Day 6

June 8, 2013

Today was mostly travel. We took shuttles from the Hotel Current to LAX this morning qt 7:30. We had 22 people and a ton of equipment along with baggage for 3 weeks. It was logistically challenging trying to get all those people and baggage checked in with TSA and all that. But, we made it, got on the plane and headed to Hawaii. 5 hours later we were landing in Honolulu. We managed to get all those people and bags loaded into cars and about 45 minutes later we were on the other side of the island. We got to the barn and it was pretty nice. We figured out the sleeping arrangements for 15 people in the space and we had a chance to kick back and take in the Hawaiian beauty.

Shortly after we had a delicious dinner prepared by our hosts. After dinner most of us headed to the beach for an evening swim. IT WAS AWESOME! What a way to finish the day. I’d post some pictures, but we haven’t got the WiFi password yet, so I’m writing this blog on my phone 🙂

 

 

Day 5

June 7, 2013

Last day in Long Beach, today was about loose ends. We spent the morning working on our labs trying to finish up. I finished mine and started helping out with the preparations. We needed an extra laptop and some power strips, they knew who to ask :). So, I headed over to my office and grabbed the extra stuff. It was nice being able to catch up with the guys at the office just before I head out for 3 weeks. After that I had lunch with some of the other REU guys at the Chart Room, yeah, we were a little out of place in there, but that’s ok, it was good.

This afternoon we talked about projects, focus areas and common products. There is a tremendous amount of research that can be done, so we are starting broad and working on what we call common products. This is research that we can all share in our individual projects. For example, we may fly one of the UAVs over the coast and get imagery data that can be used in a number of projects related to archaeology, hydrology and more. My first choice was the hydrology common product, but there was only one person signed up for the UAV team and 3 for hydrology, I took one for the team. The UAV team isn’t as glamorous as it might sound, most of the UAVs fly themselves so, it’s really just data collection and cataloging. I’m happy to help, because I’m a person that loves organization, plus with my computer experience, I think I can really help on that team. But I was a little disappointed to miss out on the conversation about the really cool stuff that they will be doing in regards to the hydrology. I let them know that the UAV thing might be more offline organization and that I really want to explore the seeps and vents and other hydrology, they assured me that we would all have a chance to work in all of the areas and that the team we were on was more of an ownership thing, and I get that.

So, I’m all kinds of emotions today, excited, worried, intimidated, and excited. I’m really going to miss my family, I’ve never been away from them for this long, a few days at most. So, that worries me, but I’m pressing on, this is an awesome opportunity and I’m glad I didn’t pass it up. I’m really looking forward to the next three weeks!

Now, I’m all packed and ready to go at 6:30 tomorrow morning, my bag weighs in at 48 lbs. so hopefully I won’t have trouble at the airport. The next time I write, I’ll be in Hawaii.

Day 4

June 6, 2013

Labs, labs, labs, and no not the dogs. That’s what sums up the day, but among the labs was some awesomeness. First we started this morning with a lecture by Dr. Becker on hydrology. As he was discussing the geology of Oahu, I have to admit I started drifting in thought, but it was a good drift. He was showing slides detailing all kinds of cool processes at work, showing how the Hawaiian Archipelago was formed and how the volcanic rock ages, cracks and fills up and how that affects the water, and I just thought about my whole education and I thought, “GOD, I LOVE THIS!” I have always loved science, astronomy, chemistry. I could never get enough discovery, history, or TLC. But at CSULB, I was wandering, because I didn’t have direction, I couldn’t go for a degree in the sciences, they were too many units for where I was at. I bounced around from major to major and now I was getting to the point where any degree over 40 units would cause me to go over 120. That’s not the end of the world but, I din’t want to essentially start my academic career over, I need to get my bachelor’s some day. Anyway, I finally feel like I’ve found the perfect home in Geography where I get to do all of this really cool science, I love it. Anyway, sorry for that tangent. So, Dr. Becker’s lecture turned into a discussion on things we’d like to study and I’m most interested in studying the water seeps and vents off shore. I’d like to use one of our aerial platforms, maybe the quadcopters or the X100 to get thermal imagery of the area and I want to build the arduino data collector and use that in the water.

After Dr. Becker’s lecture, we broke for lunch and spent time catching up on labs. I only got one done this afternoon, but hey it’s progress. The thing that I was really impressed with was some software called PhotoScan. It is awesome! Paul used a quadcopter to gather 40 images of a section of campus, and with 40 still shots of differing angle and altitude, the software is able to process the images finding common points and it can not only stitch them all together but build a 3D model of them and show you where all the pictures were taken in 3D space! That’s awesome, go math! Here’s a screenshot of PhotoScan:

So, even though 3D models are fun, they are mostly just a visual tool, but wait, there’s more! PhotoScan will export an orthophoto and a DEM that you can pull into ArcGIS or ERDAS, awesome!

Day 3

June 5, 2013

Today started out like yesterday, jumped right into lecture. Today was Dr. Wechsler’s turn, it was a good reminder of the things that we often forget in GIS. Scale, responsibility, scale, error, scale, confidence intervals, scale, did I mention scale? Geographic scale, temporal scale (my favorite), spatial scale, you get the idea. Anyway, I mentioned that temporal scale is my favorite, and this is one of my soap boxes. I think the temporal scale is the one most forgotten, not only in GIS, but in much of science. People are presented with data and they automatically assume it’s recent, current or live. Another interest of mine is astronomy and this is a field that people are always forgetting about time. The light we see from space was emitted long long long ago, people tend to dismiss that, but that is a huge thing to remember. A star or galaxy that we see in the sky tonight may not even be there anymore. We tend to see something in the heavens and talk about it like it’s still there or in terms like, ‘it just did x, y, or z’. But it did x, y, or z millions of years ago and we are just now seeing it. That is important when you are going to try to correlate observations in space with ones at home. Anyway, I’m off on a tangent 🙂 So, this morning’s lecture was good and important, I think we all needed it.

After lunch we headed out to the field next to the Japanese Garden. It was finally flight time!! I volunteered to fly first, I was a little excited 🙂

Here’s my landing after my flight:

Even though I’m a bit sun burnt, it was worth it.

I loved this part of the REU, can’t wait to do more.

After this, we went back to the lab to be dazzled by Photoscan. That software is awesome, the math that it must take really blows my mind. Looking forward to day 4.

 

Day 2

June 4, 2013

We were to read some “easy readings” the night before. They kept me up until way too late, but this morning I was ready to talk more about it. But instead, I just listened. I’ve heard Dr. Lipo discuss this topic briefly in the past, it was an informal discussion between him and Dr. Wechsler, I was just a fly on the wall, but I remember it because I could see Dr. Lipo’s passion for the subject. After seeing that he was a co-author of the material we read and especially after his lecture this morning, I have a much better view of his passion. Other people’s passion can rub off and I was really loving the discussion about common sense and science. Though I didn’t participate in the conversation (lack of coffee), I love getting really deep into a topic, down to the meta material, and that’s what this morning was about, really good stuff. So, all I will say about it, is “observation is theory laden”.

After 2 hours of Dr. Lipo’s journey into science, we broke for lunch, then we jumped into Dr. Lee’s lecture on remote sensing. I was looking forward to this since I have not taken a remote  sensing course, and I won’t be able to next semester because of Dr. Lee’s sabbatical. So, anyway, it was just an overview, but I was happy to get what I could. After that, we  moved into lab assignments in ERDAS. This was my first experience with ERDAS, and… well… I’m not impressed. They went to the trouble of updating the UI with ‘the ribbon’ but other areas of the software are painfully old. The file dialog was awful, it saw my flash drive as “Floppy (E:)”… really? Floppy? What year is this? It’s not aware of special folders, like desktop, Documents, etc. Dumb. Anyway, I know, nit picky. Once I moved past the interface, the software can do some cool stuff and it definitely handled georeferencing better than ArcGIS. So, maybe there’s hope.

I finished the day by almost finishing my labs before I had to run back to reality and pick up my kids by 6. Then, dinner, being a daddy, a husband and not a student anymore. I’ll be back tomorrow.

Day 1

June 3, 2013

Well, the long awaited REU is here. I got in last year and couldn’t participate out of obligation to my new job, but this year, they can’t stop me. Here I am!

Anyway, the morning didn’t start until 10, so I had some time to tie up loose ends at work before heading over to the REU, I did that, talked to my guys at the office, grabbed some coffee and shifted into student mode. We took care of some paperwork, then we headed over to the bookstore to get everyone setup with their BeachID, then we headed back to the lab to continue getting acclimated. Paul took the undergrads on a tour, but Howard and I stayed behind as we are already from CSULB so we knew the campus already, besides we wanted to get a jump on installing software and generally preparing.

Lunch was Togos boxes, intros from everyone and a powerpoint detailing our trip. Accommodations look interesting…I’m not sure what else to say…it looks like it might be like camping, whether you’re inside or out, but I’m good with that. The big question that I haven’t asked anyone yet is how are they all going to deal with my insane snoring. My wife uses strong adjectives to describe it, inhuman, unbearable, scary, anyway, I’m still not sure how I’m going to work that into the conversation. But, if you’re an undergrad and you’re reading this, you might want to put me in one of those 3 rooms, or force me to sleep outside :(.

During the presentation today, Dr. Lipo talked about how we need to formulate our research question and how we need to decide on an area of study. Funny enough, I think this is difficult to do, not because we don’t know, but because we all like all of this stuff, it’s hard to pick. At least that’s the case for me, I’m really interested in all of it. I love the water and want to check out the marine life, the reef and these seeps, but I love R/C and planes and that kind of stuff too. So, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Anyway, today was cool, everybody seemed really nice and I think we’ll have a good trip (as long as we don’t have a ‘lord of the flies’ over my snoring).