Week 9

An erie quiet

July 13, 2009

There are no teachers! Things are quite quiet here. Professor Rodger is also away. She is on a panel that is approving grant money for reasearch. I spent the morning working on my new Alice world relating to rounding numbers. I should be finished it soon. I also started organizing my paper. I want to finish it this week so I can work on the refinements next week.

More Research and Alice

July 14, 2009

I did some more reading and finished off my rounding world today. I also made some corrections to my geometry world. I decided that I will attempt to finish one more Alice world. There are several middle school math books that I have been looking at that are geared to girls: Math doesn't suck: how to survive middle school math without losing your mind or breaking a nail and Kiss my math. I am going to animate one of the explanations in these books as many of them are in story format.

Feeling a Little Crazy

July 15, 2009

My essay is a little all over the place right now. I hope I can reel it in.

Today was another undergrad lunch. I have been missing the nice lunches during the workshops. Last night I forgot that we were going to have pizza, and I made myself lunch... oh, well maybe I will eat it tomorrow. Prof. Landon Cox presented on Mitigating Data Exfiltration by Misconfigured Personal Machines. Basically he is looking for a way for computers to intellegently add encription to files without the user having to worry about it. Especially for those who are not familiar with the complexity of internet security and unknowingly allow their sensative information to leak out into the public.

In the evening I got a chance to go out for dinner and walk around Hillsborough. I had some true sothern Jumbalaya and enjoyed the atmosphere as we ate outside. After some dessert we toured the town and looked at all the historic buildings.

The week is flying by

July 16, 2009

I'm slowly working on my essay. I think I have a better idea now of what the main focus is. This will really help on getting it done. But it looks like that won't happen this week.

Last day in the office for Liz

July 17, 2009

It's Friday already! It's Liz's last day in the office. She is flying home to the west coast. I spent most of the day working on my research paper, with a little bit of time spent on Alice.

Weekend

July 18 to 19, 2009

This was a weekend for working on summer homework and catching up on this blog. I was actually thinking of finish my final report this weekend so I could "have some fun" playing with Alice, but I ran out of time.

I went to the Duke Chapel for their church service. Their choir is great, and the pipe organ... well it was like being at a concert. The Dean of the Chapel, Samuel Wells gave a very thought provoking message about peace.