Tuesday (5/23) Homework

  1. CITI Exam – Friday by 9pm in Github
  2. RCR Exam – Friday by 9pm in Github
  3. COI Form: Completed
  4. Github assignment: Completed
  5. Background Consent Form: Completed
  6. LaTeX Homework
    1. Professional Bio and Picture: Completed
      1. Use a table to note your degrees and work experience
      2. Use references to note your favorite book that exemplifies your professional interests or your field
    2. A bio that would get the interest of a K-12 student with a picture of you (that a K-12 student would connect to): Completed
      1. Use references to discuss your favorite book as a child
    3. Upload to GitHub: Completed
  7. Read and summarize papers: I couldn’t find any papers under Tuesday, but I did get some major points from when Katie was reviewing the posts (one of them was mine!):
    1. Use the right pronoun.  Don’t use “we” if I wasn’t part of the project.
    2. Add in specifics of the paper.  Use data and percentages to back up conclusions.
    3. Give a full citation of the starting paper including a link to find it
    4. Explicitly saying “the point of the paper was to…” is generally good
  8. Questions:  Katie!!!  My major question this week is how do you get tables and pictures to stay under the proper sections?  They seem to move around randomly.
  9. Blog Post: Completed

Today was a very eventful and educational day.  We covered a lot of topics and learned the basics of many softwares.

We started the day by reviewing our summaries of the papers.  Katie gave us some of the critiques above.  These skills will be extremely useful in the near future as we are trying to use at least 20-30 sources.  This is a lot of reading so we will have to apply our summary skills.

Next, Andrew Neel gave us an IRB & Ethics lecture.  We went through the history of the IRB and why it is necessary.  Basically, the HSO and ISB collectively try to protect humans in research, both people conducting it and people contributing to it.  This is especially the case for vulnerable populations such as children, pregnant women, and prisoners.  We learned the different types of reviews by the IRB.  Most of our projects will fill under the exempt and expedited section.  We will learn more about these topics when we take the CITI and RSR exams.  We quickly were able to finish the COI in class.

We then learned to use Github and work with its commands.  We tried several examples in class but honestly, I am still not well-versed in it.  I definitely see its applications in research and in any project in general so I want to improve my skills in it.  I have programmed with C before and I used a “svn repository” so it’s a pretty similar concept.  I am just slightly confused by the branch and checkout commands still.  I downloaded Github Desktop and I’ve found that it’s pretty darn helpful.

Then, we played with Paper Circuits which was fun!  We built a very basic circuit with a battery, an LED, and a resistor using conductive tape, a basic watch battery, an LED, and solder.  It was a good review of soldering.

LUNCH BREAK.  WENT TO WICH WHICH BUT THEY DIDN’T HAVE CAMPUS ACCESS SO SWITCHED TO POTBELLY.

We then learned a bit about Arduinos.  We played around with the Lilypad Arduino, specifically, and Ben showed us some of its applications, including the wearable quilt one.  We used a blink program that Arduino made for use already, but I’m excited to start some coding ourselves so we can make our own projects.  I’ve worked a lot with Arduino before, so I know that it can perform some pretty amazing tasks.

Finally, we worked with LaTeX on sharelatex.com.  This wasn’t too bad, although I’m still struggling with a few things.  It was pretty fun to play with and change the syntax so then immediately see the results on the PDF.  We were able to upload pictures, make different sections and subsections, reference papers, and create tables.  This is highly useful tool.

Dylan and I then took a trip the School of Informatics and Computing building that David Crandall works at and met with Sven.  Overall pretty eventful day and very very busy!