Week 1 (June 4 - June 8):

    Since I was here last summer, I had things scheduled in the lab before I arrived. I started out first thing Monday morning with Sib Sitting (watching the siblings of children being tested so their parents can help with the study). I also got to start meeting the new members of the lab! During the remainder of the week, I did a lot of reading to prepare myself for the two projects that I will be playing an active role in. I was also trained to run kids on the behavioral project I am working on, and I practiced with other members of the lab pretending to be the children. I feel that I am prepared for the experiment now, which is good since I start running kids early Monday morning!

    Outside of the lab, I spent a bit of time around Boulder (I’ll be doing much more of that as the summer progresses). I also rented a bike through the CU Bike Program. A bike definitely makes getting around easier, and Boulder is a town with bike racks everywhere! Since I’m living in an apartment on campus, I also started cooking on my own. This is my first experience being entirely responsible making all of my meals (when I have an actual kitchen at least). I’m enjoying it so far, although I’m still getting used to not having a microwave.

Week 2 (June 11 - June 15):

    This week I started running kids in the behavioral experiment! It was very exciting, and most of the kids have been really good so far. We also had our first really crazy week in the lab, with 35 kids coming in during the week, most on Thursday and Friday mornings. This was a bit chaotic, but we had lots of people there, so it all worked out.

    For the modeling project, I continued my reading (something that will probably be continuing to some extent for the entire summer). I also got a better idea of what the project is. As the summer progresses, I will be updating the description on the Research Project page. Eliana and I also discussed possible conferences to submit to and the plan to write up the paper from last summer’s work!

    Outside of work, I have traveling around Boulder some more. There is an outdoor mall a couple of miles away where I have spent some time. This weekend I’m planning to go to the Boulder Farmer’s Market and spend some time on Pearl Street (a few blocks that are limited to walkers and have a variety of shops and street performers).

Week 3 (June 18 - June 22):

    This past weekend I went to the Boulder Farmer’s Market. It’s pretty big and has tons of stalls to visit! In addition to the regular farm stands, there’s also a group of restaurants who have stands set up, similar to at a carnival. There’s tons of good food to buy at these. I definitely need to remember to not eat before I go in the future!

    In addition to enjoying Boulder, I did a bit of work this weekend. I found the vocabulary-size-matched children to go with the bilingual children we already have for the modeling project.

    During the week I met with the other professor working with us on the modeling project. I also wrote a program to create a random set of words that matches the size of a vocabulary that I input. This is the first set controls to compare the bilingual and English monolingual children to. I also wrote the program to randomly start a network and then grow it according to rules to a size that I input. This weekend the lab is going to see the animated movie Brave, which will be lots of fun!

Week 4 (June 25 - June 29):

    Last weekend was a lot of fun despite the heat. On Saturday I went to the Boulder County Farmer’s Market and got breakfast. They have a group of stands from local restaurants, so I got food from the Indian restaurant there. I then went downtown to the International Festival and walked around and visited all of the booths. They had a large tent set up with various local dance groups performing, so I watched some of those groups. They were really good.

    This week started out with a big event in Boulder. A lightening strike started a fire just over the first Flatirons Mountains and resulted in a huge wildfire. Even now, four days later, it’s still 300 acres. Part of the city of Boulder was on pre-evacuation notice, but they have the fire controlled now so it’s not as big of a worry.

    Outside of the excitement of the fire, I have been working on my current projects as well as starting the process of writing up the modeling project I did last summer. This has mostly just been focusing on reading more background research right now in order to prepare the introduction of the paper. I am still running kids in my behavioral project. I also finished perfecting my program to grow networks that I wrote last week.I also created a lot (about 4600) networks from that program to go with the children that we have for the modeling project.

Week 5 (July 2 - July 6):

    This week was fairly quiet as a whole. I continued working on my reading for writing up the work I did last summer for that modeling project. I also wrote a program to convert text files of tuples into CSV files with complete vocabularies. This allowed the vocabularies I grew last week to be input into our program to build the networks and calculate appropriate statistics.

    My family came in for the holiday and are staying through the weekend. We have lots of fun things planned to do!

Week 6 (July 9 - July 13):

    The visit from my family was excellent. We went to Estes Park and Rocky Mountain National Park, as well as Celestial Seasonings and Pearl Street Mall. It was nice to see my family. I also attended the Colorado Music Festival Community Play-In Orchestra Rehearsal.

    During work I spent time reading to write up both papers. In addition, I started writing the abstract to submit our work on the modeling project from this summer to a conference. Since our lab coordinator was gone for a couple of days, I ran more kids than usual in my behavioral project, but most of them were pretty good.

    This coming weekend I will be running a kid for the behavioral project since the family cannot come in on weekdays.

Week 7 (July 16 - July 20):

    This past weekend I ran a kid for the behavioral project that couldn’t come in on weekdays. I also played oboe in the Colorado Music Festival Community Play-In Orchestra conducted by the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra’s Michael Christie. It was really enjoyable, but also scary since I was playing first oboe and there were a lot of solos. I participated in this orchestra last year as well, and this year was even better with more people playing and a rehearsal the weekend before.

    This week our lab coordinator was our for the first few days and she and I are often the only ones able to run our particular behavioral project. This meant that I had a very busy Monday morning running appointments (which take about 35 minutes) every 45 minutes. Later in the week I had few appointments since she was back, but there was still some difficultly since a family came this Friday (when another appointment was supposed to be happening) rather than next Friday when they were scheduled for.

    On the modeling project I spent the first part of the week writing the abstract to submit our work to a conference happening in February. It is not done, but it is a pretty good start considering what work we have completed on the project. I also spent a lot of time working through the 26 clustering coefficient measures for the networks that we did last summer (something that will be relevant for this summer as well to some extent).

    This weekend I plan to do some exploring around the downtown area as well as cook some new dishes.

Week 8 (July 23 - July 27):

    This past weekend was the OpenArts Festival on Pearl Street. There were tons of booths with artists selling their work. Some of it was really cool and I ended up buying a bit.

    This week I worked mainly on completing everything for the project that I focused on last summer. I spent the first couple of days continuing to work on the clustering coefficients, including explaining them to Eliana so that we could decide which were most relevant.

    Later in the week I worked on modifications of my preferential attachment program in order to make it run more successfully so that I can create the grown model networks for our work for this summer. Although it is not complete, I’m hoping that it can be finished by the end of the day Monday so that we can start to analyze the results from these networks.

    This weekend is the Rocky Mountain Tea Festival, which I am quite excited for.

Week 9 (July 30 - August 3):

    The Rocky Mountain Tea Festival was at the Boulder Dushanbe Tea House and it was quite enjoyable. I didn’t do any of the classes, which looked like fun, but there were a small number of vendors that sold really cool stuff related to tea. I got some tea and some gifts for family.

    At the beginning of the week I finished debugging my program and ran it all necessary times. For the remainder of the week, I did writing. I wrote a report about how to prepare everything related to DREU in Boulder so that future participants will know. I also did some reading about bilingual children and wrote my introduction and methods for my final report.

    This weekend is the sidewalk sales on Pearl Street and the weather is supposed to be really nice. I’m planning on enjoying my last weekend here.

Week 10 (August 6 - August 10):

    The sidewalk sales on Pearl Street were not that exciting. I did go to the Boulder Dushanbe Tea House after, though, just to have dessert. I have always gone just for a meal. and been full before getting dessert. I got a cherry sencha panna cotta and a scoop of chai ice cream. Both were absolutely amazing.

    This week I needed to finish up everything since it’s the last week I’m here. Monday afternoon (after I finished running kids in the morning) and Tuesday morning I formatted our data for analysis. Wednesday we analyzed the data and I worked on my paper. The remainder of the week was spent finishing my paper (found here) and completing various other things around the lab.

    Friday night the lab went out to dinner at The Med to celebrate my last day and Clare (the grad student in the lab) finishing teaching her class. Almost everyone was able to come for at least a few minutes, and it was tons of fun! They had delicious food and it was great to get to see everyone before I left.