Optimism

July 22nd, 2010

Well I recently reviewed the summer goals my advisor had originally given me and got a little concerned that I would not have enough time to complete everything I set out to do. I talked to her about this and she understood that her project proposal was very ambitious and that the exploration of digitization programs would be a monster on it's own. When I approached my advisor about pressing on past the digitization and doing some single station analysis she explained to me that her priority for the project is the digitization of old seismograms. Single station analysis is easier in a sense that we know mathematically how to go about it. But with the digitization, you need to explore and investigate different methods, note the pros and cons of each, be aware of what is best for digitization, etc. Hopefully by end of the summer I will have a good  understanding of the pros and cons of the 3 different programs I've experimented with and be able to write a brief article about notable parameters during digitization such as image resolution, sampling rate, etc. 

On a different note, with the program I'm investigating now a lot of image preprocessing has to be done. I have to filter them (the scans are really spotty), rotate them, convert them to .xcf (GIMP format) and crop them (the image sizes are too big) before they are ready to be imported into the program for digitizing. This would take a long time to do for each individual image so I wrote a bash script to automate the above actions. I was very excited about my script because I've never written in bash before so getting an executable bash script is an accomplishment in itself. 

Lastly, since I only have about 3 weeks left my advisor asked me to prepare a presentation for August 11th before I leave recapping my summer project. This will be presented to the seismology/geomechanics group at Harvard. I'm really excited about that!