I started doing more research on the top social networking sites. I got four more sites done. I also met with the PhD student who has been working on the code for part of this project. I helped create some classes (we're using Java) that link to other parts code that she had completed. We're going to meet again tomorrow to add more classes once she gets another meaty section of code done.

I finished up research on the top 15 social networking sites. Near the bottom of the list, most of them had turned into pretty much dating websites, so it was a bit awkward navigating through them. I have to remember to delete all these accounts I created on these sites once we're done with this research. Even though I used my spam email account, I still don't like dead accounts existing that are linked to me in some way. I met with the PhD student again but she was having problems with the code, so I wasn't able to do my part of the code today.

I started working on more research paper summaries. I have five more papers I need to summarize, two of which I still need to read. Then I need to make a broad summary of all the papers. I wrote 48 classes in the code the PhD student is working on plus more lines of code in existing classes. It's a bit awkward, but this is how the code was written by the original author who isn't around PSU anymore, so this is how we have to work with it.

I met with my mentor today instead of our usual Friday because she had another conference to go to again, I believe. She went over my top fifteen social networking site research. We discussed the similarities and differences of all the privacy settings on the websites. We also discussed the future plans of the project. Next week I am to put together an analysis/report type of document describing my findings on the social networking sites. We still have to discuss the research papers and the findings in them and I'll have to write up another analysis paper based on those papers. That will probably be the week after. We will then move onto designing a research survey. We'll need to get the survey/data collection approved and I'll need to be approved to do the survey by taking an online certification course. That's the game plan for the next few weeks. My mentor said she would give me one final paper to read.

After I met with my mentor, I went to meet with the PhD student working on the code for the other project. Today I didn't get to help much because she was having issues with the code. When the program was executed, it ended up taking exponentially more time to finish when we added more features and privacy to the data the program uses. I did find the cause for a different error at one point in time, which made me feel good about being able to help, even if just a little bit. I read one of the two papers I have left to read.

I met with the PhD student again to work on the code. I was surprised to find that she found another error. The code takes people with similar features (like location, gender, age) and groups them based on those similarities. It outputs groups of these people displaying their unique ID (ex: 16, 42, 95). It then takes these groups and further divides them based on similar privacy features they set, (ex: allow all family to comment on photos, etc.). The problem was that when the code executed, it wouldn't display this final list with the unique IDs of each person, but a new set of IDs starting at 0. So it would display (0,2) instead of (16,95) in a group. To me, that problem seemed like a simple fix, but the student explained that it's actually fairly complicated. She wasn't the original writer of the code (the original person left) so she doesn't fully understand everything. I felt bad, because if she was having issues, there was no way I'd be able to help. There was another error in a simple loop method that she asked me to look into. She figured out the problem before I could though. She also asked me to find out how to print output from Eclipse to a text file because she couldn't figure out how to do it, which I was able to figure out.