RIT CIS Summer Internship

We resumed the morning staff meetings today. My lab partner and I finished sieving the last trial for our gravel sample. We also weighed all of oven-dried samples from our previous wet sievings. We then put the data in graphs so we could compare our data obtained from the different methods. The wet sieving data was generally accurate compared with the USDA standards. Our advisor added some slides to the background section in our presentation. He also moved all of our slides onto a new template with the CIS and GRIT lab logos. In the afternoon, our advisor went over our presentation again with us and explained a lot of the new facts and images that he added. He plans on combining a lot of our graphs into a single graph for comparison purposes tomorrow in addition to running our camera and microscopic images through the automated image analysis code on his computer.

My lab partner and I started the wet sieving for the clay & silt this morning. We got one and a half trials done before lunch. In the afternoon, we finished sieving the clay & silt and recorded the weights of the dried samples of the sand that we put in the oven yesterday. For the clay & silt sample specifically, we noticed that a large portion of the soil ended up in the water collection bin. From this we can conclude that this method of sieving is essentially useless for determining the particle size distribution of the clay & silt. We also started the wet sieving for the gravel, which we plan on finishing Monday.

This morning, my lab partner and I started the wet sieving after our advisor helped us with the setup (connecting the tubing, testing to see if the water ran through the sieves properly, etc). We ran into some technical difficulties once we started the sieve shaker (i.e. the base pan was leaking and we couldn't fit some of the sieves into the connector pans) so we had our advisor come up to the roof lab to assist us. We finished the wet sieving for part of the first trial of the 400 gram sand sample in the morning. After lunch, we continued with the sieving and data collection. Before we left, my lab partner and I completed the wet sieving for all three trials of the sand. We plan to finish sieving the clay & silt and gravel tomorrow.

There was no staff meeting in the morning. My lab partner and I met with Joe to go over our presentation. He gave us some advice and later we met with him again with our advisor present as well. After, I shortened our PowerPoint by combining some of the data tables that I generated from GRADISTAT on Monday. I also put in mean and median values for the histograms of data we collected from the manual image analysis. In the afternoon, I assembled the parts to make the wet sieving machine with Chris's help. I cut appropriate lengths of tubing that we will be putting through the sieves. We are hoping to finish the wet sieving tomorrow (and if not definitely by the end of week).

We had no staff meeting in the morning today. When I got to my lab, I started working on finding various statistical measurements of the data from our sieving trials for each of the three different samples. Chris found a program online called GRADISTAT that automatically calculated the mean, sorting, skewness, and kurtosis for a set of data after sieving. This program also generated various graphs that related to grain size distribution. I inputted all of the data from our trials with sand, clay&silt, and gravel into GRADISTAT in excel and copied the images of the analyses into our presentation. In the afternoon, my advisor went over the PowerPoint with me and made comments on some slides. I combined the background slides on sieving into one and replaced all the data tables with graphs of the same information, which shortened the presentation significantly (just what we needed!). I also added axis labels to the graphs that contained the binned data from our manual image analysis an

My lab partner and I continued working on our PowerPoint in the morning. I took a picture of the clay & silt sample using the camera because our other one was not clear enough for the image analysis. I continued working on and finished the manual image analysis for the sand image and transferred the data onto a spreadsheet. However, after binning the data, we noticed that the particle size distribution did not match our data from the sieving trials for sand. We asked our advisor and he said to redo the image because the cropped version messed with the pixel sizing of the image. After lunch, I went to a MS thesis defense on visual perception. The title of the presentation was "A Tool for the Analysis of Human Interaction with Two-Dimensional Printed Imagery. I also started working on a new manual analysis of the sand image in ImageJ and finished before I left. Chris said that he will give us some advice on our presentations next Monday and after we can start the wet sieving if