Unfettered

Last week was the final week of EISI, certainly a bittersweet time, also exceedingly busy. Everyone in the program had papers to finish, conclusions to draw, and presentations to rehearse. Still we all got through it and I saw some very interesting results. During all this chaos three other students and I drove to Albany (Oregon, not California or New York) to eat at a Hungarian restaurant. I first saw a sign weeks earlier, driving up 5 to a field site and I knew I had to go. After all I'd just spent a semester in Budapest and I couldn't find a Hungarian restaurant in the entire Bay Area. The place is called Novak's and ended up being a little fancier than I expected. Still everyone was game and we had a great time. I had the shepard's platter which had all the typical Hungarian food, paprikás csirke, töltött káposzta, kolbász, and pörkölt (chicken paprika, stuffed cabbage, sausage, and goulash for those who don't speak Hungarian). The food was quite good though no...

I doubt anyone is still reading this, but I need a break from Mathematica so I thought I'd try writing some plain English for a change. We've been in Corvallis now for 4 weeks, and aside from one trip back to Quartz Creek I've been doing my work here, either in the library or memorial union. Earlier this week the other two members of my group Will and Ginger went out to Crab-Tree Creek on the Santiam to finish the last of our data gathering. I opted not to go for two main reasons, one the StreamPro (The ADCP actually designed for shallow water) can be easily operated by two people, and two I already had plenty of work to do. For the last 4 weeks I've been using Mathematica to visualize and analyze our data. It may not be the best tool for the job, but I know how to use it. Essentially what I do is read in text files of data from WinRiver (the program that comes with the ADCP), process them into a usable format, then use them to make pretty pictures. Aside from work I...

This has been rather busy as evidenced by the lack of posts. On Monday we drove around with a forest service guy named Ray. He showed us a bunch of log jams on the McKenzie and some side tributaries. Its amazing how well he knows the area and all the log jams. He kept coming up with sites to look at, we ended up driving back and forth over the basin. We found a couple of cool snorkel sites to look at fish behavior but none of the sites were really suitable for our instruments. Today we went back to Quartz creek (our main site) and took some more data. This time Jorge our math mentor came along and helped us try to come up with a way to create a grid of data. Suffice it to say it was a long and complicated process and only data analysis will tell if it works. We did get to use a total station to survey the points where we took data, which was pretty cool. This weekend I went to the Oregon Country Fair , which was quite a spectacle and tons of fun! I'm not really sure how to descri...

Although I have safely returned from Budapest I'll try to maintain this blog, though likely with infrequent posts. This summer I am doing research at HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. I am part of the Eco-Informatics Summer Institute which is very similar to other REU's (research experience for undergrads) in that both are NSF (National Science Foundation) funded research opportunities. In all honesty I'm not really sure the difference, though I'll likely find out. The project I am working on is studying the how artificial wood jams in streams affect the fish populations. These wood jams were put in to aid in stream bank restoration and there are still questions as to how they interact with fish populations. In particular my group is studying the flow and hydraulics of water through the jams and how this in turn interacts with fish. My job will be to model the hydraulics using software developed by one of the project advisers. I've actually already arrive...