Day 14 – Humbled

Sorry for the MIA blog yesterday, but here’s why:

Kayak trip on the North Shore

I can honestly say, today I was more impressed than I have been in a long time. My fellow REU students, one after another, delivered excellent presentations of their data, procedures, and maps that will go into our common product. It was so impressive to see how much time and effort people put into their projects and the production of meaningful results is an added bonus. Hearing what other people had done really gave me a sense of what is going on in the valley in the areas that Julianna and I were not able to reach. The presentations seemed to give everyone of a better sense of where to head with their research, and the professors provided a little more insight into what needs to be looked at and what is beyond our reach.

I have to say, I am a bit disappointed in my work, but it certainly will give me cause to work harder in the next few days. We really struggled to learn eCognition, but I do not regret that time investment. I think now that we both feel more comfortable with the software, we can be an asset down the road to help other team members. But I really would have liked to have done more with our classification, perhaps a comparison in Erdas or at least playing around with more powerful functions in eCognition.

I still get a little nervous with public speaking, a skill that has taken me years to get better at. Overall though, I am happy with the classification we produced, but it needs more time to be a product I feel comfortable using. I would like to generate at least 50 sample points to create an error matrix to see how we did.

Bare ground classification in the works

With today’s arrival of Dr. Becker, our research team is now complete. Tomorrow we will be discussing our research plans, so I really need to refine my ideas into something meaningful.

After a full day of sitting, we trekked the roundtrip of 5 miles to 7-eleven to get some exercise. It is amazing how different some of the food is here. In the aisle that normally houses 99 cent bags of gummy bears, we found similar style bags of dehydrated “mixed seafood,” which I have to say was intriguing. I settled on a frozen pineapple pop, which turned out to taste like a stick of butter. It ended in the trash and I headed home.

Looking forward to some morning flights. I am also hoping to take part in creating the collective geodatabase for our common product. As dumb as some of this stuff makes me feel sometimes, I know I can handle that!