Working in the Kindergarten, I am treated as an adult. However, I am actually at the awkward age where I am directly in the middle of the kids and adults. I don’t wear diapers yet can fit in the children’s chair and I can talk but I still choose legos over chatting. When talking about my weekend in Belgium, my coworker Markus was shocked that I had a drivers license, and I even showed him and told him I got my permit at 15. Dana (in my host family) turns 18 in October and she is still driving with an adult under her permit. Even Camryn Friedman is driving before her! However, Markus was even more shocked that I was not going to partake in any Belgium beer drinking (the legal drinking age here is 16) and that in the US we have to be 21. Different regulations lead to very different cultures indeed. Today at work was mostly normal but with an outing to a nearby water playground pictured below!
Tag: Day 6
Department of Health and Human Services- Day 6
Today I met with Ariel Christensen, a PhD student who has been working on North Carolina’s COVID-19 wastewater surveillance system. The system monitors water from sewage systems across the state and measures the COVID-19 viral gene copies to determine the prevalence of the virus in certain areas. This tool has become increasingly more helpful in recent times with the increase in at-home test availability and decrease in willingness to test at all. With less testing occurring, a decline in the case count has been observed, shown in the first graph above, but according to the viral load in the wastewater in the same region of Cary, the second graph, COVID-19 is still very much present. Because of this large disparity, wastewater has become a useful tool in more accurately measuring virus prevalence.
Laber Labs: Day 6
Today we spent our work day testing the game that we contributed some level designs for, Laber Lab’s Zombies on Treadmills. You can play the demo on your web browser here! (Just a reminder that this is a demo and not reflective of the final product)
Shown in the picture above is a level that I designed, it is a stage in the shape of a dinosaur 😊
The premise of the game is that zombies have taken over, and you want to use the treadmills (the platforms with the arrows) to direct them on a path through walking in the directions of the arrows towards volcanoes (which kill zombies) and away from houses (which contain people, who you want to minimize the deaths of). You can use the WASD keys to move the camera, as well as zoom in and out using the trackpad. You can change the direction of the treadmills by clicking on them to create a path for the zombies to walk. The “Zombie Noncompliance” variable is the chance that zombies may not follow the direction of the treadmills, which you will need to account for. Once you have created a path you believe should work, you can click the “Go!” button to spawn the zombies and see everything play out.
We were the first people to be able to test the game, and gave feedback to the team at Laber Labs on various aspects of the demo, such as the artwork, gameplay mechanics, sound design, and controls. It was certainly a one of a kind experience that I am grateful for Laber Labs for giving me the opportunity to have a glimpse at the behind the scenes of developing a video game!
Day 6
More kids, playgrounds, mineral water and naps today. Lighter work today since less kids and more adults evens the ratio, yet challenging myself nonetheless. Todays highlight was when Markus (the lead teacher) took a light snooze on the beanbag chair during lunch and the children covered him in plastic dishes and fake carrots. He woke up when a child tripped while trying to place a bunch of fake grapes on his chest. My comparison for today is how much more available the public transportation is in Germany and accessible to everyone. It’s also cleaner, as I remarked to the host family nothing like the New York subway I know. The trains run efficiently and are located sporadically, effectively connected by smaller trolley or bus systems within the city. While this is apparent in America, in my expertise mostly utilized in popular urban areas. Yet here we were in small walkable Ettlingen where you can see someone you know walking down the street with a highly advanced bus and transportation efforts. In fact, my host family son Jan commutes to his university in the nearby larger city of Karlsruhe through the bus system, and I experienced it myself today. Lots of new riveting things and comparisons, looking forward to another day of exploration tomorrow. Tchuss. 
Day 6
Today we were helping clean out and organize the office by sorting through merch and putting it on shelves. We also made a sale in the merch store with someone who was buying some clothes for the upcoming game this weekend.
Day 6
On day six, I got a virtual tour of the building Dr. Summerville and her team resided. They were on the 3rd floor because their usual fifth floor was being renovated. I got to see the huge cafeteria and just get a sense of the personality of the people at SAS from the many paintings and even the statues of Yoda and Darth Vader. It is just a shame that I was not able to see it in person. My assignment for this day was to write a paper which summarized everything that I had done before, very similar to what we have been doing with the blogs. 
Lenovo Work Experience- Smart Contracts and Interviews, Oh My! (Day 6)
And hey, we’re back from the long weekend with some more internship stuff! Today we researched smart contracts, which are somewhat confusing and a bit too complicated for me to reasonably explain right here.
As well, we watched a video by GaryVee where he interviews 12 people related to NFTs. The two points that I want to talk about today are:
- He says (at 1:33:55), “DAO everybody uh who’s in the chat. There we go Sebastian, thank you.” So yeah. I had a minor heart attack there when he called out my name.
- The more relevant point of the two is which people he called upon. All of them seemed to be the folk that believed in NFTs before they got big, and I would love to see an interview without that confirmation bias. Are there any famous investors that didn’t believe in NFTs that missed out on the bubble? What about them?
Anyways, those are my big takeaways. Peace!
Day 6: WebEx Abuse & Neglect Court
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Wake County Courts were forced to switch to a virtual setting and today I got a witness this firsthand.
Even though the court system was able to adjust to an online format quickly and continue with trying cases, I witnessed some of the troubles that are specific to online court. For example, today the internet in the courthouse shut down completely which forced Judge Davidian to reschedule some of his cases for future dates because he had to call into the meeting on his phone and could not record the meeting. Also, online court cases seem to be harder to control because there were several instances where witness testimonies were interrupted by others and it was harder for Judge Davidian to control the court as compared to an in person hearing.
Overall, today was a great learning experience and I learned how important it was for the justice system to continue functioning even during a pandemic despite some few minor hiccups.
Playing with Numbers
This morning, Ethan and I met with Dr. Aziz and Leah to provide an update on our work from the past couple of days. These past couple of days, we’ve made some really great progress on the model, and things are starting to come together.
I spent the remainder of the day on three main things: debugging my code for lignin degradation, writing up tasks and the information page for the model, and designing the user interface.
Debugging the lignin code entailed a ton of trial and error with numbers. I went back and forth between my code and the interface multiple times, first to make sure the lignin was decreasing (since it’s being consumed) and not increasing, then to slow the fungal reproduction so that fungi didn’t dominate.
Since our model may eventually be used as a virtual experiment for middle and high schoolers or an educational game, I then worked on writing up the introduction page and some challenges that future players could try.
Lastly, after poking around on the web-based version of NetLogo, I realized that our user interface needed some re-designing since the graphs were really condensed in the web-based version, making them hard to read. Here’s the re-designed interface:
Talk about crazy colors haha! Let’s just say a lot is going on in the fungal filter and leave it at that…
Flow
Today, we were left to our own devices as we weren’t required to meet with Dr. Aziz. I continued my work on simulation water flow through a fungal filter by making nutrients, O2, Co2, etc. spawn at the bottom of the screen and move upwards, vanishing as it reaches the top. However, when the speed of the water is set above 1, nothing moves upwards properly, leading to a giant dead zone where only the top and bottom rows have these nutrients.
The problem is this one line of code, which is supposed to make the nutrients disappear if they’re about to exit the top of the screen, but is apparently going gung-ho on everything and deleting it all as soon as it spawns in.
As I don’t know how to solve the issue, I’ll have to consult with Dr. Aziz tomorrow.