Created 07/14/2017 at 2017:01PM

Okay - so we definitely learned about the challenges of data collection in research at the start of this week.

In all of my prior research projects, the data was either nicely packaged and collected for me, and at shifted data points into different columns, and plotted them through different views, a Principle-Component Analysis, or a time series superposition. At times, I complained loudly about the missing data points which were making my data analysis procedures so much harder - never knowing the difficulty of pain and effort to collect it in the first place. From computational hydrogeology to aerospace engineering, to cancer cell line data and patient data, I have never had to deal with the difficulty of actually collecting the data myself. The closest I have ever come before, was to watch as another unfortunate student curse her way through the week, having recognized that her project (incubated nalgene bottles strung on a PVC pipe, measuring algal populations), had physically fallen apart under the weathering and marmots and was at the bottom of a pristine alpine aquifer. While I do not remember the specific outcomes, there was discussion of hiring a dive team to fetch the materials out of the bottom of the lake so that the water quality would not be adversely affected in the future. Observing this, I thought that data collection could go wrong, yet I still thought that it would go smoothly, with a human subject. Aren’t people intuitive and reasonable? - not quite so it turns out.

We had a trial “pretend” run of data collection, which gave us the clear view of the many holes in the procedure, and the need for much greater and smoother preparation. Turns out, writing every movement out, even though it’s not like you’re synthesizing organic chemicals under significant time and material constraints, human-subjects, are very much sensitive to verbal and nonverbal communication inputs as well.

Throughout the rest of the week, we have been practicing and refining our protocol, doing trial runs for data collection on interns and also ourselves. We are still developing models for the trainees in the trials to “learn” how to perform various surgical tasks, but should have those finalized very soon. Next week on Monday - we are re-running a trial simulation, and this time, we hope to be cleared for the real data collection.

I can’t believe it’s already halfway over - time is passing by so quickly and it feels like it was just yesterday that I first walked in.