Recent Exposures

Just a quick post to say Go BEAVERS!!!!!  Today the Beavers won the World Series of College Baseball in Omaha for the 2nd straight year in a row!!!! 

Again.. another really interesting read… not really.  Yesterday our Field Geophysics class went to the field behind the Wave Center again to try some seismic refraction
field techniques.  This involved laying down a line of around 60 geophones dug several inches into the earth with a pick ax over a line several hundred meters long.  We then dug holes at intervals over the line, put a metal plate on the ground and smashed it as hard as we could with a sledgehammer to produce seismic waves which were then recorded (or not recorded by Anne because I had to come back today with her husband to help her re-do all the shots).  In any case it was exhausting work digging the holes and it was 95 degrees out which made it super hot without any shade.  Oh… and I got poison oak all over my leg… yeah…

What… you don’t know what Magnetotellurics is?  ;).  It’s basically the study of the deep earth using earth’s natural electromagnetic field that is created through the earth’s interactions with solar energy in the ionosphere.  These electric "tides" can be
measured in the earth to look at the structures deep beneath the ground.  I have been hired on as an outside consultant to work with Adam Schultz this summer installing these stations around the country with my Indian counterpart Prasanta who is a post-doc from India visiting the school.  Today we went to Soap Creek to re-install the backbone magnetometers that Jan Baur had installed but had been pushed out of the ground by the rising water table over the winter.  To this extent we rented an auger which Adam seemed pretty pleased to drive.  We had to go through the OSU animal study center (cows) to get to the site.  It took the afternoon and everything went pretty well.  Prasanta knows much more than I about the discipline but I can tell I’m going to be the muscles behind the installations this summer…. yippie.

Doesn’t that title just grab your attention…  haha.  Today my Field Geophysics class did some EM field work in the field behind the Wave Center where my roomate works. This involved simply walking a line with coils of wire that have an electric current passed through them.  This current would essentially reflect signals at a frequency out of phase with the transmitted signal from layers of earth of different resistivity (inverse of conductivity).   Doesn’t that sound grand… Anyway, here’s a picture.

Well, this week was finals for my 2^nd term here
at Oregon State University.   My classes this winter term were Sedimentary
Processes in the Ocean Basins and Igneous & Tectonic Processes in the Ocean
Basins. I also took a course called
Success in the Classroom which was ungraded but taught me a lot about how to
effectively educate as a TA or a college professor. I wasn’t as nervous for finals as I was last
semester because I realize now that if you put in a lot of effort and the
professors can see that they will give you a passing grade as a graduate
student. I’m still torn over which
direction I’m going to go with my research. Right now I technically have about 3 advisors. With Anne Trehu I’m working on seismic
profiles off the coast of Oregon to better understand the tectonic structure of the subduction zone there and
the possibility of a major earthquake that could trigger a tsunami. With Rob Harris I’m traveling around the
state to various bore holes (deep holes in the ground) to measure electrical resistivity
which can then be converted to heat measurements to look at heat flow within
the earth in tectonic regions. I’m also
working with Adam Schultz here to measure magnetotellurics within the earth
(basically measuring electrical currents within the earth). The good thing is that those three topics are
3 out of the 4 fields being measured in the massive Earthscope project, the other being
geodetic satellite data. In this way
I’ll have exposure to the major aspects of the largest geological/geophysical
survey ever taken of the United States and will be a prime candidate for
working in the National Parks with ranges to disseminate the information
gathered from the project to the public (building my professional development
resume in education as well as research). Anyway, that’s just a little update as to what I’m doing here lately if
anyone is interested. Finals were ok and
I think I did pretty well this semester.

Emily comes tomorrow! Yeah!!!

Update: Got an A and B this semester keeping my GPA at a
3.47. And apparently after hitting up
Squirrels last night there are quotes from me up on Facebook such as “If I had
a belt full of kangaroo nutsacks I’d fill them full of grape sweedish
fish”. Honestly… where do I pull this
shit out of?

Started my new research with my new PI Rob Harris this week.  We went out to a borehole near Lebanon to take measurements of electrical resistivity in the 200 meter deep hole which can be converted to temperature measurements.  The procedure is
prettty easy and simply involves slowly lowering a sensor from a spool into a large pipe hole that runs vertically into the ground while a computer records measurements taken.   It was a beautiful day and the sun was out keeping it warm.  A cat from the nearby farm also paid us a visit.  Rob is a great guy and we are already getting along great and I feel more comfortable talking with him than I currently do with Anne. 

Today I helped out Eleanor and Coral with the Salmon Bowl, a nationwide competition of high school kids in Oceanography.  I was a timer while my buddy Mac was the score

keeper for two rounds.  It was a ton of fun and some of the questions were pretty hard. This evening Eleanor and Anna had a party at there place of all the volunteers.  I went over with my friend Kristen Splinter for a few drinks before heading home around midnight.  Highlight of the night was Sam piss-drunk in a wife-beater talking about his position in student government.  :) 

Today I volunteered to go out on the Elakha (COAS research vessel) to retrieve our autonomous glider named Bob.  Let me first tell you a little bit about the Glider and provide a link :)   

The glider is a torpedo shaped research instrument that travels around the ocean due to changes in it’s bouyancy.  A bladder inside of the $100,000 instrument fills with air and brings it to the surface and then deflates so that it can sink into the water column.  By attaching wings that are angled it also is moved
forward by this sinking, rising motion.  It has a range of several thousand km but right now OSU is using it just off the coast of Oregon.  It has sensors on it that measure temperature, salinty, oxygen content, water pressure, and it’s path indicates current direction.  When it is at the surface it recieves a gps fix which then directs it back onto path, although a strong current can often carry it well off it’s intended path.  In fact when we picked it up a current had dragged it 7 miles to the north of where it should have ended up

It was an early morning trip out with Tristan and Anatoli to pick it up in calm seas.  I think it was 7ft swells over a 10 second period if I remember right.  I was able to hook it with a gaff on board and then they hauled it on board the ship.  Everything went smoothly and I was back on campus by noon.  It was really great to finally get out on our research vessel and on the Pacific for the first time. 

Ok, time for me to vent a little bit here by telling you what I’m up against here. 

1.  I’ve gone back to graduate school at one of top research university’s in the country after 4 years of being out of school not really using my brain and slowly forgetting what I had learned. 

2. My research involves having a pretty thorough understanding of the UNIX computing environment which I had never worked in before coming here and have
had to teach myself on the side.  If you don’t know UNIX let me digress:  It looks like dos.  If you add one extra space to a script or a / or $ where it shouldn’t be, the system locks up and you can’t do a thing.  This is especially frustrating when you can’t find your mistake on pages and pages of numbers or when my advisor leaves for the day thinking that I’ll have everything wrapped up for the following morning. 

3.  My research also involves higher level math and physics, examples being matrix theory and applied differential equations and seeing that I haven’t had a math or physics course in 7 years I’m pretty lost. 

4.  Because I haven’t had math in 7 years my advisor felt it necessary for me to catch up on math so I’m now taking Differential Equations with undergrads which I’ve been
told here is the hardest undergraduate math course offered and unless I have an expert knowledge of Integral and Differential Calculus I will fail.  Hmmm…. I remember taking integral 7 years ago but have no clue what it involved.  So… I’ve spent 80 bucks on Calc for dummies books and am in the process of teaching myself the two courses (integral and differential calculus) that are needed in order to pass the Differential Equations course I’m enrolled in…Essentially I’m taking 3 math courses in one right now… and not doing well. 

5. Lets talk about hours here… My research assistantship demands 20hrs/wk.  I am in class 14hrs/wk.  The professors ask that as students we prepare atleast 2-3 hours for each lecture they give.  I’m taking 4 classes.  One of them doesn’t have any prep work for it so I’ll just use the other 3 which meet 3 times per week.  So…. 3×3 = 9.  So for each of those 9 hours of class (and I’ll low-ball it here) I am asked to spend 2 hours preparing for it.  So 9×2 = 18hrs/wk prep for classwork.  But wait… I’m teaching myself
two other math courses, how to work in UNIX, and learning the background of inverse modeling for my research so we should easily tack on another 10hrs/wk for that as well.  And, I have to work on the side to pay my bills.  The schedule I’ve attached is the one I would have if I still was bartending.  Now I’ve found other data entry work that fills those hours up anyway that I’ll get paid for.  So, I’ll low ball it again and say 10hrs/wk of outside work.  Lets add those hours up now shall we?  20 + 14 + 18 + 10  + 10 = 72 hrs/wk of classwork/work/class/research.  On a week like midterms (this upcoming week I could spend 90 hours).   I’ll say that between waking up, showers, breakfast, lunch and cooking dinner it’s about 20hrs/wk for that.  72 + 20 = 92.  I also go to Corvallis Mountain Rescue meetings once a week or have training for it all day on saturday so we can add on an average of 4 hrs/wk for that as well 92 + 4 = 96.  I also work out for an hour each day to stay in shape.  96 + 7 = 103.  There.. 103 hours per week.  The rest of the time is is my time.  Now for the fun of it lets break down how much "my time" I have.  24hrs x 7 days = 168 hrs/wk.  I like to get 8 hours of sleep a day.  8×7=56.  168-56 = 112hrs of "awake time".  112hrs "awake time" - 103 hrs "busy time" = 9 hrs/wk "my time".  This is a little over 1 hour a day when my day starts at 8 am and finishes at midnight.  And oh, look… I’ve just wasted the one hour of "my time" writing this!

6.  At this point in time I should be starting to think about what I want to do with the research for my Masters here.  How can I do this when I don’t even understand the research I’m doing?

7.  I think I may be the only one here without a laptop to take with them to class or home to continue work or something.  This is a big disadvantage as I’m a much faster typist than note taker by hand.  Thankfully, Jason has let me borrow his old one but the battery is dead and it constantly needs a wall outlet which leaves me in the back of the room squinting at powerpoint presentations.

8.  I function well socially but now I have no time to socialize.  I find myself meeting everyone out at Bombs on Tuesday night just to run around in circles trying to make quick conversations with everyone I know because I have so little time throughout the week to maintain friendships here.

9.  I’m thinking about switching advisors and my research here.  If you’ve never been in graduate school let me tell you right now, THIS IS A HUGE MOVE.   It means letting my advisor down so that I can move to an area that interests me more and if I don’t do it right it could leave me without funding.  Right now I think I’m going to try to finish out the research I have now until it’s done with at the end of the calender year, but I have to start looking around now for something where I can use the skills set I already have to my advantage.

10.  #10 is my personal life.  An elderly father who is sick, a daughter who I love but can’t be with, a mother who worries about me and doesn’t understand where I’m coming from right now, and a girlfriend whom I love.  All the people I love are on the other side of a continent from me.  The activities that keep me sane - going to the mountains for biking, skiing, mountaineering, I seem to not have time for anymore. 

Thus is the life of a graduate student.  To give you a better understanding of what I’m trying to learn look at the pics and read this:  It’s one of the paragraphs in a paper my advisor told me should be an easy read.

" We have used an iterative backprojection method based on that described by Hole [1992].  For the inverse step the model is parameterized in terms of constant slowness cells, the cells being equal in size to the node spacing of the forward step.  The slowness in each cell equals the average of the slownesses of the nodes at the eight corners of the cell.  (1) The ray-path-averaged slowness perturbation for each ray passing through the cell equal to change in t/l, where t is the travel time residual of the ray and l is its total length, and (2) the number of rays passing through the cell.  After the rays are traced the slowness update for each cell through which at least one ray passes equals the first sum divided by the second sum." 

The best part of this is that it doesn’t reference to an equation or figure anywhere for a better understanding.  If you understood it please give me a call and explain it to me!

This week has been pretty exhausting for me.  I finally decided that I needed to drop my math course Matrix and Power Series because I was completely lost.  I had no right being in that class after 6 years of having no math whatsoever.  My advisor should have told me how to prepare months before I came out here when I asked her repeatedly too.  Now I just feel lost and I’m having to work incredibly hard (think 12 hour days 6 days a week). 
    Anyway, enough complaining and boo-hooing… Here’s what took place today.  In my Physical Oceanography class we had to make a presentation in lab on the effects of the coriolis force (Force
that deflects water to the right of it’s path of motion in the Northern Hemisphere due to the earth’s rotation - simple explanation).  Everyone was going to use pottery wheels, water buckets, etc but I of course wanted to do something
memorable…  So I decided that we (Brycen, Karen, Brendan and I) should buy a kids pool table from Walmart and rig it up to a merry-go-round and shoot pool to demonstrate it.  So today Brycen picked up the pool table and we went down to the playground at the pre-school on 29th street to shoot some film of Brendan and I playing pool.  Well, as soon as we go there kids started to pour out of the building for recess, and we were’t supposed to be there.  After talking to the principal (Princi-Pal) he agreed to let us do our expirement which thoroughly entertained all the liltle kids who instantly got excited about the science experiment! 
    We had a great time playing pool on the spinning merry-go-round.  Everytime we’d shoot the ball straight it would get deflected to the right which made for some great hook trick shots… Check out the video we made for class HERE.  At the end I got down to the ground so that all the kids could see
themselves in the video on my camera.  As we left they all ran up to the fence to wave good bye to me.  The project wasn’t even for a grade but we definitely got a few laughs in the class when we presented… and we even got to buy something from Walmart, rip the box apart and then return it (I hate Wally Mart!).