Monthly Archives: May 2012

First Wild Ant Captures

5/31/12| ——– 11:30 AM Testing capturing footage of leafcutter ants outside the schoolhouse. Filming under a short tree is not a good idea. This tree is full of thousands of small biting ants, and everytime I am filled with the desire to change focus, exposure values, I accidentally stand up fully and the shirt refills itself with ants.

My stated goal for coming here is to capture difficult footage of uncommon species on natural locations for testing computer vision tracking. I have to pick and move branches and leaves away from the ant trail. In a way, it makes me think about my job as cheating for computer vision. Shooting more GoPro footage. I hope it turns out. Hang GoPro upside-down from ant tree. Camera sets are covered in ants. Plastic is a fantastic substance! Animals can’t figure it out. They don’t know what to do with it. About to do some Dual DSLR testing. Realized that I could photograph my Journal entries to preserve them in case of destruction or loss.

 

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More Pics from the day before

 

 

Barro Colorado Island

Day before went with Peter to Barro Colorado Island.

Hiked across the island through the rain. Peter shows me walking trees.

 

 

Lunch with Apes.

Shiny Bugs.

Poison Frogs.

Crocodile in the distance.

Susi did not like how we smelled on the boat ride back.

Science Starting | Rapid Development

5/29 |
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Start day with peter looking under microscope to identify ants. There are apparently 20+ varieties of Azteca ants around, but there are only identification keys for 4 species. These ants I hear are also notoriously hard to tell apart, especially between workers. Queens are apparently the key to identifying species, but they are, of course, harder to sample.

Need to keep reminding self not to be bogged downby money or equipment failures,- place strict focus on the possibilities of experimenting, exploring and learning here.

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Projects thought up the night before with Biologists
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Despite that this may sound like wishful thinking on my part, considering much of what I study and will hopefully bundle into my thesis is about the values of situated design, but I am amazed by how much more rapid and powerful ideation and design can come forth when actually being in the field around excited, interested groups.

Leafcutter stop signs:
auto-redirect paths of leafcutters. See what sorts of gate timings going up and down provoke new paths or let them keep the same path.

Bee Guillotine:
Apparently scientists want to examine bee brains all the time. This means they have to cut the bees heads off. Bees like to walk in rows, why not hook servos with razor blades up to computer vision/arduino stuff.

Antotator:Adapt a temporal annoation system based on a smartphone (sort of like Documatic), to let field biologists quickly tag and collect data on their surveys. They could choose common attributes/tags, such as species, witnessed behaviors, or area descriptions, and input custom metrics like body lengths, and other environmental information like GPS coordinates, air sensors, timestamps would be included automatically!

Artifical Cecropia tree (for labs):
It would be useful to have a tree that is transparent to monitor the full colonies without having to invasively cut the trees open.

Side Writings
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Items to purchase: Haircut, boots, fruit, machete (for peter), plastic melting soldering iron

In a way, this journal is a bit like Memento, and it’s interesting to know that odd specifics I include and exclude, will form my later comprehsions of what I actually witnessed. These slight changes to how I write things down, whether this is due to misperceptions, limitations of what I could actually write down at the time, compressed details from tiredness, or just plain lies…my future self’s knowledge of these encounters are at the whims of circumstances of writing.

Eyes feel funny last night. Have been pained since the end of florida. I’m not sure, however, if I am too aware that there may be something wrong with my eyes and psychosomatically these problems come about, or if I am just tired.

Booting In

Kitty drives me to the airport at 3:45. Despite my hours of packing and gathering, I still have to stop by Tech one more time to grab my missing Arduino ADK. Get in to Panama, meet nice older biologist couple in the Inmigration queue. As someone described, the airport looks like the 1970’s.

 

Found a cab to Smithsonian headquarters (Tupper), and met up with Bill Wcislo. What a great guy. Sat me down and gave me thorough, elegant descriptions of the most pertinent and interesting research projects and animals around Gamboa. He brought me to get registered and find housing, when, suddenly, all the power in the entire building shut off. Luckily for me, he got his assistant to drive me into Gamboa. Bumped serendipitously into Peter Marting who gave me a place to stay for the night.

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Peter shows me around a bit. The roaring vivacity of the jungle is so evident, palpable. Everything is moving and screaming. After so many equipment failures already, the humidity here has me terrified. GoPro1 was destroyed by idiocy. Hopefully Amazon takes it back. Battery Backpac is not quite functioning. 64GB SDCard is being very flakey. Andy T2i (AT2I) scare this evening. Just bad batteries. GoPro + T2I work well together as a reviewing mechanism.

Sawing into a strange tree tumor

List of neat animals that I was told about that run around here: Tapir (Macho de Monte), agudi, basilisk, gecko, sloth, leafcutters, azteca ants, Bullet ants, bats, hemipterans (stinkbug looking order with sharp dagger probiscuses). Stingless bees, howlers, toucans, giant eagles that attack people, jaguar, ocelot.

 

Peter explains the Azteca+Cecropia relationship. Ants are an external defense kept by the tree. I go to one scientist’s going away party on my first day here. Someone rushes in to the party with a strange bug. Creature has a false, hollow facepart. vibrates. back is like a moth. sharp sucking tube. Face looks like it’s trying to be a tiny lizard head to me. Sort of like Yoshi.

Conchs are Weird, Personable

Woke up on beach. Everything is back right with the world. Returned gopro camera to amazon through byzantine process involving a best buy, staples, and a ups. Spent the morning exploring the beach. I knew conchs were mollusks, and I’ve seen their feet before, but I figured they were just some blobby, snail or oyster-like creature on the inside.

 

I had no idea they were so expressive.

 

Academic Sass, Cash Moneys, Gopher Tortoises

Morning lecture by Danielle McNamara from ASU. Preaches for “games” (she speaks incredibly broadly about this topic) to be used as educational tools but argues adamantly that games themselves have NO LEARNING VALUE. She proves this by administering pre- and post- examinations to groups who play a (pretty shitty-looking*) game vs. watching a powerpoint presentation. *[they admit to this, saying they didn’t have the money to make good games so they just “gamified” stuff]

I got riled up. Still bummed about my camera. Bugs in our tracking program are keeping me down too. Cash is leaking out of me in fat streams as I prepare for this panama trip. I’m also battling against the dwindling business days in which I can purchase equipment and have it before setting off to panama.

 

Have to keep reminding self that I’ll be fine no matter what and that money spent prepping for ULTIMATE BADASSERY is always worth it. Decided to upgrade to a full 3D gopro. Need to capture and share footage that the world has yet to see! Who knows how well the system will actually work though.

 

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Dropped Maria off and had to miss the rest of the evening’s activities. Found my way to barefoot beach. Giant gopher tortoises crawling everywhere! Manatee reserve on one side, beach on the other. Signs everywhere saying beach closes at dark, but no one comes to throw me out. Get caught up taking weird long exposure pictures anyway.

Dissembling and trying to clean the broken camera

 

Get scared by monkeys(?) in tree. Things in woods. A little scared of armadillos.

Finally set up camp. My tent is fantastic. Up in just 5 mins. Large, airy, and cool inside. Fist time lying down fully reclined all week! saw shooting stars and fell asleep against the sky, sand, and waves.


 

 

First Academic Conference

First day of my first Academic Conference! Weirdly laid back conference. Everyone’s in shorts and loose shirts. Topics are
AI conferences seem odd in that there is a huge spectrum that individuals seem to cover between theory and practice. At one end, I spoke with some german researchers about several diagrams of crazy just-pure-math, probabilistic conditionals and the rules governing translations from different state spaces. Their chart looked like this:unnerving in that way akin to the hardest of science. Much research in AI seems to be focused on using CGI monsters from the depths of the uncanny valley to stop real humans from trying to kill themselves.

 

On the other end of the spectrum, were applications so embedded in shear practicality. Using AI to determine optimal shared conditions for a thermostat.

 

Drove back up to for Myers to pick up Dr. H. She’s always fun to hang around. It’s pretty adorable how opposite her and Dr. B’s personalities are!

Ate cheeses and chatted with AI people. Met Tucker’s old student Gita.

Got my GoPro camera submerged in water, sea water, totally destroyed. It was great talking to kitty on the phone, which made up for the lost brand new camera.

Panama Preparations

 

Spent the night meticulously gathering all my filming supplies and attempting to optomize their loading into my backpack. My somewhat masochistic goal is to use the trip down to southwestern florida for the FLAIRS-25 conference as a stress test for my body and equipment.

I want to see how much equipment I can carry by myself in dense, wet heat. See how far I can hike, and how much stuff jangles around. See how intense bugs and sweat can be, and how that will affect my filming. I am hoping the everglades will be a good approximation for Panama.  down3AM up5:30AM

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Afternoon

The main pack has:

T2i - All lenses, lighting, reflectors, 2 shorts,
3 socks, 3 undies, 3 shirts, meds, batteries, tent,
towel,dry sacks, Pens, Markers, notepads, hacked nook,
laptop, chargers

The Side bag has:

Tripod, 2 Heads, Glidtrack Dolly, Food, Vibram Shoes

First impressions are that the pack is far too heavy. The side bag that I’m holding the tripod in is not really a tripod case, and is too long and gets floppy when I walk. The amount of stuff in the bag seems too much to transport for more than 1-2 miles. After the day of hitch-hiking and just regular hiking down hot streets, the initial shock seems to have worn off. I was tired, but felt much more endurance for hiking in this fully loaded fashion.

The Hitch Hiking: Attempted to develop my stress test by hitch-hiking from Fort Myers Airport down to the very southern tip of Florida to Marco Island, where the AI conference was being held.

Got a ride 3 miles out of the airport. Hung around the rest area, scrawled my “South” sign and made people deflect my smiles. Started hiking away and Chip pulled up in his van. Chil is a “Golf Comedian.” Specializes in golf comedy. Took me quite some time to figure out that “golf” was the word he was saying from behind his strange accent. Chip drops me off in some off ramp in the middle of nowhere and the hitcher’s anxiety sets in as the hours slip by. I do a grueling 2 mi hike to the other highway, and it suprisingly gets easier as it goes. Finally give in in the evening and call a cab.

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Evening: Don

The taxi man pulls up. Is weirded out by me (he tells me so). “What the Fuck are you doing?” Says he’s not going all the way down to Marco Island now, has a hockey game to go to. Says he’ll leave me at his house and maybe we’ll go on a midnight run to Marco Island. ” If you fuck me, I’ll shoot you!! I’m only doing this because without all that shit you look so fucking normal.”

Get a bunch of work done at his place. He’s the nicest man ever.

He gives me his life story later in the car. Used to be rich. Business fell apart. Wife left. He had the kids. Kids are world champion wrestlers. Spoke with Tucker; we change plans and he has me rent a car, and that way I can get Dr. Hybinette from the aiport the next day.

 

Finally cruise in to Marco. Florida is fucking harsh. Bobcat signs and mosquitoes pervade the environment. Didn’t imagine mosquitoes could be that thick. Campsites are all closed, everything so dark, sleep in car, waking up periodically because my neck keeps falling asleep. d2:00 up 6:00

Permethrin

Bought some Permethrin to bug-proof my clothes and tent. As my boss says: “permethrin is serious shit, make sure you look into the warnings.  I sprayed a barrier of it around our house 5 years ago and we have never had a bug in the house.  I also use it on the ground under the bee hives to kill hive beetle larve.”

Its warning label is pretty magnificent. Excerpt: