Brief but important. /Angelynn

I was introduced to the "top secret curatorial office" this week, and have been spending most of my time in there since. Yep, more reading and getting acquainted with the goods. I went through numerous files of artists who have worked with MoCA Tucson. Additionally, I also worked with Allison in the Development department. We sorted out some more items from the LGA Gala auction items and contacts their winning bidders. She was great and very patient with answering all of my questions regarding MoCA, the Committee, and the Board of Directors, as I hadn't a strong and clear idea of who what is and what it is they do.

Unfortunately, this is all I can share with you for this week as my week has been cut short at the MoCA: Reed College (Portland, Oregon) is flying me out to meet and spend some time with them! Before I go, though I will not be attending the Museum Studies session this coming Friday, I hope you will check it out at MoCA's website at http://www.moca-tucson.org/.

Museum Studies
Select Fridays
3pm, $5 for members, $10 for non-members

This course is designed for participants in our Museum Studies Program, however, we are opening up the course to interested parties. Interested parties may include prospective docents, students, community members, artists wanting to learn more about art culture and the industry, teens considering a museum career, anyone interested in learning more about new art and new ideas.

April 1: What is a museum? What is an art museum? What is a contemporary art museum?

April 15: Modernism, Post-Modernism, High Corporatism: How Global Capital Affects World Heritage

May 13: The Culture Brokers: Who or what determines quality in art?

May 27: Priced Out: Museums and the Market

Last but not least,

Free on the evening of April 10th? Want to enrich yourself with an exquisite treat? Then make sure to mark on your calendar the Spring Gala by the Tucson Philharmonia Youth Orchestra! (Come support Jayanth, Eric, Adelynn, and me.)

Spring Gala 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011 • 7:00 pm
Catalina Foothills HS Auditorium
Tickets
General Admission $14
Senior/Students $7
Students who are current members of their school band or orchestra will receive a complimentary ticket

P.S.: This will be my last performance with the TPYO before I start a new chapter with college. So..come!

As to my fellow classmates, congratulations and best wishes to all who have heard, and have yet to hear, about their college admissions!

Until the next,
Axk.

To Death I Say, Nay! - Sierra

I'm posting quite late for this (last) week, but I had a murderously hectic week! A new surge of work combined with a bad case of phlegm and headache wasn't exactly ideal, but it seems I'm springing back. First, I've been working on a draft of a contextual overview of the environmental issues going on in Tucson, which has involved a bit of looking at old Tucson newspapers and such in order to finalize my outline. I am also, as of this last week, officially responsible for two sections of an Environmental Assessment - Hazardous Materials & Solid Waste, and Sustainability & Greening. This means that I will be researching the implications of a project proposed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in these contexts. The project is based in California and involves the improvement of three access roads that will allow for CBP to bring materials to a border fence for further improvement (which requires a separate EA). In terms of hazardous waste, there won't be much to report, but sustainability can include everything from the fuel and efficiency of the machinery used to improve the roads to the percentage of post-consumer recycled material used in the paper the project's various reports and proposals are printed on. So far, it's a bit scary (it's an OFFICIAL report!) but stupendously fun and interesting, and should give me good material that I can use in my editorial on the efficiency of environmental assessments and compliance reports. This week, I'll be continuing to work on my EA sections and will also finalize outlines of both a basic history report of environmental policy on the federal and state levels as well as a more in-depth outline of the workings of HEG and the NEPA process. (These should be easier/quicker since the research is already completed.) I will also be getting written responses to a survey I sent out at the end of last Friday to the employees of HEG, which included questions about each employee's specific role in HEG and what they each see as the most gratifying parts of the NEPA process and the most frustrating parts. These answers will be crucial to my final editorial, so I'm feeling rather giddy with anticipation for the responses. Until a healthier time, Sierra

Dr. Muhammad Yunus, part two

As promised, here is a post regarding my finishing of Dr. Muhammad Yunus’ book Banker to the Poor. I actually typed this up in the Houston airport and never posted it.

In the latter chapters of his book, Yunus outlines principles of business based on “social consciousness.” He argues that it is clear that humans have a desire to help others, as demonstrated by willingness to donate to charities, volunteer with organizations, and occasionally help the poor panhandler on the street. If this benevolence exists in society, then, it should be possible to create a framework for what he terms “social businesses.”

In current capitalist structures, the profit-maximization rule prevails: in many cases a CEO of a company may be sued if it is found that he made a decision for a company knowing that his actions would not maximize revenue and profit (this is part of corporate law). Where profit is the only goal, there is little room for companies to take into account the social consequences of their actions. What Yunus proposes is to create businesses that follow a maximization rule in which both profit and social return are taken into account. He describes two types of social business. The first is a business that is owned by investors and provides products or services beneficial to the community. The second is owned by the poor, thus allowing profits to go back to the poor.

Dr. Yunus’ dream still follows the rules of capitalism. Firstly, social businesses will compete with each other for customers and investors. Customers will choose to patronize a business based off both the quality of product and the extent of social return, encouraging the businesses to constantly be improving their service. Secondly, social businesses will compete in the market with profit-maximization businesses. Again, a customer will take into account the fact that social businesses are in some way socially beneficial, an allure that profit-maximizing businesses do not have.

While I'm on the subject of Yunus, I suggest checking out this interesting article.

There isn't particularly much to do in Nebaj. I did a hike last Tuesday that offered wonderful views of the surrounding mountains. Some of the work that I have been assigned is to provide English descriptions for hikes offered by the SolCom tourism office here in Nebaj. This town is actually where it all started, and the restaurant and tourism office are geared toward keeping tourists in Nebaj for an extra day or two, thus contributing to the local economy. My own contributions to the economy thus far involves being slightly ripped off in buying a beautiful woven bag in the market. I purchased it for 150Q when apparently they can go for about 70Q. Fortunately for me, this mistake really only means the loss of about an extra ten dollars for a handcrafted useful item. I know now for the future.

I have also been working on creating a pamphlet (in English) for Soluciones Comunitarias. My first deadline is a week for today, so that the pamphlet may be reviewed at the monthly meeting. That means I will be traveling to Antigua again. I will then have a several day "vacation," as I am arranging to travel up north to visit Tikal, the most famous and largest of all Mayan ruins in the world.

I shall see about getting some pictures up!

IRL Academics

So... the publishing business is a business. A large part of the work is business-related work. Like FILING and ORGANIZING and making sure everyone has been PAID or has paid us. Then there are the two people of our seven-people team that do creative-type stuff. Like designing books and then actually CREATING them, which is really simple-ish.

Academics-wise, I'm learning from books and some few other things. Like, for-profit publishing houses (The ones everyone knows: Panguin, Random House, Del ray) do actually choose books to publish based on if they think it is "marketable" or sellable. Will it make money? It it what the PUBLIC WANTS to read? Meaning they may be sacrificing quality (which is a rather subjective term, anyway, though one could pretty much say that there is terrible writing. But perhaps not. Bad writing could be a new, grungy form of novel that appeals to more people and speaks truth! Whatever. So, basically, there is always at least one person that can call a book 'quality.' ARG!!) for popularity. And then the non-profits (which are obessed with money, also) are definitly mission-driven. AT least Kore.

So, what you should get from this short and full and convaluted blogpost is that it is pretty much recognized by scholarly people that for-profit publishers reject some quality books because they will most likely (though who can really see the future?) not sell very much. And that there are people who say the opposite, and defend the non-quality choices of Houses. Also, that business are concerned with business, which can be dull.

~Samone

And the time starts ticking away...

Firstly, I would like to apologize for the lack of a post on Firday. It was very crazy, and I did a lot of work before I had to catch my train, so it was very much a last minute affair. Again, apologies!

Bonjour, mes amis! Back from Marseille, and I can tell you I had really a blast! From going to cultural music concerts and staying up dancing until 3 in the morning, hanging out and eating fresh grilled fish at a friend's housewarming party, and biking 20 miles along the beach, I couldn't have asked for a more picturesque setting and fun time. Well, I did get no more than 18 hours of sleep in the three days I was there, but who needs sleep when there is music to hear, places to see, and people to meet? I don't, that's for sure!

So, as I wrote in my last post, I had grown several different types of bacteria, some with the GFP genome and some with the Strawberry genome. In fact, we were supposed to grow two types of bacteria, one called wild type and the other called Delta-dna. We would then have a GFP Delta-Dna strain and a Strawberry Delta-Dna strain, and a wild type with either GFP and Strawberry. There was a small mix-up, and we ended up not having wild type GFP. I ended rushing around on Friday to resuspend some of the culture we had made earlier on Agar plates. But, Bianca had read this article that had done pretty much the same thing as what we are planning to do! What they did is mixed the bacteria in the sma solution, then put a dot on some Agar plates, and let them gorw for up to 84 hours. What I saw was astounding to say the least! The bacteria had grown and formed some sorts of patterns on the plates. The combination of red and green was not only pleasing to look at, but the sort of patterns that they made were also quite amazing and artful. So, of course, we got super excited and decided to try it out! And, man, I swear, Bianca is a genius. We had four different types of bacteria, and we need not only to make dilutions of them in medium so that they grow and we could observe them under the microscope, but we wanted to also to make every possible mix of the four different bacteria, on one plate. We both came up with the solution, and it all fit on one plate. We could do the dilutions, mixes, and the control as well, all on one plate! Ok, maybe that's not so amazing... Anyway, I began to despair at the amount of miniscule volumes that I would have to painstakingly pipet into the small wells (because everything has to be super STERILE), but then I looked around and grinned at that heavensent machine sitting in the office. We had used it already, and it had done fantastic work, so we used the pipetting machine. Once it was done, there was nothing to do but wait until Monday. So, then I boarded the TGV, slept, and hit Marseille, had a load of fun (I've said that one hundred times already), and came back. Today, what we did is took out the cultures and put them under the microscope. The thing was that we didn't have the necessary knowledge and some missing equipment, so we spent three hours bent over a very complex machine that didn't really give us any results. We have concluded that we are to replicate the experiment (some of our control was infected for some reason too) tomorrw and see what that gives us. Interesting, and quite fun too, overall!
I didn't have access to a computer in Marseile, so the writing of my story has been delayed. I have started the storyboard though, and am well into it. The storyboard is actually quite fun, but also a challenge, because it takes some knowledge to know where to put the characters and play with the point of view and all. Back to work!
See y'all!
Clover

Reflections of a Week Past--Clarice's SRP

Sorry for the bland title, but I'm still tired from last night and last week for that matter. Yesterday I accompanied Jacob to another wedding. However, my third wedding was remarkably different from my other two weddings. Over the course of two weeks, Jacob has acquired more and more video equipment. On my first wedding, I only had the Panasonic gh2, two lenses, a tri-pod, and no backup battery. Now, though, we have two video cameras, two tri-pods (with heads for the cameras), backup batteries, several lenses, two steadicams, a track dolly, video light, and a microphone for one camera. Of course, now that we have all this equipment, we need more people to help out. So, a friend of Jacob's who is interested in making his own documentary film on rock climbing went with us. Because Joe was with us, I was more relaxed than the last wedding that I was one, and I could focus more on getting artistic shots. From what I watched yesterday of the footage I took, I was pretty satisfied with what I did. I'm hoping that once I've finished editing this short film it will be the best out of my three weddings. Ah, that also reminds me! I have not yet finished editing last weddings video. Last week, which was spring break for most people was far from a break for me. More than half of last week I spent time with Eren and Ari. As you all know--or might know--they had their premiere for Precious Knowledge on Thursday evening and some more shoots for the Discovery Channel. I really only worked with Jacob for three days--if that. The bad thing about that was I couldn't finish editing the video for the last wedding we had (and now I have another video to make at the same time), but the good thing was, of course, spending time on my other internship. The shoot with Sheriff Joe went well, even though downtown Phoenix scares me. We accidentally went to the jail instead of the Wells Fargo building where is office is and all of the guards were just..... well... creepy to put it lightly. Once we got to the Wells Fargo building, Eren, Ari and I had to go up to the 19th floor with all of our equipment. Sheriff Joe.... was quite a character. The interview went for only about a half an hour, which Eren conducted. Ari and I just stood back and made sure everything was recording properly. Some of his remarks to the questions disturbed me; an example was just that he said he liked it when people called him Hitler. He also stated that he wasn't a 'media hound,' which isn't true at all. Eren and Ari are hoping to film Sheriff Joe at the tent city for the Discovery Channel as well. I don't know if there has been a date scheduled for that or not, but I will post about it once I here. To make things short, since this post is getting quite long, the premiere of Precious Knowledge was fantastic!!! I had a great time, to say the least, and the Fox Theater was over capacity. Even though there was the U of A basketball game that night, there was a very long line of people outside the theater; even after security closed the doors. We went and celebrated after the screening, and hopefully now both of them can rest a bit. Next week I should be post some of my wedding videos and maybe even another short film! Until then, adios! --Clarice

Nicole adds another 9000

Gammage Auditorium: "Bringing the outside in"

Taliesin West: Frank Lloyd Wright's summer home and school

Mr. James Abell!/Master Po

Frank Lloyd Wright's living room

Art by Olgivanna Lloyd Wright, his 3rd wife and more-than-3rd mistress

Sculptures at Taliesin West by Heloise Crista

The Allens, my host family, beautiful inside and out (from left):

Christy, Cynthia, Teddy, Michelle, Michael

Art by Jack "Smurf," an 8 year old heartbreaker, and a top notch compass from my advisor

It's done, and I feel different. Excited? Happy? Probably a combination of the two, mixed with a quiet content that won't let up. Before I move into Miss American weepiness, I will say that the internship was truly awesome. Even though I won't be going upstate regularly, I hope to keep that level of appreciation and curiosity here. I guess it's not done. Of course not.

So April and May? Bring them on.

Nicole uses 9000 words

After living upstate Monday through Wednesday, this was the last week of my 6-week internship at Abell & Associates. Instead of talking about how much I learned and what a phenomenal experience it was, I won't.

That goes without saying.

Here are some personal photos of Albert Chase McArthur's Biltmore Hotel and Paolo Soleri's Cosanti to speak up.

The Biltmore Hotel (1929)

Stairs that hang from the ceiling

Cosanti

Without a doubt, Cosanti was my favorite example of architecture. Paolo Soleri espouses "arcology," his own term combining architecture and ecology. At Cosanti (another invention meaning "against things" in italian), he and a team of fellow hippies made a village of huge structures out of concrete, clay and dirt, lived in them, and have continued to add onto them over the years. The man is 91, but the place was more 9100 BC. Soleri has another experimental camp named Arcosanti, which I would go to in a heartbeat.

Now wait! There's more.

Sorry it's been awhile: Greg Spell

Wow! I seriously do apologize for not blogging in awhile. A summary of my past couple of weeks is certainly in order:
1) Climbed Volcan Acatenango, the second largest in Guatemala and almost got robbed by bandits. Camera doesn't work anymore because I had to bury it to keep it safe :(
2) Got new camera
3) Did publicity for and participated in a Soluciones Comunitarias campaign in the town of San Juan Comelapa. A campaign is where SolCom administers free eye exams and sells an array of the beneficial products they offer. Glasses are they main product offered. Comelapa had a high percentage of people who spoke the local Mayan dialect over Spanish.
4) Got sick. 'Twas flu rather than "dribbly bum" (as I heard a British bartender call it in Antigua)
5) Relocated to the mountain town of Nebaj in the Quiche department of Guatemala.
6) From Nebaj, travel the town of Canilla (four hours) to give information about SolCom to potential new entrepreneurs. Stayed the night in Canilla.
7) Wake up at the crack of dawn to leave Canilla and travel to Xexac (pronounced "SheShak") where I participated in another campaign. To give you all an idea of how rural Xexac is, I will say that most of the people who came to the campaign didn't speak Spanish, but the local Ki'che Mayan dialect.
8) Returned to Nebaj completely exhausted.

That pretty much sums up the past couple of weeks I have had. Right now, I'm in a restaurant in Nebaj that has Internet, so I'm limited in how long I may be online. I hope to be able to post again soon with more detailed information. Until then,
Adios,
Goyo

A Moment of Your Time (please help Zobella!)

(I took this pic in Granada, Spain; it is from the Albacin neighborhood)

Hey guys and gals!

I made a survey that will help me analyze data for my multi-media book.
It would be so wonderful if all of you would take it, as well as share it with your families and friends.

Here is the link: http://brinksurvey.com/s/2011/79

Gracias!

"I have proof here!" Photography is the new painting. /Angelynn

My bibliography-making skills came in handy this week. Hurrah for all those tedious English papers and their bibliographies! I've been compiling books for the upcoming Collector's Series (which has, unfortunately, been cancelled this coming Saturday). And of course, naturally, I've been browsing and reading some of them as well. I am starting to realise that I'm really not a fan of the business and accounting parts of the museum work, but am interested instead in the intellectual and philosophical parts (discussions in Art Now! and etc.). But..we'll see where this experience will lead me.

So this week, we had Photography as our topic, and it's amazing: "Photography is the new painting." Photography was under a lot of scrutiny before the 1980s and it was difficult for society to accept it as a form of high art. The "new painting" (photography), taken through a machine with a click and printed out from another machine, was being compared with the conventional painting, laboured with hours of paint-brushes and strokes and colours and its textures and authenticity. It seemed far from right with people. Where are the art in photography? Some photographers tried to test the limits of the camera and would literally throw their cameras up in the air while leaving the shutters to automatically click with every f-stop: all about what the camera can and cannot do. Photographers really tried to make photography art in the code of paintings, such as composition and contrast. One even emphasised on making everything by his own: he would take a mugshot of a person, print that portrait in a gigantic scale, make another canvas (yes, he made the canvas), and paint the exact large-scale mugshot as he had printed. There, he would have one made by machines and another made by his own hands. And these large-scale portraits were really daunting not just in their size, but also the identity it photographs; the picture almost is the person. Audience would feel that natural personal bubble and uneasiness when they stepped too closely to these portraits; it's almost too intimate, being that close to someone so vulnerable.

We always think that pictures should be a really quick snapshot of our lives, exactly as it is, no lies. But actually, we all have this for-the-picture smile! A good majority of the pictures taken are actually quite laboured over. At a party, you hear Smile!, and someone will be fidgeting with their hair or checking their teeth, but everyone will be donning that same artificial smile. You think pictures are proofs of moment in life, that they actually happened. You hear The Photo Never Lies (this applies more heavily back when Photoshop wasn't the crazy phenomenon that it is now), but in fact, it doesn't depict the actual reality either. Pictures were usually seen as a snapshot showing a story, like a painting would.

A photographer we gnawed on for a good amount of time was Tina Barney, who was a photographer who teased the notion of "the picture is a story." She's famous for her on-going large-scale portraits of the relationships of her family and close friends. Her works often instilled a sense of ambiguity paired with aestheticism. Instead of "the picture is a story," her photographs were intimate and almost accidental, and most importantly, part of a narrative. For example, instead of "Ah, the woman is setting supper on the table for the banquet," Barney inspired uncertainty: what are they talking about that would make her look so defensive, why is he posed so strangely, why is the man behind turning over when there's no action happening in the foreground, etc. Artificial naturalness and accidentalness. Some of the audience didn't understand how this could be art, as the composition was not complete or balanced (a leg or an arm could be out of the frame), and there was no clear subject or plot.

Photography was a difficult art to invest in by collectors and investors, as ink was fugitive back before the 1980s. And by the 80s, red was almost gone. Furthermore, photography could be so easily reprinted, and the medium was more volatile (compared with an oil painting that can last up to thousands of years with proper maintenance and management). So how can this be a safe field to invest in? When technology stepped up, artists were able to have more reliable machines, materials, and licences. Production and reproduction was more convenient. Once photography gained more faith, it opened the doors to the art that made contemporary art possible today.

Sadly, that is all I can reproduce here for you, as the discussion ran far too lengthy to be pasted exactly onto this post. We covered so much more, and I wish I could share everything with you (if only). Anne-Marie said we'll have subsequent Photography sessions since we opened up many other issues by the end of the Art Now! session; I really hope so! Also, keep in mind that you can always join us on select Wednesdays from 5:30 to 6:30 with a small fee. Check out MoCA's website for more information.

For now, I am running a bit late for MoCA today; I got too carried away and wrote too much for too long for you!

Until the next,

Axk.

Gels!

Up until this week I was practicing taking tissues from mosquito dissections and turning them into RNA. This week I learned how to DNase treat the RNA, convert the RNA to cDNA, perform PCR(Polymerase Chain Reaction), and run gels. I'll explain the theory behind these processes and then discuss my gel pictures!

We are interested in extracting RNA because it is involved in gene expression. When we run DNA that was made from RNA in a gel, we can see how well our inserted gene is being expressed. Recall that genetic material comes in two forms, DNA and RNA. If the whole tissue is taken, we are going to get RNA(what we want) and genomic DNA(what we do not want). Genomic DNA cannot help us see how much of our gene is being expressed, as it codes for every gene in the mosquito. RNA, however, is a direct result of transcription(Going from DNA to RNA) which means that every gene in the RNA is being used in that specific tissue. The genomic DNA must be removed from the RNA sample in order to measure gene expression. This is done in process called "DNase Treatment".

DNase treatment, like many microbiology protocols, involves using a Buffer to set the proper salt concentration and pH for our reaction to take place in. In addition to the buffer, we place an enzyme called DNase into the samples. DNase will eat up all the genomic DNA in our sample. In order for this reaction to take place, the RNA samples need to be in a 37 degree water bath for 30 minutes. After that we add a chemical called "EDTA" to stop the reaction. This is done because DNase will start to destroy the RNA as well if it is left unchecked. Now that the RNA does not have any Genomic DNA in it, DNA can be made from the RNA.

We then perform a process called "Reverse Transcription". We use an enzyme called "Reverse Transcriptase", another buffer(again to set optimal pH and salt concentration), primers(small chains of nucleotides that attach to our RNA allowing DNA to be formed) and dNTPs(Nucleotides that can be used to form complimentary DNA). This reaction takes place in a thermo cycler(named because it cycles the process through several different temperatures). Now that we have cDNA, PCR can be done.

PCR takes the DNA that we have and multiplies it. We don't have a lot of DNA after it is formed from our RNA, so we need to get more. Each strand of DNA that was formed during reverse transcription is replicated many times. Many, many, many times. 2^32 times. After we have plenty of our DNA, we run a gel.

A gel can tell us many things. In my case, it confirmed that I performed the previous steps correctly(resulting in workable DNA). The gels I posted are listed from lowest exposure(top) to highest exposure(bottom). The well farthest to the left is called a ladder. The ladder contains DNA of known lengths so we can compare our DNA to see how large it is. The second well is our NTC(Non-Template-Control). It's essentially GO TAQ(A rare enzyme that can withstand extreme temperatures) and water. Wells 3-6 are DNase treated RNA. We would expect to see nothing in wells 2-6 because they do not have any DNA in them. Wells 7-10 contain our post PCR DNA samples. We used an actin primer to detect how active actin was in my samples. The three wells showed heavy actin activity, while the last well did not. The first three wells are samples from mosquito midguts, ovaries, and fat bodies(respectively). The final well was DNA prepared from mosquito heads. Actin is most commonly found where there is high muscle activity. Because the head has high levels of nerve cells and low levels of muscle cells, this result is acceptable.

I will be practicing these protocols for the rest of the week, and possibly next week as well. I'll have more pictures of some of the lab equipment(such as QIAcube and the Thermo cycler) in my next post!

Combining two blog posts in one - Dany Joumaa

I figured I'd finish a blog post that should've been up last week, and also share with you what I've done this week.

Post 1 (last week)

Today, we checked on Eu(Tta)3 to find that it had not recrystallized at all, despite our attempts to recrystallize it with the rotovap. We've thus decided that we're merely going to let it sit and recrystallize over the weekend, and hopefully we should see something of it.

As far as EuDBM is concerned, we have proceeded to react it with TPTZ. We started by first scraping out all of the crystalline solid sitting at the bottom of its round-bottom flask (an artifact of recrystallization). From there, we removed some of the liquid into an ampule (a small container) and tried to remove as much supernatant material as possible while collecting a nice collection of solid at the bottom. This solid was then dried out with a light vacuum.
Next, we set out to react the remaining solid with TPTZ. We washed the TPTZ with ethanol and the DBM with acetone at a 1:1 ratio, then left them to sit and react under heated reflux.

Here's some data that I can't think of a better place to put:
weight of container - 3963.4 mg
weight of container plus EuDBM- 3980.4 mg
remaining solid - 17.0 mg

Lots of science, I know. I can't help it.

April 1st (this week)

After much chaos in the world of Dany Joumaa outside of the lab, I've finally had the time to put together another blog post of what we're up to. Today we walked into the lab that the Eu(Tta)3 that we had expected to recrystallize earlier had still not recrystallized. Remember, we need the recrystallization to occur in order for us to procure impurity-free product. We tried using a rotovap (detailed in an earlier blog post) in order to remove the compound's solvent, but only to find that the compound without its solvent is a gooey, honey-like thing that can't really recrystallize at room temperature. So, I made the suggestion of freezing the compound in hopes that it, in its solid form, would be much easier to take out of the flask. Dr Zheng responded well to the idea and that's what we're currently trying :)

As for our other compound, EU(DBM)3TPTZ, we sought to recrystallize it as well. Although this was already reacted with TPTZ, we sought to recrystallize it in order to stay clear of any impurities brought out by possible side reactions. We inputted the compound into a makeshift cotton-pipet filtration system and collected the supernatant. From there, we let the compound evaporate naturally under the fumehood. We chose natural evaporation in this case so that the recrystallization process could take place slowly, but accurately, in recovering solid compound.

Finally, I worked with Dr. Correlas in launching my next NWChem calculation: acac. Allow me to explain: acac is short for acetyl acetone, which is basically a simple organic compound that includes two methyl groups bounded in a diketone structure (does that help?) This is one of the simpler compounds that I will encounter in this project, and hence it is why I am calculating it now. Calculations take the UA supercomputers days to process, so it's very likely that I'll get the results of this calculation by Monday next week. Once this calculation is complete, I will be but one more calculation away from computing the ligand Tta, which, as you may remember, is currently in one of my compounds.

That being said, I figure I should congratulate many of you for your fantastic college acceptances :) Great job, you guys.

--Dany.

Pictures from Berlin

And here are the rest that I'm going to put up right now. If you want more, just tell me, and i'll be sure to try and put up some more! Enjoy!

These are just a few pictures of Berlin...

Whew! Back from Berlin!

Wow. That's all I have to say about that. Berlin was really just something else entirely. Firstly, the weather was absolutely fantastic. The sun was out everyday, and it really warmed you up. The air was fresh and whetted your appetite, so I ate a ton in Berlin. Had my first burger since I came here in a place called Burgermeister. So good. Funnily enough, when I got there, at first I felt sort of like I hadn't left Paris. It is very much like Paris in a way, and then again, very different. Berlin is approximately eight times bigger than Paris with the same amount of people, so there is so much more space! It felt so much more relaxed, and the people enjoy sitting outside at cafes and retaurants. I felt that vibe much more in Berlin than in Paris, where it feels very tight and stressed. Paris is just a faster paced life. The buildings are much newer in berlin, but there are still remains of the old, war torn apartment buildings there, with the bullet impacts ever so evident. As I was walking through, I almost lost my touch with time, because there is a lot that remains of the time before WW2, but much more of it is new. And there is grafitti everywhere. Really just a very beautiful, enchanting city. I'll post the pictures I took up as soon as possible!

So, back to the lab, and back to work! To give you an update, we had tested out our bacteria in a machine that measured fluorescence, and we got negative results. We actually got results that pointed towards green fluorescence, exactly the opposite of what I wanted. That would have overturned all our previous results and that was not my idea of a good time. So, I didn't worry too much about it in Berlin (what with the amazing breakfasts they have over there, I was more than occupied, haha), but when I got back, I impatiently waited to speak with Anne about the results. She, so kindly, transformed the plasmid into a variety of different bacteria so that we could observe the growth of the bacteria and its relationship to the plasmid. We may change the promotor region, which is the region that signals the production of the product that the genome is geared towards. I sense we are entering the finshing stages of the project, but I may be mistaken! It will be exciting to see where this goes and what results we get. We have a meeting at 2:30 today, and so I will get many ideas and feedback!
In terms of the comic, I will definitely finish the writing portion of the process today, and do some grammer check, because I hate mistakes in my writing. Once that's done, its to the storyboard. Eh... kinda nervous for this part, because its what the comic is going to look like, so I am definitely going to work my hardest to make it look good and professional.
Ah.... It is nice to be back in Paris. Plus, the sun is shining and the air is warm. This week is going to be nice, I can tell.
Oh, and by the way, thought I'd mention I'll be going to Marseilles, a city in the South of France, Friday night and returning Sunday night. Haha, this week is definitely going in the right direction.
Peace out,
Clover

Guess Who's Back? (Agustin is!)

Howdy Everybody!

Exactly one week ago, I set foot once again on dry Tucson dirt. After two days of non-stop travel, it was nice to finally be able to go home and shower in my own shower and lie down in my own bed and just be home. Anyway, on a more academic note, I came back with an amazing amount of information! I really am a little shocked at the amount of information, and work, that I have for the coming weeks. Since I got back, I have been doing a lot of thinking and planning and I just started doing some translating. All the data that I have is in Spanish, so for a while that will be my main job. I also have to translate the interviews so that I can use them for my presentation. It’s going to be a lot of hard work. Like I said, I have also been thinking a lot, just connecting ideas and events. Once I have all my information translated, I can dive into writing and writing and more writing! I'm really excited to start writing and see where this topic takes me. It was an amazing experience gathering all the information and researching, and I'm positive it will just as much fun writing! So, not much to write about for this post, and the following posts won’t be too long or exciting either, I’ll just be writing like crazy, so not really much to talk about. But rest assured, I will be enjoying myself! That’s it for now, next week I hope to have an outline ready for my paper and maybe I will have started working on the subtitles for the little bits of interviews that will be in my final presentation.

Until next time!

Agustín

Back to work... - Dany Joumaa

Dr. Zheng has returned from China, and indeed his return marks my return to the UA internship.

So far, we haven't heard a thing from Dr. Corrales, the computational chemist. Dr. Zheng brought it to my attention that I may be getting filed under spam due to my e-mail signature (which, if any of you haven't seen before, is depicted on the image in the right). Total spam-bait, right?

Anyway, we returned to the lab to find that the second compound that we wished to recrystallize, Eu(Tta)3, had not recrystallized a single bit. Despite the use of an antisolvent and despite the fact that we waited an entire week for it to recrystallize, the solution was far too diluted to allow the solute to manifest in solid form.

So,what was our solution to the problem? The "rotovap."

A rotovap is basically a giant vacuum connected to a boiler plate. The idea is that you heat up a liquid under a vacuum and rotate the solution at the same time. (You rotate the solution so that you can prevent the solution from boiling up into your vacuum and contaminating it -- for you see, you would not like this to happen.) You keep doing this such that the high vapor pressure of the solvent (which is higher than that of the solute) causes the solvent to be sucked up by the vacuum. In case you slept through Chemistry 101, all of this is another way to say that we're removing the amount of "diluting stuff" so that the solution becomes "less diluted" and "more concentrated." If the solution is "more concentrated," and we leave the solution to sit in a nice cool refrigerator for a while, then some solid material will emerge out of the "oversaturated solution." It's empirical fact, my friends.

That being said, it seems that time will be my best friend as I now wait for the recrystallization of Eu(Tta)3 to yield an adequate amount of product. From there, we will take the crystals from both compounds and finally react them with the missing key component -- called "TPTZ," which is responsible for replacing the remaining water ligands with nitrogen-based ligands that provide a higher quantum yield (ie higher photoluminescent efficiency, but that's for another blog post).

That's all for now, folks!

--Dany.

There's A LOT of work left to do (Jayanth)

Hello Everybody,

As I detailed in my last post, I was very happy after summarizing all matches because it seemed as if the data proved that the Table Tennis played according to minimax, because the winning probabilities for serving to each side were virtually the same. That still can likely be true, but I going to have to go through a lot of work to try and prove it.

When I was recording data, I simply summarized matches rather than recording results point-by-point. Now this is all good for convenience, but people want to know how you got that data (i.e. which points were left serves/right serves). Therefore, I am in the process watching all the matches over again and recording each result point-by-point. It is fair to say this will probably take another 2.5-3 weeks, because for each point, I have to record, games, points, server, court, serve direction, winner, and point code, as well as having to note faults, set and match times, and coverage of games that was missing from the DVDs.

After that, I have to do the statistical tests to confirm the data results. That might take another week because there are several statistical tests that have to be run, not just the Chi-Squared tests.

And after that, I probably will have another three weeks or so to write the formal paper (which will require reading other minimax strategy papers to make sure the theory is correct) and the presentation. But all of this doesn't even take into account that I will be taking several music and college related trips over the next month in a half!

So much to do, but so little time! Now I know why really good academic papers take years to finalize.

-- Jayanth A.K.A Señor Juanito

Seems I Find Errors Errors Everywhere... - Gabriel

Well, after a rather uneventful week last week, with no posts, I am back to work. This is the issue. Information takes approximately an eternity to acquire when you have nothing to do to occupy your time before it comes back.

I am rather happy with my internship, and I feel more and more each day that I am making a contribution to the office and even society. The coolest thing is I'm finding flaws in the sources themselves that we're getting our info from.

Empirica Signal is a tool we use here to help find out if a drug causes diseases or side effects. Basically, every time we see a disease and a drug, the FDA reports it under the AERS (Adverse Event Reporting System) that this symptom was found while this drug was being taken. What Empirica does is I type in the drugs I am looking for and the diseases I am looking for. Then it shows me every case in which these drugs and diseases have crossed paths. Using this data, we can determine if the drug can be truly considered a cause, or if its just coincidence. However, sometimes the data is not automatically indexed by Empirica, so a custom data mining must be set up to find the missing data. The problem is that it can sometimes take up to 3 hours to yield zero results. I have found several errors with the system that have now been brought to the creators of the database for fixing (these people I work with have MAJOR connections, it's not everyday you have an issue with a search engine and then the creators are put to work fixing your issue). Already three times I have yielded zero results for several drugs, and that is where I have found the errors in the system. My work is possibly leading to a drub being taken off of one of the lists, which is HUGE, cause it takes a lot of work, research and expertise to do so. I am getting things done here.

This week I have finished gathering the stats for Torsade on most of the drugs, and now I am gathering data on the instance of QT prolongation.

SANDWICHES AT MEETINGS THIS WEEK. Yum.

Such is the situation... - Dany Joumaa

(Glad to see we're finally putting our names in the title of the blog posts)

In all honesty, little has happened with my official internship while Dr. Zheng has been off to China. It's next to impossible to secure lab time while the sponsoring professor is out of town, and unfortunately chem grad students are too busy preparing their final theses (it's that time of year, apparently).

In the meantime, I've been perusing some of Dr. Zheng's research papers in preparation of being asked to write something new for the SRP blog, but given what I know now, Dr. Zheng and I will finish the recrystallization of Eu(DBM)3 (which turned out to be incredibly bright when we shone UV upon it!) and also finish preparing the other compound [Eu(Tta)3] with which to compare against Eu(DBM)3. Monday or Tuesday--depending on when Dr Zheng is free and available--will mark my return to the lab to finish the creation of the compounds and to begin the empirical measurements of the efficiency of each compound.

Outside of campus, I flew to Austin (again on AUR's tab) to attend a social media conference and ended up getting contact info with YouTube employees and a promise to become a beta tester for music-related YT features. Other than the 8-hour wait in the airport terminal in Austin (because I had no hotel), there isn't anything else other than great things to say about that trip :) Needless to say, I did manage to get a little SXSW under my belt. Also amazing.

Keep in touch!
--Dany.

Straightforward jig at the MoCA. /Angelynn.

So I'm keeping this update brief, as this past week consisted of nothing too new or too exciting.

Essentially, I have been sorting through the library at MoCA to familiarise myself with the different types of literature in the art realm: art magazines, monographs, catalogues, guides, even business magazines were among the stacks I toiled with.

It goes without saying that I have been reading a ridiculous amount: everything is so fascinatingggg.

I found Art & Today by Eleanor Heartney particularly capturing, out of all the book I had to sort through (and I am not yet complete with sorting still!). It's a gigantic 450-page book, lovely for a newbie such as me, covering the subjects of art and..today, popular culture, politics, audience, the quotidian object, abstraction, representation, deformation, and more!

In the next post, I will touch on some of these more specifically, and share with you some new artists and their works that I've discovered. (Unfortunately, I am not able to at the moment since my router is giving me unpleasant attitude..). This coming week, I will be taking a break from the books and hitting it up with another department of the museum. Additionally, you will hear from me something about the Museum Studies in the next update. The first Museum Studies session is on this coming Friday afternoon, great for anyone who has any interest in museums. (Check it outtt.)

Also, way to go, everyone! From what I've read, everything is sincerely impressive, interesting, and not-a-disaster! Really, all are doing an excellent job, and I'm not just sayin' :] Keep at it!

Until the next,

Axk

Blissful weddings and eye-opening documentaries

If this past week seemed busy to me, this coming week will be even more hectic. I'm going to be working more and more with Eren, as her premiere for Precious Knowledge creeps up and Discovery Channel en Espanol demands more and more footage for a film, and finishing up editing videos of yesterday's (Friday's) wedding with Jacob and filming another wedding on the 26th.
However, I have had some recent accomplishments. Last monday, Jacob's daughter Piper was baking some hamantaschen and he decided to film the whole baking process. Being the type of person he is, he gave me the job of editing the footage and sat back to watch me work. I did and I was amazed that it took me only about two days the really finish editing the video, which could mean two things: the video is crap or I did a pretty good job and am just getting more familiar with editing software. I'll let the readers make their own conclusion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lCu8Da2gOU
My next accomplishments were helping Eren and Ari out with things they didn't have time to complete. I finished scanning releases for them, bombarding people with 'Precious Knowledge' postcards, and helping out on some film shoots. Ari even let me film a bit and do audio recording (which isn't really a daunting task) for their documentary for Discovery Channel en Espanol. (Oh, and I made a previous mistake in one of my blogs. The documentary for Discovery isn't focusing on one family being affected by SB1070, it deals with multiple families).

This week is going to be better than last, despite my hectic schedule. On Tuesday, I'm going with Eren and Ari to Phoenix to interview the infamous Sheriff Joe for the Discovery documentary. Then on wednesday and Thursday I'm just going to be helping them out with preparations of the premiere. Hopefully everything with go smoothy, since they premiered in San Diego on the 18th and said everything was great there. With Jacob, I'm just going to be doing some of the same old, same old, which is editing and organizing. This week I want (and need) to really get started on my final product, which always gets pushed aside by something else, and I want to practice more with a steadicam that Jacob recently acquired.

Hope everyone else is having a great time with their internships!
Clarice