The End.

Today was the last day- we held the presentations and had some tearful farewells.

Joe and Bob- Thanks so much for everything you've done to make this all possible! I had a great time and learned so much. This will definitely be one of my most memorable summers!

The end of this internship also marks the end of summer. I'm leaving for a college visit road trip in a couple minutes, so peace out tp RIT and best wishes for the coming school year!

Helen

August 19th

LAST DAY OF ACTUAL WORK!!

So sad :(

Today we practiced our presentations. I think ours was ok, but I think i might try to memorize the order of the slides tonight and what I'm going to say on each of them. It was really cool to hear what everyone else did this summer! I was really impressed by everyone's work and I wish i went around more often to see what people were doing.

I can't believe it's almost over! We cleaned up our desks at color science (tore down the posters of puppies and all our colorful post-it notes) and left a thank you note for the grad students who were so kind to us and let us share their office. We also got Joel and Christye a little gift (which we put a lot of thought into....it reflects their personalities and jobs!). I'm almost dreading the end of this- that just means that school is coming up again!

August 18th

Today, we worked on our presentation cue cards. I found that it's actually very hard to explain our project in an organized, coherent way. We didn't want to be reading off the powerpoint slide, so we instead put many visual aids on it- which we will explain verbally. The problem with this is that due to the nature of our project, we have a LOT of files and programs that we use. If we explain the files, it will be difficult for the audience to understand, but if we don't explain them....then the rest of the project won't make sense. Honestly, some of our slides are just there to give people something relevant to look at while we explain.

We're not exactly sure where we lie time-wise. Our outline is four pages long at this point! We practiced a couple times today, with around 6 minutes left over every time!

August 17th

Today, we decided that we wanted to put in data from our Topcon camera into our presentation so its a bit more reliable. We also brainstormed a list of any possible inaccuracies in our experiment and added that into our presentation as well. Since the presentation is due tomorrow, we'll just tidy up some cue cards tomorrow morning :)

August 16th

AHHH last week!

I'm so sad that this is our last week! This has been my first job...ever! And i'm really sad to see it end.

Madeleine and I have been working really hard on our presentation- since our project is time-dependent, we JUST finished putting our data together today. Thankfully, we've already finished our powerpoint presentation- all we have to do is put in a couple graphs and pictures.

:)

August 13th

Today, we did a huge chunk of our presentation. I took a lot of screenshots to show what exactly we do, but I think it'll be confusing even with illustrations. We do way too much excel work! We also went to Home Depot to pick up another blue paint chip since we lost our original. Tomorrow, we'll use the spectrophotometer on the chip and start graphing all the delta Es.

August 11th

Today, we went to the Eastman House to learn a bit about daguerreotypes. They're pretty interesting, but definitely not my kind of thing.

August 10th

Today, Madeleine and I were befuddled by an alien puzzle we found in the Color Science break room.

We also went to the library to read up on some colorsci textbooks for our presentation.

August 9th

I'm giving up on numbering the days, because I'm pretty sure I lost track sometime last week. Today, we finished our data collection process! How exciting :) We started analyzing our data by graphing delta E versus time for the short term component of our experiment. Unfortunately, we found that our target L*A*B values were incorrect- we'll have to start all over to find the true values of our blue. Besides that, we also worked some more on our final presentation.

:)

Day Twenty-Three

Today, we made a video about how to operate a fundus camera for our final presentation. It took a pretty long time because on top of filming, we voiced over the video.........in iMovie, which is THE WORST software of any sort I have ever had the displeasure of using. I think it turned out pretty well though! You can view it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSZh1xTPjKw

Day Twenty-One

Today, we were locked out of everything. The door to the building, the door leading into the graduate student office, the office itself, the spectral measurement lab, the camera lab, and just about everything else. We ended up coming back to building 76 to find the delta e's of some of our data. It seems like our data is most likely going to end up being inconclusive.

This afternoon, we took a lot of pictures- 6 rounds between two cameras. This time, we timed everything and made sure that we noted every little change between takes.

Hopefully today's data will be more useful!

Day Twenty

Today, we couldn't get the macbeth machine to work. :(

Day Nineteen

Today, we started graphing the delta e's for the short term data points and found that we didn't have enough data to conclude anything. Next week, we'll take new pictures.

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.