Tag: Day 3

Laber Labs: Day 3

Today, Alex Cloud, a current NC State graduate student who works at Riot Games  (the studio behind video game titles such as League of Legends and Valorant) came in to teach us about academic statistical concepts such as the difference between estimands and estimators, reinforcement learning, and luck and skill in games such as Randochess(p). He also showed us DALL-E, an artificial intelligence software developed by OpenAI that uses AI to generate digital artworks based on a prompt that is typed as an input. We got to play around and test it and it was incredible to see how the AI was capable of stitching together realistic and believable images and how it was able to understand many different prompts (that were taught by training the AI using images associated with captions). Of course, there were some shortfalls. For example, DALL-E interprets the input “tree bark” as a visual of a dog barking at a tree instead of actual tree bark, as is shown in the demo video for the software.

Shown above is an example from DALL-E’s website about how to use the software, I unfortunately don’t have any of the resulting images for the prompts we tested, however, some of the prompts we gave were “A painting of a cat by Caravaggio”, “Mario graduating from middle school”, “An Impressionist painting of Jinx from League of Legends”, and “Mona Lisa but as Zelda”!

Department of Health and Human Services- Day 3

What you need to know about Asian longhorned ticks - A new tick in the United States | Ticks | CDC

Today, I was in and out of a few meetings but my most interesting one was with Dr. Barbarin, an entomologist in the Division of Public Health. She focuses on tick-borne diseases like Lyme while her colleague specializes in mosquito-transmitted viruses like Zika. She taught me about the importance of education about tick-borne diseases, specifically how to prevent them with appropriate bug sprays as well as where they occur most. The Asian longhorned tick, pictured above, has been of specific interest lately due to its ability to transmit diseases. In addition, Dr. Barbarin taught me more about the migration of ticks and how diseases like Lyme disease are slowly making their way from Lyme, Connecticut to more southern states and are increasing in prevalence in western North Carolina. Dr. Barbarin even let me view a Lone Star tick under her microscope!

Day 3

Another day with more fun in store for the children and me both. Beginning the day with a stroll (and the kids loading up the Kinderwagon), we ventured to a nearby city playground. I really got to know how walkable Ettlingen and most of Germany is. Everything is foot, bike, and Kinderwagon friendly! However, I am used to the pedestrian right of way but Germany yields to bikes, thus I ended up having three close calls just today where I stopped mere inches away from a certain disastrous collision. Luckily, no collisions occurred but I did have to deal with some upset children when I told them they were not allowed to touch the electric fence. We all were happy to see the horses and livestock out and about during our walk, but even happier to settle down for a midday nap, where I again accompanied the kids, exhausted from my near bicycle mishaps. Overall, today showed me how the kindergarten takes advantage of the accessibility of the neighborhood and the emphasis on car-alternative travel for the environment!

Day 3

On day 3, Dr. Summerville and I sorted out all the technical difficulties so that there would no longer be any problems with communication and scheduling. I learned today that when you are accused of doing something that you didn’t do, its best to stay calm, apologize, and quickly try to explain everything as clearly as possible.

Today, we optimized the excel sheet I did and reduced all the unnecessary steps when filling out the excel sheet so that a volunteer would have the easiest time. My assignment was then to research any papers or articles about bacillus bacteria in maternal milk. I must find any papers that could be helpful or have any data which can help in out process so we can see if there are any trends.

Google Saves the Day

Once again today, we met with Dr. Aziz and Leah to review the work we had done last time. This time, we went over individually what we could do to improve our models and went over several mathematical formulas that could improve the realism of our work. I was suggested that I could implement an aging system to the simulated fungus in which the enzymes they produce decreases the longer they’re alive, which I added. I also tried swapping around the values in the equations for the temperature slider I added last time. I suck at math, so it took me an hour to figure out, but I eventually got it. I also tried to make it so the simulated glucose is able to randomly move around the model, but after much experimenting, I was unable to figure it out. I eventually just turned to googling the answer and was able to piece together the process, shown below, from several different pages. In each patch, or in each small part of the simulation, it causes a random amount of glucose to move to a random nearby patch each time the simulation progresses. We were told by Dr. Aziz that next week, we will be working mainly independently, and he will only check in with us once or twice.

Lenovo Work Experience Day 3!

Alright, this one’s a shorter entry than usual because not much happened today. Mostly we’re gearing up for a presentation- I’ll post that PowerPoint up once we’ve finished it, but it’s about NFTs. As well, I’m working on researching a few other markets, other than OpenSea- I’ll post information about those two tomorrow. But, for not, feast your eyes on some more NFTs! These’ll be sold hopefully soon. Once I get some gas money. Anyways, see you next time!

Day 3: Probation Violation & Trial Court

Today, I attended probation violation court as I had attended yesterday, and the process was more or less the same as yesterday. This afternoon, however, I was able to witness a trial with a jury about a convicted felon possessing a gun during a traffic stop. I was able to see the defense and the prosecution examining their witnesses first-hand and take note on when and how a judge intervenes when the other side proposes an objection during witness questioning. An objection is proposed by an attorney when the attorney if the question asked by the opposing attorney is too vague, argumentative, or unfair in some way to the witness, and if the objection is sustained, the jury cannot incorporate said question into their decision and must disregard it.

During lunch, Judge Davidian also shared with me valuable tips on how to be successful as a lawyer in both the military and the civilian world, including standing up for your client no matter the backlash and always aiming to further your career.

Enzyme Kinetics: Inhibiting Factors

This morning, Ethan and I met with Dr. Aziz and Leah again. We shared our work from the previous day and began discussing some more ideas about how to make this fungi model more realistic. We had a very interesting discussion about different mathematical equations that could be used to model various variables’ effects on the reaction rate (e.g. temperature, pH, UV light, and dissolved oxygen) and ways to model water flow (in the real system, water would be flowing through the fungi filter).

After our meeting, to get a better context for our research, I spent some time reading a journal article that Leah shared detailing the different mechanisms that the fungi’s enzymes use to break down pollutants.

I spent the bulk of my day fine-tuning the enzyme kinetics aspect of the model (shoutout to Mr. Rushin–iykyk). I was working on writing code to incorporate the relationships between temperature, pH, UV light, and dissolved oxygen into the model. For each of the variables, there’s a sweet spot, where the rate is the fastest and enzymes function best. Then, on either side of the sweet spot, the rate decreases.

Look at all my bell curves! Each of these is for one of the variables. You can see the sweet spot is at the peak of the curve and the curve tapers off on both sides.

Below, you can see how the different conditions affect the rate of the reaction. On the left is when all of the variables are set to the optimal conditions. On the right is when the conditions are too acidic, so the enzymes don’t do their job 🙁

   

-Emily

Day 3- Farewell IT

Today I got to spend some time with Barb Whittinghill and her intern, Andrew, who worked in Compliance. They walked me through the intricacies of compliance. Basically, their job is to ensure that every client that SAS has abides by federal regulations, that way, their servers would be more secure from outside threats. Andrew, who previously worked for the military, discussed with me the process through SAS workers petitioning compliance for outside help (vendors). Compliance then checks the certifications of said help to make sure they are up to date, and gives approval based on their findings. Next, I had a meeting with Steven Toy, head of the infrastructure side of IT and the father of CA’s own Chris Toy. Mr. Toy walked me through SAS’s goals of transferring data into virtual servers, a project that would lend itself both to efficiency and security.

At lunch, I was able to have beef tips with Mr. Andy Rash, who was responsible for the more applications side of IT. This means that instead of maintaining servers and making sure the foundations of SAS remain up to date, Mr. Rash oversees a lot more of what workers operate on a day to day basis; the checkout system for lunch for example. I was then placed with Peter McNeill, one of the many Cary Academy graduates working at SAS. Peter showed me a lot of the script he was writing for some new software SAS was putting out, as well as how he was participating in intern training by having them review some of his old code for practice.

Lastly, I went to E building with Taylor Andrews, a software engineer currently working with Ms Dawn Smith (who I met with on Day 2) to create a new application for client agreements. He took me through a lot of the coding that went behind building the application, such as SAS software and the conversion of Java into JavaScript. Ultimately, it was a great way to end my time in IT!

~Rundown of the Supply Depot

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