Haven't Updated in a While
Haven’t updated in a while.
Anyway, I’ve put in a lot of hours in the last few weeks. Usually Lixian and I are the last people out of the lab…however I can’t really say we’re ever really the first ones there. I’m thankful that my lab is so close to Chipotle/Firehouse/Green Tango so I can easily grab food when I leave. A slightly disconcerting result of this, though, is that our refrigerator is probably more full now than even when we took the original picture that posted earlier to the blog. So I’ve been making dinner the past few nights to try to deplete the food supply. If anyone on Central reading this wants cake, feel free to stop by!
I don’t want to reveal too much about my research at the moment. Got to keep some surprises for the poster session. ☺ Right now a lot of what we’re doing is re-running a lot of different set-ups we’ve done to get clearer data. Because we have a good amount of data, we are branching out a little from our main objectives and testing some other compounds than sugars. Most of the results are consistent with our results, but a few have been a little surprising. Then again, our main findings have been quite surprising in their own right! Anyway though, we’ve been pretty successful on getting those error bars down so that a lot of the comparisons we hope to make are statistically different. In doing so, we’ve seemed to notice some even more minute differences between different sugars, but I don’t know if we will have enough flies in the upcoming days to run enough trials so we can get error bars from our Preference Indexes that are small enough to be useful. Time is always against the researcher!
However, we have collected a bunch of virgins the past few days, so we can be prepared to set up a flurry of trials at the last minute if we find out we need more data in some areas. But it’s amazing to see how much data I have recorded so far in less than a month and a half, especially since the first couple weeks we spent perfecting the set-up and not to collect data we would use for our official results. All the hard work will hopefully pay off! Over the next few datas I will need to start putting the data together in graphs and preliminary visual representations.
This summer has turned out to be a great opportunity to run this experiment because I need to put in significant time every day collecting virgins, mating flies, setting up the feeding stage, setting up the experiment, and counting. Since these all occur on different days of the adult fly’s life cycle, missing one day in effect messes up four different days of the experiment. Since I don’t really have any other commitments now though, I can come in every day to get these done. A behavioral experiment such as this with work at many specific moments of the flies lifetime would be much more difficult any other time because I need to be in lab certain times every day.
In other news, I really liked the last Harry Potter movie…even though I basically forgot everything that happened in the book. Oh, and I also turned 19 since my last post! Had a nice night at Olive Garden with friends… The birthday also contributed to the surplus of cake. I’m reading a book on the ancient Greek philosophers and I’ve gained a great new respect for Socrates…it seems like he’s usually overshadowed by Plato and Aristotle but I think Socrates is my favorite of the three. He should be known for a lot more than just the “Socratic Method.”
Oh, and what up Andre Dawkins. We NEEDED another guard. I’ve watched a bunch of Youtube highlight tapes and I’ve come away with two things: 1) He looks REALLY young. 2) But he has a REALLY complete game. He seems a little more polished of a player than Elliot was coming in. I think he’ll be able to come off the bench and get some extensive playing time. He may not be the next JJ Redick but he’s got a sweet jump shot.
Until next time,
Nick
