Candid Student Reports

The following (emails) were written by members of the TIP Tapper program during the first day of the third week of the program. Some elements may have been removed for various reasons, but the text that remains is in the student's own words.

 
We spent this morning working on the first part 
of our presentation because we needed some 
information from Viki Stocking before we could 
work on our algorithm.  This afternoon we 
researched suicide and eating disorders so that 
we can better understand the effects of a low 
self esteem. Our project is coming together 
nicely and hopefully the Phd's will be happy 
with our results. :)


 Liz and Bev
 

 
Except for the fact that we just found out that 
we are presenting our project right after a 
break, today was a good day.  We have most of 
our model done, the work at least.  Now we have 
to just put on the finishing touches, and put 
together the presentation.  Of course, we still 
have some stuff to do with figuring out what 
certain things mean, but for the most part, 
today made us pretty optimistic.  The other 
part of our group seems to be doing well also, 
but we have to read thirty pages of information 
tonight to understand some of the application 
part of the project.  Hopefully tomorrow we can 
find a sedative for Natalie at Eckerd's.  :-)


 Madhu and Renee
 

 
Today was monday, and it was pretty frustrating, 
but what else is new?  Me and Matt spent most of 
the day trying to decipher the stuff in our 
article and put it into our stella model.  So 
far, we're doing pretty well, i guess, but all 
this scientific poopstuff is really hard to 
read. (These are Natalie's words)


 Matt and Natalie
 

 
Today we launched a frisbee into outer space at 
a rate approximately one octillion times the 
speed of light.  It was fun.  I think we found 
a decent example of large scale modeling error.  
Seriously, we got a lot done though.  At 
reasonable speeds, our model works very well 
along the X and Y axes.  The only things left 
to put into our model are spin and movement 
along the Z-axis.  This project seems to be 
comming along very well.


 Eric, Ben and Harding
 

 
We finished part of our model and we are currently 
using microsoft excel to make a spreadsheet and 
graph which will be our model.  The coordinates 
part and plotting the course of the Tsunami part 
is difficult to do.  We are having trouble with 
putting in the vast number of depths for the 
ocean.


 Kevin, Alexander, and Russell
 

 
Today we made another, hopefully final, change 
in our project's direction. We are now modeling 
the appropriate construction of a flute (really; 
I'm not kidding) out of a length of PVC pipe 
(still not kidding). The finall application will 
be an HTML document that uses Javascript to 
process the information and return it in a form.


 Ryan