Week of 9.3

WEEK OF 9.3

We began our journey by discovering some new facets of research and some how-to's on conducting it. I think it was pretty interesting how people would share similar perspectives on how research should best be conducted, despite being in different fields and studying completely different things.

As a group, we shared our perspectives on how research should be conducted, especially in the context of different people and their research journey/experience in their specific field. While there were some small differences here and there, I think we as a group covered our bases pretty well. Besides that assignment, we were also told to create a concept map which outlined a certain aspect of our research and the topic of it. We watched videos on the Feynman process, which told us that we should simplify the things we learn as to be able to explain it to other people- using analogies help!

I did my research on Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is named after the "Turk". I thought that was pretty interesting- I did some research, and while I found some pretty impressive explanations of the MTurk and how it worked, I thought that the scandals and the stories of exploitation that came with it was even more fascinating. A lot of the workers were overworked and underpaid, and I'm frankly not that surprised. When you pay people for little and expect them to work a lot, the quality of the work probably goes down a lot too. Here is a video that details one of the experiences. 

 

We did a video on the Mechanical Turk as well, which explained how Amazon's platform worked. That came with the Concept Map. I thought that the Concept Map itself wasn't difficult, but I just thought that it was a lot of work and used up a lot of time. I personally didn't think that it was necessary for us to create a video if we already made a concept map, and I think that belief stems from the fact that the video is basically just us recounting what we wrote in the Concept Map. We were still able to compile a pretty comprehensive video.

We also flew paper airplanes! I thought the assignment itself was pretty fun (I guess it was a pretty laid-back and relaxing form of study), but the lab report was really stressful. After I found out that I had to write one every two weeks, I got really scared because I'm not too sure that I'll have to time to write these in time and produce quality work. But it's okay, I'll just roll with it until it gets bad. The lab report still took up a lot of my time. I think it came out kind of decent though, which was a relief. 

Here's some pictures of my group flying our planes. We tested which plane had the longest flight time. 

Yay STEM! Yay CalTech! Yay research! :) See ya next week!