Friday 19Jul19 - Discouragement
The frequency with which I make these posts is directly correlated with the progress I make on my project. I personally think that taking time to verbalize my daily or weekly goals is crucial to maintaining a vision for the project. But also when there is no progress made, there is nothing to write about. This week has - I feel - been an utter waste.
Despite reaching out to Rebecca Larson and Dr. Finkelstein by multiple means (Slack, email, etc.), I heard nothing until yesterday when I received an email from Rebecca. It's flooded with information, but I believe I was able to identify those tidbits most pertinent to my work. Still, that leaves me in a difficult situation. On Dr. Finkelstein's recommendation, I had been working on writing a closest-neighbor distance function that would allow me to compare the Right Ascension and Declination of each entry in each DataFrame, and match them that way. Rebecca expressed some enthusiasm for that idea since it would cut out the middle step for a Translate file. But she also noted that her intention had been for me to compare two files using their ID.
If I choose to go the first route, I'll be remaking the wheel in my opinion. This step of the process has already been done for me. Briana Indahl is a graduate student in the astronomy department who introduced me to the Python package Pandas; this is a powerful tool for comparing two different files arranged in a table-like way. She helped me write a code that would do this distance-finding, but it broke, and I haven't been able to meet with her to fix it. I hope to do so this afternoon. I like the notion that we'll have a code that can do this.
If I choose to go the second route, I'll have to correct the way the ID is written in each table. I will do this by analogy. In Rebecca's line file, they are indexed as SURVEY_1234_567 where SURVEY is the GOODS North survey preamble, 1234 is the actual galaxy, and 567 indicates the Position Angle it was taken from by Hubble. Only 1234 is contained in the Translate file. I'll have to rewrite Rebecca's line file to strip the ID, or find a way to match them only by the middle part of that line.
It's hard to express my anger at how much of this has been left completely to me without supervision. My frustration and general sense of failure in this project has bled into my private life. My eating, sleeping and exercising habits faltered this week. It's been tough to enjoy this excess of free time I've been given because I don't feel a sense of forward progress.
This morning I finally got an email from Dr. Finkelstein saying he thought it would be "good for the two of you, or all three of us, to sit down soon." It's nice to hear back, but this doesn't help my project at all.
Despite reaching out to Rebecca Larson and Dr. Finkelstein by multiple means (Slack, email, etc.), I heard nothing until yesterday when I received an email from Rebecca. It's flooded with information, but I believe I was able to identify those tidbits most pertinent to my work. Still, that leaves me in a difficult situation. On Dr. Finkelstein's recommendation, I had been working on writing a closest-neighbor distance function that would allow me to compare the Right Ascension and Declination of each entry in each DataFrame, and match them that way. Rebecca expressed some enthusiasm for that idea since it would cut out the middle step for a Translate file. But she also noted that her intention had been for me to compare two files using their ID.
If I choose to go the first route, I'll be remaking the wheel in my opinion. This step of the process has already been done for me. Briana Indahl is a graduate student in the astronomy department who introduced me to the Python package Pandas; this is a powerful tool for comparing two different files arranged in a table-like way. She helped me write a code that would do this distance-finding, but it broke, and I haven't been able to meet with her to fix it. I hope to do so this afternoon. I like the notion that we'll have a code that can do this.
If I choose to go the second route, I'll have to correct the way the ID is written in each table. I will do this by analogy. In Rebecca's line file, they are indexed as SURVEY_1234_567 where SURVEY is the GOODS North survey preamble, 1234 is the actual galaxy, and 567 indicates the Position Angle it was taken from by Hubble. Only 1234 is contained in the Translate file. I'll have to rewrite Rebecca's line file to strip the ID, or find a way to match them only by the middle part of that line.
It's hard to express my anger at how much of this has been left completely to me without supervision. My frustration and general sense of failure in this project has bled into my private life. My eating, sleeping and exercising habits faltered this week. It's been tough to enjoy this excess of free time I've been given because I don't feel a sense of forward progress.
This morning I finally got an email from Dr. Finkelstein saying he thought it would be "good for the two of you, or all three of us, to sit down soon." It's nice to hear back, but this doesn't help my project at all.
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