Siliceous and Delicious

Ben

Deliverables

1. Look at Mesozoic Rad Catalogue, come up with ideas for measurement (if at all possible).
2. Continue literature search on pre-Cenozoic rads (with increase in velocity if possible).
3. Update OmniPlans to accord with current project view. Add license to OmniPlan on MacBook Pro.
4. Find out about sieving vs. filtering dissolved rad samples, experiment with prep/cleaning methods.
5. Continue stepping through Rabosky’s R code.

Beaudry

Progress on Deliverables

Multi-year cropping—check! Required massive restructuring. Threw out 52-week-based irrigation plan, and rewrote irrigation to be based on soil moisture, now allows multiple irrigation plans and plantings a year. Separated crops into perennial and non-perennial. Crops can now be harvested whenever they’re ready, don’t require anything else (budgeting, etc.). Friday afternoon reached an impasse—crops wouldn’t harvest. Discovered infinite loop agents got into (to do with moving planting flags from agents to farm objects). Then on Tuesday, farmers were maxing out their acreage, and their was a random error—turns out it had something to do with the way the grid is read into a single java object at the very beginning.

Weather events—was surprisingly easy. Picked out 8 stations from NOAA with precipitation, downloaded montly historical weather data (precipitation-inches). Model runs will only be on historical timeframes, so predictability is less of an issue. Finding out where the stations plot on the grid was a challenge.

Miscellaneous loose ends—mostly on track. Will be done with things by Friday. For pricing scaling with acreage, there are no data to be found. Just using linear function now.

Other Updates

Had major disaster with Parallels and Time Machine (see Beau’s blog). Lots of meetings on Monday, none related to research; bad experience with a professor who wanted to know about agent-based modeling.

Had meeting with new committee member. Hadn’t read chapters, but didn’t bat an eyelid when Beau suggested graduating in June. Repeated what he’d said before in terms of comments—talked about referencing other literature, but he “doesn’t want to make you a prisoner of history”. Has a professorial poise Dawn never had, a lot calmer.

Reclamation will buy the university license for the programming environment, which means unfettered access to the debugger!

Ben’s Lens

Once again, an impressive record. You say you were lucky that things worked out, I say it’s a testament to your dedication and hard work that you managed to address such major and far-reaching issues with your model and substantially transform your code… in less than a week. Hats off to you sir! From my perspective, you have nothing to worry about in terms of your academic progress, and it looks like you are well on track. The one morsel of food for thought I could give you is to consider your mental and emotional stamina as you power on through the next few months. Yes, this is the final spurt down the home stretch, but it’s not a flat-out sprint. You can’t go working as hard as possible—you need to work at the hardest level that will allow you to keep going until the end. Your dreams might be a good indication to be mindful of sustainability in your exertion of effort. Decompression time is a necessary part of work, so try to keep those movie nights, long runs, bike rides, etc. as part of your week. Other than that, things look pretty sunny. You’re knocking down deliverables with a sniper’s accuracy and consistency. Keep up the good work.

Deliverables

1. Finish tidying up, housekeeping on the model, e.g. plotting colors. So far (prior to the CSU meeting) been testing two scenarios out of five (baseline, and just water quality trading markets)—major testing will begin next week.