Spring Break Finale: ASB Output, DWB in DC, and an Appeal*

I'm not even sure where to begin recapping my Alternate Spring Break (ASB) experience. I'm totally amazed that in a week I was able to pull together a fully functioning Excel application for my mentor, Dr. Lee-Ann Hayek. To be fair, she hadn't expected it either; it was a pretty tall order.

My mentor, Dr. Lee-Ann Hayek, and I at the Smithsonian

As I mentioned in my first post about ASB, I was helping Lee-Ann build a better user interface for her Excel application which compared samples of species to test the evenness of their distribution against a known model. The project name (SHE) stands for Species H-Model Evenness. From a frantic looking collection of sheets with links and formulas all over the place (information overload), I created a front-end, instruction set, and logical process for other scientists to use Lee-Ann's application.

(Because I feel like showing off ) The Instructions Sheet (click to enlarge)

The Input Sheet

The Main Output Table Sheet (There is also a Charts and Regressions page, but I'll spare you)

But the fun didn't stop there Data Without Borders was in town (!!!) and even though I couldn't stay for the entire weekend event I dropped by on Friday to say "hello"

Here's DWB's founder Jake Porway giving the opening speech, introducing everyone to the work they'll be doing. This weekend's groups were National Environmental Education Foundation, GuideStar, DC Action for Children. I was super pumped about the projects - several of which are being framed around designing questions to measure social impact - and was a little bummed that I couldn't stay the weekend.

source: DWB Facebook Page

Over 100 people showed up for the presentations on Friday night, which bodes well for an enthusiastic bunch of participants over the course of the weekend.

Source: Mayur Patel's Storify board

Also, because I'm still in a bragging mood - I won "best dressed" for the t-shirt I choose to rock (Cool Girls Code).... it was an easy sell to this type of crowd.

And last, but not least, I'm making an appeal to you - friends and family - to help support Alternate Spring Break at the School of Information by considering a donation to our Crowdwise campaign. ASB was an amazing experience for me and the other 140 students who participated this year... and it was all funded and coordinated by our school (transportation, housing, the projects ... you name it, they worked it out for us). But as you can imagine it takes a lot to put this together. Please consider a donation as a way to support all the good work that the School of Information and us students are trying to do.

Thank you!

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* Trying to squeeze as many acronyms as I can, like a good grad student should

ASB Day 2: Learning about Forams

(Apologies for the delay, slow wifi at the hotel)
Today was day 2 of my internship at the National Museum of National History for Alternate Spring Break, which I introduced you to yesterday

The lab where I'm working

I'm plugging and chugging away at my project still (I'm hoping to have all the big moving pieces worked out by tomorrow, so we can start working on the bells and whistles on Thursday and Friday). But I lucked out today because I got a tour of the paleobiology work area today and learned more about how the project I'm working on relates to the work they do. I mentioned in yesterday's post that the Excel workbook I'm helping reconstruct was used to categories specimens into homogeneous groups ... well this was applied to the study of foraminifera (forams for short)

A foram, up close and personal

The many varieties (only a sampling) of forams

I felt quite lucky to get a tour of the Cushman foram collection by Dr. Martin Buzas. He showed me some samples on a stereoscopic microscope (now in 3D!).

These things are so itty bitty....

That in order to get them onto a slide, they have to use a small paint brush to order the specimens in ordered rows and columns.

Forams are really fascinating; they are some of the most common plankton species; they've been around for 30 million years (as opposed to humans who've been around for about 2 million); they can be used for dating other fossils; they make some amazingly intricate and varied shell structures ... basically they rock. Which is I guess why the scientist, Zheng Shouyi, was so easily able to convince the Chinese government to build a forma sculpture park. No joke

Forma Sculpture Park (source: Smithsonian online magazine)

I also got to see where they keep the large vertebrate fossils

They build the casts to protect the fossils for transport

Row of fossils (you can see what I'm standing next to in the following picture at the end...)

Me next to an Apatosaurus (formerly Brontosaurus) femur bone

The Dinosaur Hall in the Natural History Museum

It is crazy because the museum is planning on redoing the Dinosaur Hall soon and it is going to take SEVEN years to complete! Take a good look because it won't be the same again!

My mom always wanted me to go into science .... maybe this is my back door in?

Alternate Spring Break: National Museum of Natural History and Ben's Chili Bowl

I'm on Alternate Spring Break (ASB) this year in Washington DC at the National Museum of Natural History - which is amazing! ASB matches SI students with public and non-profit institutions all over the country for a week long internship. It is a win-win for all of us: we get some extra work experience at some heavy-hitting institutions* and they get a week of free labor from us.

My internship is a perfect fit for me: large datasets, Visual Basic in Excel, and creating a better user experience, oh my! I'm working in the paleobiology department helping Dr. Lee-Ann Hayek, a statistician, rebuild an Excel workbook that she built. The program takes raw data of various samples counting the number of species (think: samples taken from different depths of the ocean floor) and breaks them into homogenous groupings. It can be used as a way to tell when (in space, depth, latitude, gradient, etc) the samples you've collected are distinct from each other. Dr. Hayek believes that this program - and the analysis that it is built upon - has a lot of applications ... she just needs help building a user-friendly experience. That's where I come in.

Fingers are crossed that I'll be able to finish everything I want to do before the week is up - but it was really heart-warming how excited everyone was about the work I started producing today. We're off to a good start!

I got out of work a little late today - but was still able to catch a local icon of DC: Ben's Chili Bowl

Caitlin getting excited about chili dogs

A short history of Ben's, in case you want to know more

Yummy!

The weather was perfect tonight (mid 40s?) so we walked back to the hotel. It has been so long since I've been to DC that I had totally forgotten how wonderfully walkable and pedestrian/bike-friendly it is here.

Oh. And to end on a light hearted-note this is the sign for the hotel where we're staying. Notice anything interesting about it...?

Bat Signal?

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*summer internships, anyone?