Thursday, August 5, 2010

August 5th

Today I put the finishing touches on my presentation. I added a few graphs from the first series, and changed around a bunch of the slides. Other than that I just worked on an outline for my own benefit. After listening to Alex's presentation, I gave mine and received criticism on it. I still have some work to do on it, but it should be ready for my presentation in the spring.

August 4th

Wednesday, I spent pretty much the entire day working on my presentation. I have made a series of animated pictures that will help explain overcharging and the counter ion density wave theories. I also recruited the aid of Atwater Animations Inc. to help with some of the method slides. I think that over all, my presentation is really coming together.

August 3rd

On Tuesday, I finished up with my final analysis of the data for the second series. I calculated all of the averages a different way, one which I found to be a much better representation of the data. I got the concentrated series to agree very closely with the diluted trials, which is very promising. I also began updating my presentation for Thursday.

August 2nd

I spent most of Monday organizing and analyzing the data from the second series. This included looking through all of the raw data from all of the trials, and making sure there were no large problems with it. I also updated it to take into account the standard deviation of the mean.

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Monday, August 2, 2010

July 29

Today I ran 2 digestions with the only difference being how much nuclease i put in each sample. In one i put a 10x dilution of our nuclease and in the other i put a 100x dilution. I kept everything else the same and used our old protocols to complete the digestion. On Monday we are going to run the gel because we have been kicked out of the chemistry department for the rest of the week.

July 29th

On Thursday, I made some new spreadsheets to analyze the data in a different way. I am trying to average the data in different ways, by averaging the values across the data series first. I think that doing this way is more accurate, because the trials are fairly consistent, and this helps to take into account where most of the error is coming from. This process seems to be making the data agree with itself more, which is promising.

July 28th

On Wednesday, I finished running the concentrated trials of the second series. I also reprocessed a few of the earlier trials, trying different calibrations. I discovered and correct one major problem, which was that I had run out of sample in one of the trials. This was throwing that trial way off, because it was taking values when there was no sample left. Reprocessing some of the data with different calibrations also helped make the data more consistent.

July 27th

On Tuesday, I continued to prepare and run the concentrated trials for the second series. So far things are going well, but the data is not quite matching up with the diluted trials. This could be because of the way I am analyzing the data, or also from problems and inconsistencies in the data itself.