever I wanted. The presentation I had done helped to structure my poster and I could pull information from my earlier analysis and other papers I had read. This summer, I worked on analyzing body rotations of the bat as it approaches landing as well as hypothesized and tested for factors that affected impact forces like hovering/non-hovering and distance between approach and landing. ...

Behind the scenes of the AMNH. This week, I got through digitizing all the trials from 17 to 71 on the shoulders and lumbar for three important frames. In that digitizing, I calibrated two more trials, which took up to Wednesday to finish. I calibrated only three frames for the exact frame of tuck, land and settle to be extracted for other analysis. Wednesday afternoon, I was able to graph boxplots with the new data taken from digitizing to compare Ftot (total impact force) with velocities (distance between xyz points divided by the time in frames – 600 frames per second). On Thursday, Dr. Swartz, David, Melissa (an undergrad) and I went to New York City to visit the American Museum of Natural History. We went to loan for good bat specimens for future experiments. I had a great time even though I had been to the museum numerous times because we went to the secret collections area above the museum itself. I didn’t take too many photos as there were strict social media rul...

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 o...

Bane, Joker and Penguin. On Monday, I helped David move his equipment from his car to the lab. Those were the names of the high-speed cameras he used for the Costa Rica trip. The appropriately named Batman villains, as well as the bat soft toys around the room, welcomed me into the second week of the lab.   For the first three days, I worked on more digitizing – except this time, I ran the trial from start to the final edit process. I had to calibrate the xma files before I could digitize properly. I did this by choosing around 30 good photos from the 900 from the stacked JPG of the chessboard video and digitized those on the three cameras: B, J and P. Before each set of trials, David waved a chessboard with certain black and white tiles before the cameras. This allows XMALAB to accurately represent x-y-z coordinates in relation to the points that I click for digitizing. Then, I ran 100,000 calibration iterations, which took around 4 hours. While the calibration...

5 weeks of EXP? That's almost a sin. Earlier in July, the grad student I’m working with, David, emailed me about his 2-week field trip to Costa Rica to collect data on a special type of bat with suction cup sticky disks (Thyroptera tricolor). This affected the first week of my original 6-week experience and had me reduced to 5-weeks, but he came up with another project that I would be working on. I remember earlier in sophomore year when Dr. Peretz gave her initial EXP presentation and told us not to pack our schedules for the summer if we planned to do EXP. But that’s exactly what I did. I played a lot of golf over the first half of the summer. A college commitment was my goal but that didn’t go as planned. I did bring home two trophies though. So I had my 6 weeks cut down to 5, but my summer was already planned out and the Airbnb booked. For week 0, I stayed in the Airbnb in Federal Hill, Providence to work on my common app and began my summer homework. I also read ...