Day XIV: Building an Experiment

Today, I played with Legos. Oh sure, we had a very important goal and a scientific reason, but that doesn't change the fact that a fair chunk of today was spent playing with Legos. This was a part of Matt and Jane's part of our research, when the participant is given a specific brick to find and must locate it as quickly as possible. We used a large baseplate and created a random pattern of bricks on it, with one unique one that was designated as the target. We took a picture of it with the lab's amazing digital camera and put it on Matt's computer. There, he could spin it and invert it and make many, many test images from one plate. In the end, we created three plates, some with a single-brick target and other (harder) ones where the target was a specific grouping of bricks. To help us set up our experiments, Jeff and Andy gave us some papers and textbook passages to read, which we did during lunch.

Since the weather was quite wet today, we passed on a rooftop lunch in favor of one of the corner conference rooms. It was great to see daylight while working again...windowless labs get a bit stuffy after a couple of weeks. So we discussed our papers and our projects and built another plate while laughing at the odd looks we were getting from passerby as we crowded around a Lego bucket. After that, Erika and I went back to work on our own project and got some advice from Jeff and Andy on formatting and procedure. It was pretty funny watching them race to find Waldo, too. (Jeff won). Joe was less funny, but that might have been because he spent a bunch of time in the Air Force examining satellite images and after that, spotting a red Lego probably isn't so hard.

After working on our PowerPoint and Matt/Jane's, I went back to transcribing. I think I knocked off ten-twenty more scenes, and the remainder won't take me long tomorrow. Well, now I'm off to write my summer project!