Day Eighteen

Today, we helped the remote sensing department set up and move around targets. It was nice to get out of the lab and out into the sunshine!

:)

Day Seventeen

Today, I coerced Madeleine into getting a Facebook. Just a couple minutes after some intensive Facebook-friendly, Facebook sent her a message saying that she was being "annoying" and basically a stalker. And so now she can't add any more friends and we're sad.

Today, we cropped more samples and ran them through IDL and pasted the numbers into excel.

And that is all.

Day Sixteen

This is a little irrelevant, but I checked some other interns' pages and I guess some of us have been having so much fun that we've lost track of the days. Time flies when you're having fun! Me, Sean, Billy, and Amy think that today was the sixteenth day. Ethan, Kevin, and Luke think today was the fifteenth day. Naba, Cicely, Reiner, Ben, Ory, Toni, Rebecca, Octavia, and Madeleine were smart enough to use the date, not the day, to post their blogs.

I just counted, and today is indeed the sixteenth day. (Yay for me, sean, billy, and amy!) Of course, perhaps some people took a day off and is only counting working days. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. :)

Day Sixteen

I noticed that practically no one else blogged about the blindness simulation this morning....

Anyway, we were left in a dark room for a couple minutes, then we were taken out on a quick walk in the bright building with one eye covered. When we went back into the dark room, we found that we were partially blind. And our task was to explain this.

Well to be perfectly honest, I made some sad attempts to explain it myself (I AM in, after all, eye imaging and should therefore know something or other about eyes...), but all I could come up with (after looking through my notes) is that our eyes accommodated to the darkness (which is when your optical lens changes shape to focus under different situations). After leaving the dark room (with one eye still accommodated to the darkness since that eye was covered), the non-covered eye accommodated to the light during our walk. Upon returning to the dark room and opening the covered eye, each eye sent conflicting impulses to the brain (perhaps due to the differences in contrast and brightness) and being unable to process the information, we were rendered temporarily blind. Oh, and I believe the pupils must be vastly different sizes as well (larger in the covered eye, smaller in the non-covered eye), which may or may not have had some part in the simulation.

And even though that actually sounds somewhat legitimate, I have to disclaim any truth or fact in the above. I tried google-ing it, but I couldn't find a good phrase to type in. Apparently

"dark room light room blind"

"temporarily blind simulation dark light"

"rit cis weird blind simulation thing"

does not yield any helpful results.

Day Fifteen

Today, I ran the target paint samples through the macbeth-gretag machine in three separate trials to get the spectral reflectances which I saved as .txt files which I then averaged together in excel and saved as .csv files which I then renamed into .txt files and ran through the SR to CIELAB IDL program that Joel wrote....and for some reason this sounds quite familiar because I think I just blogged about doing this a couple days ago. We tend to do some pretty repetitive stuff. :)

Day Fourteen

I think I forgot to swipe out today. Oops.

Day Thirteen

Today, I was ridiculously productive. We did what we usually do- excel work, taking photographs, and running things through IDL...but we did a lot of it today.

I always wonder who actually reads this. I know us interns love to stalk each other up and that Joe and Bob read our blogs, but the sheer idea that other strangers read this makes me want to do a better job of blogging. But that probably won't happen :)

It's 5:21, which is just about time to leave.

Peace out.

Day Twelve

Today, we did work. Legit work. (In the morning at least...)

Madeleine and I stopped by Javas this morning after the group meeting to grab something to drink and to chill for a while/wait for Audrey. There's something about that place that makes me HAVE to buy something every time I'm there. We went back later in the day and I got something else. Java's is going to drink me broke by the end of the summer :/

Anyway, here's more or less a checklist of things that we have to do each day:

-Take 3 pictures of each color checker (5 color checkers total with 2 colors on each). That gives us 15 pictures per round. We usually do two rounds of pictures in 20 minute intervals per camera (we are using 2 cameras), so we end up with 60 pictures per day.

-Then we have to crop out a 500 x 500 px sample of each color using GIMP or Photoshop. That leaves us with one hundred and twenty 500x500 px squares. Essentially what that means is that we end up with 4 folders full of .tif files that are confusingly named "3ag (color checker three, take a, gray)" or "1cb (color checker one, take b, black)."

-Then we run the IDL program that Joel wrote that takes the images and makes them into numerical values (RGB, XYZ, CIELAB).

-Then we take the CIELAB values and input them into excel spreadsheets

-Then we put the target (the paintchips we used for the color checker) in a Macbeth-Gretag machine which measure the spectral reflectances of a range of wavelengths

-Then we input the spectral reflectances into an excel spreadsheet

-Then we run the excel spreadsheets through another program that turns spectral reflectance values into CIELAB values (compensating with a 2nd degree observer and d65 lighting feature of the program)

-Then we put the CIELAB values into an excel spreadsheet

-Then use the target spreadsheet and the measured CIELAB spreadsheet and find the differences between the LAB values and put it into a new excel spreadsheet

-Then we find delta e (sqrt((delta L^2)+(delta A^2)+(delta B^2)) and put it into the excel spreadsheet.

And we do (errr...or rather we should do...) all of the aforementioned every day. Except sometimes we don't get that far.

Oh, and as a side note, I don't particularly like excel.

_____________________________________________________

We went to U of R today. We learned a bit about the biomedical engineering (BME) program there, which was actually pretty interesting for me since i'm still going back and forth between choosing the premed/medschool path or the BME/medschool path. I'm really glad we went because I always feel guilty that I got a scholarship to U of R and never really bothered to check out the school.

TANGENT.

So Madeleine and I are practically the same person. We found out yesterday that we can read each others' minds. We were looking at pictures of cute things (and doing work simultaneously...!) on cuteoverload.com when she said "oh, you know what the cutest thing on the world is?"She typed in google.com in the web address blog, and before she even had a chance to look up what she thought was the cutest thing in the world, I said "well fennec foxes are adorable!" and it turns out that she was justtt about to type in fennec foxes on google. Oh, and I realize that this probably doesn't make sense to anyone reading this except for Mad. It was a have-to-be-there-moment.

Oh, and we both want to go to Med school and become doctors. We both watch House MD and Secret Life of an American Teenager (don't judge! yes, it's a crappy show. but SO addicting). We are both in Science Olympiad, Model United Nations, and Math League at school. We took practically all of the same AP classes. We both interviewed for MRI and Ultrasound and Remote Sensing and were both subsequently placed in Eye Imaging. It was meant to be.

OHHH. And (this is where I was going to go with this...it's practically relevant to what I was saying earlier...) we BOTH got a scholarship to U of R for the same amount...and we go to different schools and they pick very very few people for it. How weird (and fascinatingly awesome) is that?

END TANGENT.

So the U of R tour was pretty cool. The restaurant (Pellegrino's) was awesome as well. Yay for free food.

Day Eleven (Part Two)

I'd like to rescind that last post. Rather than "Partnership Urine" or "Pirate Ship Runner," it is actually intrapreneurship.

in·tra·pre·neur

   [in-truh-pruh-nur, -noor, -nyoor] Show IPA

–noun

an employee of a large corporation who is given freedom and financial support to create new products, services, systems, etc., and does not have to follow the corporation's usual routines or protocols.

What a stupid word. (lol...)

Day Eleven

After much thought and careful consideration, I have safely concluded that the anagram "IPESNRUHTERIRANP" that Bob gave us this morning is "Partnership Urine."

Day Ten

We started our experiment today- everything went wrong :(

We couldn't get clear, pretty pictures because the paint chips were semi-glossy, and after we finally took all of the pictures, we couldn't figure out how to export them out of the program.

Better luck today? Let's hope so :)

Day Nine

Today, we met with a Kodak representative (Kodak sponsors part of the intern program). Joel had initially told us that we just had to give a quick two minute overview of our project, but it actually turned out to be a lengthy discussion and interrogation. I think I answered most of the questions coherently, and it was actually kind of helpful because people brought up concerns about Project #2 that we hadn't thought about before. We ate lunch (subs again.....that's the third day in a row!) and then went up to the computer lab. Madeleine and i did a bunch more work with excel (finding delta l, delta a, delta b, and delta e between the target numbers and the sample numbers). We also designed and created our targets for Mr. Jones.

Day Seven and Eight

I've been seriously slacking off on these blogs, so I think this post will be longer than the previous few. I have three projects I'm working on currently:

1) Joel's project- we're trying to calibrate the colors on different Fundus cameras by calculating numeric values for colors and comparing the L*a*b* values (and RGB and XYZ as well) of the digital and film pictures with the "true" color of the sample that we measure with a

Macbeth-Gretag machine in the color science lab. This project involves a lot of excel spreadsheet work and IDL programs. We also learned how to operate a Fundus camera :)

2)

Our project- we're analyzing the changes (if any) in the color of an image taken with flash over time. So we're basically taking a bunch of pictures at short (minutes), medium (days), and long (weeks) intervals to see if the flash will alter the colors.

3) My last project is using MATLAB to design and program a lightshow of LEDs to spruce up our display window.

_______________________________________________________________

Oh, and I realized today that some of my non RIT/CIS friends actually read this! So I guess I'll define some terms/people/places...

Joe= Coordinator. I'm not sure if I got off on the right foot with him because I kind of obsessively called/emailed him during the selection process. All of us (interns) are a bit intimidated by him, but he's a cool guy. And I'm not just saying that because I know you read this, Joe. :)

Bob= Coordinator. He sends us all the important emails and meets with us every morning. Really nice and takes care of all our field trips and free food. :)

CIS= Center for Imaging Science

Joel= my super cool, super tall supervisor. He's a rising senior at RIT and basically guides us

(me, madeleine, and audrey) in everything we do. He has yet to beat me at pingpong, so he can continue calling me The Champion.

Madeleine (not madeline!) and Audrey= my (i'm trying not to say that everyone is cool, but my mind just blanked out on adjectives...) co-workers/co-interns. We chill together. A lot.

Crossroads= a cafe on campus. We like to eat lunch there.

Fundus Camera= a camera that takes pictures of the eye (retina, to be more exact)

Retina= In short, the back of your eye. The color receptor.

Christye Sisson= My senior project mentor. She teaches college courses in ophthalmology.

Mr. Jones= Our fake eyeball. He's pretty cool.

____________________________________________________

YESTERDAY.

Yesterday was pretty laid back. We went to an optics manufacturer on a field trip (traveling by limo, of course...we ride in style...).

It was really loud and smelly, and it made me realize that I don't ever want to go into manufacturing. However, it was a good experience (I feel only slightly compelled to put that in there...) because it involved a bit of physics/optics lingo that I actually understood from taking AP Physics this year.

TANGENT.

AHHHHH I passed all my AP exams with 4+!! :) :) :) INCLUDING PHYSICS AND CALCULUS. Which I was so sure I failed...

END TANGENT

After the field trip, we went to a sub shop an got (free) food.

Then we went back to RIT and worked for a while...

...and then we played volleyball. ;)

TODAY.

First off, I beat Joel in pingpong (again) (thought i'd just throw that in there...) We (me, audrey, and madeleine) went to Home Depot to get some paint chips to use as color checkers in Project #2. We came back and designed the actual checker. We're using the fake retinas that came with Mr. Jones to house our color samples. We then went to a department/building picnic at Genesee Valley park and ate lunch and played games. When we came back, we tested out our checkers on the fundus cameras, and chose the two Topcon cameras to carry out our experiments (actually, we didn't really "choose" it...they were the only two we could get to work...).

So there's all the substantive stuff I was supposed to put in the past couple posts. Here's some pictures for your amusement. Let's just say that we have ample downtime when we need it.

Day Seven (Kind of)

I recall Joe and Bob saying that we can write whatever we want on these blogs, as long as we write something every day. So I guess I'll take that literally, and write a couple meaningless words...for now. I promise that tomorrow I will write a LEGIT post with photos and complete sentences to compensate for the horrible posts lately....

Day Six

Today we played a couple more rounds of ping pong.

Then we went to the library to find a color science textbook (Principles of Color Technology by Roy S. Berns).

Then we did some (more) excel spreadsheet work.

And then we went home (except that hasn't happened yet because I'm still sitting in the comp lab in building 76).

Day Five

This morning we did some busy work on excel...we formatted the excel spreadsheets we created last week into a form that is usable by a certain computer program.

This afternoon, we used a machine in the color science lab that assigned a "true" color for samples of paper and imported the numbers into excel spreadsheets.

:)

Day Four

Today, we did the exact same thing as yesterday.

Facts of the day:

1) Your eyes can not only move up, down, left, and right, they can also rotate! (Like when you tilt your head)

2) Sea gypsies are often referenced in eye imaging.

Day Three

This is going to be very short. I'm kind of tired :/

We had three hours of eye/optics/color boot camp this morning. It was basically a crash course on the terminology and the basic mechanisms that allow us to function the way that we do. I took notes on everything- from peoples names to what we ate (FREE FOOD) to the indices of refraction of different materials. No matter where I go- whether it's at school or work- I always take notes because I feel paranoid that some random person somewhere will spring a pop quiz on me at any time...or its just a personality quirk. I love writing things down, even if most of it is meaningless or insignificant.

Anyway, to be honest, most of boot camp was a drag. The things the students and professors were talking about were fascinating (really!), but even though it was only 3 hours, it felt like it took forever! I asked two questions during the presentations...here's how that went:

Me: "I'm a bit surprised at the terminology that is applied to the suspensory ligaments. Are they really ligaments in the sense of the word, applied biologically?"

One of the professors then divulged into a pretty lengthly explanation about how the ligaments help to change the shape of the eye lens (or crystalline lens as one of the other professors insisted on calling it). I guess I didn't phrase my question very well...what I actually meant was that I understood the word ligaments to mean the connective tissue between two bones, whereas the suspensory ligaments connect a muscle to the lens. I just looked it up, and I can't find the answer yet. I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but here's what wikipedia says about ligaments:

In anatomy, the term ligament is used to denote three different types of structures:^[1]

1. Articular ligaments: Fibrous tissue that connects bones to other bones. They are sometimes called "articular larua"^[2], "fibrous ligaments", or "true ligaments".
2. Peritoneal ligaments: A fold of peritoneum or other membranes.
3. Fetal remnant ligaments: The remnants of a tubular structure from the fetal period of life.

I'm probably just focusing too much on technicalities, but I'm still a bit curious...I'll have to look it up later.

The second question was...interesting.

Me: "Is it the physical convex quality of the crystalline lens or the composition of it that allows light to focus on the retina?"

This launched us into a 30 minute tangent on optics- don't get me wrong- I was thrilled. I'm actually kind of into optics after studying it pretty in depth in AP Physics B this year. I actually had answers for once! They were pretty straightforward questions (q: what is the index of refraction? a: it's the ratio of c to v) (q: what is c? a: it's the speed of light in a vacuum...3x10^8 m/s), but it still made me feel better to actually know what we were talking about!

We also started working with the fundus cameras today. I took pictures of retinas (on our patient, Mr. Jones) (he's our fake plastic eye) (he's also incredibly cooperative and doesn't even mind when crank up the illuminator all the way up) on four different digital fundus cameras. It was interesting...more on that tomorrow, since we're going to be taking more photographs using film cameras.

I really did expect to write maybe two sentences for this post, but I guess that didn't happen. It was a pretty eventful day...tomorrow is another day of bootcamp and cameras, but I'm ok with that ;)

Facts of the day:

1) Diabetes destroys the retina because (in a nutshell) the inability to process glucose contributes to the atrophy of capillaries, which is especially important to the processes of the eye. Once the capillaries are burst, the retina, in a desperate attempt to survive, sends out an emergency signal to the rest of the body to create more. The body creates more...but they are not the right type. There's a word for the type of artery thats only in the eye and the brain...but I can't remember it right now and Google isn't helping! I'll post it later, but the type of artery in the eyes and brain are different than that of the rest of the body. Whereas normal arteries allow material and nutrients to diffuse freely along the entire artery, the ones in the eyes and brain are only open on the two ends. So the body, in response to the distress signal, creates the wrong type of capillaries and the person ends up blind. :(

2) IDL is pretty annoying.

3) The heat is even more annoying.

4) The fact that my building is practically halfway across the campus is really really annoying. Oh, and we have to walk back and forth all day because we don't have a computer lab in the building so we have to go back to building 76 to use theirs.

5) At least I have a great group! Shoutout to Joel, Audrey, and Madeleine :)

Day Two

So I was on cis.rit.edu/2010intern looking at everyone else's blogs, and realized that I didn't actually have to write a blogpost the length of an essay every day. So in a nutshell, today I met Joel, my supervisor. He's a cool guy- the kind that apparently wears "real men wear pink" shirts (he likes to refer to mean girls every so often...). The entire morning, we ran a Munsell colorblindness test where you have to put little colorful discs in order of shades- they all looked practically the same to me, and I practically failed the test (not enough to be colorblind though!). We went out to Crossroads with a bunch of other interns for lunch (Chinese food, DUH). After coming back from lunch break, we went through a mini-lecture about optics/color/eye physiology. The entire afternoon we spent in the computer lab cropping out parts of photos of retinas into 500x500 pixels using GIMP, running it through a IDL program that averaged the colors in the cropped photo and determined the respective RGB, XYZ, and LAB numbers, and inputted the data into an excel worksheet. I did the photos taken from the Canon camera- there were 12 colors with 3 takes each, so I went through the entire process 36 times. Needless to say, it was quite tedious. We had a good time though. I especially love color science because of how fun and casual we can be together and still learn so much!

So today I learned....

1) RIT food is quite overpriced...

2) I hate the parking Nazi. I got a ticket today for apparently parking in the wrong spot... ($30! I'll have to go down and negotiate with them....)

3) IDL is a program where you can create programs. It's kind of like MATLAB.

4) Thank goodness I took AP Physics B this year! All that stuff I learned about optics really came into play!

5) Eight-hour workdays are a LOT longer than I could have ever expected......

Day One

Not only is this the first day of my new job, it is the first day of the ONLY job I've ever had. Seeing thus, I have nothing to compare it to. Nevertheless, I rest quite assured that my peers and all others around my age have never had a chance to burn calories, get a tan, and hang out with a bunch of pretty awesome people...all the while being paid well above minimum wage for it.

Sure, it's the first day- and I'm not quite naive enough to believe that it will be like this for the next seven weeks- but it was an amazing start to what (hopefully) will be a memorable experience.

Let's begin at 6:17 AM. I don't know why, but I seem to always set my alarm at random, non-round numbers. I mean, I could have set it at 6:15 or 6:20, but 6:17 just felt --right--. In the weeks past, everyone I talk to about commuting to RIT has been feeding me horror stories about the traffic along my particular route, especially during rush hour. Not wanting to be late on my first day of work, I left the house at 7:30, giving me an hour and fifteen minutes to commute what normal people can travel in 30 minutes. I arrived at RIT at 8:04. Our meeting was set for 8:45. Yay for people with a completely disillusioned sense of time.

Getting to work 41 minutes early wasn't my biggest problem though. Yesterday night, I carefully planned my entire "i'm-SO-ready-for-work" ensemble. Thats referring to my conservative long, black, skinny jeans and semi-dressy top (despite the revoltingly hot temperature this week), the "I'm-wearing-makeup-but-you-can't-tell-because-Google-told-me-that-this-is-a-good-look-for-work" makeup (which promptly melted off my face during our activity) and the black flats that I chose to wear- to prove that I can coordinate my clothes with my shoes (I'm a bit style-challenged) and that I paid attention during the orientation and didn't wear heels because Joe said we would be doing "some" walking on the first day.

Some. I couldn't have ever fathomed that what Joe and Bob had planned for us on the first day.

A scavenger hunt.

Yeah, pretty bizarre, right?

We (the interns) were split into three teams and given a packet of over 40 images. These images were of people, places, and things around campus. When I say "things," I mean quite literally "things." The corner of the field house building...a book on the lowest shelf of the oversize section on the fourth floor of the library...an engraved plaque of some dead dude that was in a locked lab in the color science building...and other things of that sort. Despite the torturous weather (and my torturous clothes), it was the most fun I've had since summer started (how pathetic does that sound?). I got to know the interns in my group, explore the campus, burn off some calories (regained by the coke and pizza we had for lunch...YAY free food!), and find out firsthand how friendly everyone on campus is. Not a single person turned us away or called us creepers, even though we were dashing around like crazy people that clearly did not belong at RIT.

We ended up finding the most "things," and we made a pretty impressive dvd- complete with a soundtrack, title screen/menu, and video effects. The huge downside to the video part of the project was the iMacs. Out of all of the interns, only one of us used Macs on a daily basis (thank goodness he was on my team!). All three teams had a lot of trouble getting iMovie to work- to the point where some people gave up due to technical difficulties, but we ended up tweaking some settings around, restarting some programs, and figuring it out! I still think the Macs were the biggest challenge of the day though...

So going along with the theme in my first sentence, this is my first blog post on the first day of my first job EVER. Browsing through the blogs of past interns, I couldn't find a definitive structure for these posts, so I thought I'd just post the way I normally do (I've kept a personal blog for a pretty long time!). Hopefully if I'm doing this wrong, someone will tell me- since this IS part of my job description :)

This internship also doubles as my senior project, a graduation requirement at my school. I'll discuss that in more detail later, since it's 11 o'clock (on the dot as I'm typing this) and I want to finish a book I've been reading before I go to bed.

I might do this at the end of every post, but here's a couple things (off the top of my head) that I've learned as a result of this internship so far:

1) Never wear black skinny jeans and flats on days where the high is 97 degrees and you have to run outside for couple hours

2) Food is good. Free food is amazing.

3) Macs aren't as great as I thought they were

4) RIT people aren't easily creeped out

5) When an old black man smoking a cigarette (who is a self-proclaimed king) gives you sketchy directions, listen to him. The guy knows what he's talking about.