Day IX: The True Work Begins

All right. To begin, our assignment. Bob gave us a word, ISOTARA, and told us to unscramble it and tell him how it related to the Center. Thankfully, Gary figured out that ISOTARA was an anagram of Astoria, and I was able to work from that. Turns out that Chester Carlson created xerography in his lab in Astoria, and the first words actually copied by this process was the date and the word 'Astoria'. Pretty neat.

Anyways, today we actually received our assignment for what looks like the majority of the rest of our time here. After going over a transcription of one of the older experiments, Andy gave us the run-down on our job. A while ago, Leanne and Tristan ran an experiment to see if people use the parts of an image they fixate on to describe it. Well, thirty-five participants later, they have a lot of work on their hands turning those tapes into useful data. Guess where we come in? Those tapes are in varying stages of processing, and our job is now to calibrate, digitize, transcribe, and code our little intern hearts out until every one of them is completed. The files are scattered around different computers and hard drives, some are corrupted by static or equipment failure, and some are just not there at all, so we've got our work cut out for us. On the bright side, we now have something to do every day.

To get to work, we first had to do a little bit of rearranging. We need Macs to code. There are four in the lab already, so no problem, right? Wrong. Jon kicked us off the Mac Pro so he can work on Yarbus. Andy's computer can only be used when he's not there and when Jon's not running a test. So, Erika is now using the other Mac in the main lab, Jane is set up on the one in the Purkinje Tracker room (a.k.a. the Room of Doom), and we set up another one in there for me. Problem is, there's only one internet connection for two computers, and the wireless doesn't reach this half of the building. So, for a university calling itself an 'Institute of Technology', swapping one internet lead between two computers every time someone else needs the internet seems rather counterintuitive, doesn't it? Oh well. I'll bring in a longer cable to steal a connection from the lab proper tomorrow.

After a quick meal at Crossroads with Gretchin and Laura, we returned to get cracking on the Descriptions Transcriptions. So, we located both the scripts and the movies and compared the two in a check for accuracy. We got through two each with only minor issues, and will hopefully make even better progress tomorrow.