Hey!

This week has been pretty slow. Sensor orders have been placed so now is the waiting game. It feels so odd to have all of this time to work on other things besides looking for data loggers.

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Deliverables

Paper. I have really been trying to get our paper together, especially now that we have more time. I feel like we have a pretty good grasp on the direction it is heading. I plan on reading about 3 papers this week that can be useful since we’ve added another section to our related works. I’ve also been working on some short summaries to use for an annotated bib.

Publications. A variety of climate journals and potentially a CHi work in progress or CHI student research are possible publication venues. However, timelines are pretty tight right now so we’ll see how that goes as we progress.

Peer Review. The peer review for this week was pretty cool. We didn’t have too much to edit. I kind of wish reviews were a little more critical (not in the mean way) though. I know that our paper is not perfect and I want to make it better. I tried to make my peer review for another group’s paper more thorough.

Website. I finally finished drafting my website. I don’t really like the template I used anymore, but I don’t want to go through the hassle of changing everything. Typical indecisive Kiarra. (Edit: I actually did end up switching templates. And there’s still some things I’m not happy with but I think I’m just being too picky. We’ll see how it looks by the time I’m done changing things.)

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Meetings

This week Susan and I met with Dana, James, and Dani. We mainly just talked more in depth about the back end for the database. Dani showed us the relational database that he planned to create and some examples of graphs and maps to use to visualize the data. We also talked about how the sensors would be organized within the database. Once I get some more sample files in order, we will be discussing the database for the wearables. Today made me realize how complicated this data collection and storage might be.

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Fun Stuff

Gustavo, Bri, and I went on a mini road trip to Nashville and Louisville over the weekend. We didn’t stay long in either city because we were running on time constraints but it was a nice trip. In Louisville, we ate breakfast at this packed restaurant and went to this cool eccentric store where we took a lot of pictures. I bought a bracelet from there too. I got a sticker for buying local 🙂 We then went to Lincoln’s birthplace which was also in Kentucky but about an hour away from Louisville. It was a nice little park but I didn’t really enjoy it. It made me kind of uncomfortable because Lincoln, the 1800s, and my skin color, so ya know.

From there, we headed to Nashville. We didn’t get to do much there because two of three of us are under 21, and Nashville is filled with bars and clubs. Plus we did not have a lot of time to spend. We went to Centennial park and saw the Parthenon. I wasn’t expecting for the statue of Athena to be so huge. We also got snow cones in the park and took more pictures. The scenery was beautiful. We then went to the little cafe where Taylor Swift was discovered. It wasn’t open yet. A lot of the restaurants in that particular area of Nashville didn’t open until 5pm and that was the time we planned on heading back to Indiana. We ended up just walking around downtown and admiring places from the outside. We also had dinner there too.