Project Mc2 Intro

[Marianna]

This summer, I am doing research for my Barnard biology senior thesis in a continuation of a research project upon which I worked last summer. My project involves a survey of biomass construction costs of deciduous trees at Black Rock Forest, an ecology research site and educational center in upstate New York. But what does that mean, exactly? And why am I writing a blog about it?

Dr. Stillman bequeathed the forest to Harvard, his alma mater, when he died in 1949. Many scientific papers were published using data collected at the site, but Black Rock became threatened in the 1960s by plans to build a power plant on Storm King Mountain. In a pioneering instance of environmental activism, the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, the Cornwall-on-Hudson Garden Club, the Nature Conservancy, and other groups came together to oppose the plant. Environmentalism won the lawsuit in 1980, and the forest lived on.

In 1989, the Forest traded hands to the Black Rock Forest Consortium, a collection of research institutions and public schools that includes both Barnard College specifically and Columbia University as a whole. My research mentor, Columbia ecology professor Kevin Griffin, currently serves as the president of this Consortium. The Consortium supports research projects examining carbon storage, water filtration, ecosystem regulation, responses to climate change, and other aspects of the forest that have broader implications for ecology studies worldwide. It provides subsidized housing and equipment, as well as mentoring, to researchers such as myself while we work on our projects.

Between the constant student activity and the long research legacy, Black Rock Forest is an incredibly exciting site for a research project. Data of young scientists such as myself can be compared with similar data from decades of scientists who have come before me. Such legacy is especially important for ecology research, as the lifespan of a typical oak or maple tree far exceeds the lifespan of a typical biologist; through collecting information about the same trees (and ecosystems based around the same trees) for decades, we are continually building a more complete picture of how this forest works. My project is a very small piece of this larger puzzle, and I hope other students can expand upon my work someday.

This summer, I will work with Prof. Kevin Griffin of the Columbia University Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology department to survey energy requirements of deciduous trees at Black Rock Forest. My survey will be based upon the construction cost metric, which links energy creation processes (photosynthesis) with physiological traits (biomass construction) and provides a basis for ecologists and plant physiologists to track how resources are partitioned in a temperate forest ecosystem. In this project, I will continue my work with Prof. Griffin from last summer, in which I conducted a preliminary survey and found several possible trends and areas for further investigation.

Another result from last summer that I found curious was the construction costs of my maple samples. Angie Patterson, a former student of my mentor, collected samples several years ago for a similar project and was kind enough to share her data with me. For most of the species we had both collected, the results were fairly close, but for both red maple and sugar maple, I was way off her mark. Red maple in particular was unusually high considering past research has shown it to be relatively inexpensive to construct. This variation has driven me to collect a lot of red maple and sugar maple in different ecosystems within Black Rock. I will compare the energy requirements of trees in low and high elevation, wet and dry soil, and other different habitats, potentially providing an explanation for the variation I found.

I have new skills this summer that I plan on bringing to my collection and analysis, as well. Most notably, I will be mapping all of my samples to gather location data; this will make it easier for me to do environmental comparisons and will give more information to students who might want to do similar studies in the future. I will also build on my knowledge of the forest and my knowledge of tree identification to make my work more efficient. Expect more on these topics in future posts!

Some things in the design plan like the bunk beds from Crate & Kids are WAY out of budget. Instead of purchasing some, we want to DIY a beautiful bed. And the dresser from the mood board is just a placeholder since we intend to move in the vintage piece from the nursery.

The general idea is a bold wallpaper pattern as a focal point over a chair rail, building some bunk beds for the girls, a bold mix of patterns for the bedding, and adding some bed canopies. The rest is all art, decor, and styling.

To be more budget-friendly since wallpaper can be expensive, we debated wallpapering just one feature wall versus installing a chair rail throughout the entire room with wallpaper above it. We came up with the fun idea of adding a scallop chair rail and decided to go in that direction.

Our bedroom has vintage wallpaper that came with the house and you could see every dip of the ceiling where the wallpaper met the ceiling. When we replaced the windows in our bedroom, we installed crown molding which made a world of difference in disguising the waviness.

Angie is a former marketing professional turned stay-at-home mom and magical memory maker. She and her husband Colby are avid DIYers with more than 10 years of experience renovating and decorating old homes, blogging about projects along the way. Colby, a former builder, still works in the residential construction industry. Angie's work has been featured in This Old House magazine.

This illustration, like all of the other intro spreads, will set the tone for the rest of the portfolio pages of this project. Be sure to check back over the next few weeks. I plan to churn out a few more spreads and hopefully get out some new tutorials that are long over due.

@Salonee,
I was going for something a little more abstract. I wanted something graphically strong and that would peak the viewers interest drawing them into the rest of the project pages.
@Nehemia
I do have a video tutorial of this. Check out: both these tutorials:
-rendering-tutorial/
-tips-adjust-levels/
@Martin, thanks for the comment. I have always come across these sites but never really use them. I need to start looking into them more.

I have a very diagrammatic based project and I think an abstracted version of what you have done here would work extremely well. I'm just curious how you got the overlaid color-grid and textures into the linework of the drawing?

Thanks so much for this great article; this is the kind of thing that keeps me going through the day. Ive been looking around for your article after I heard about them from a friend and was thrilled when I was able to find it after searching for some time. Being a avid blogger, Im happy to see others taking initiative and contributing to the community. I just wanted to comment to show my appreciation for your post as its very encouraging, and many writers do not get the credit they deserve. I am sure Ill be back and will send some of my friends. check this
Handless Millionaire

But I never completely lost the desire to do something with a self-contained Raspberry Pi and display. A couple of years ago, I made a Star Wars-inspired light-up box for a wedding proposal stunt, and I had so much fun doing it that I want to take on another more advanced project.

Build a print layout tool for 4th Edition D&D. The user uses the tool to define a custom layout, with WYSISYG functionality. When happy, he prints the result. The printed result always looks exactly like the one on the screen.

Finally, I really, really, recommend that you use real tooling to play with this project. I assume Visual Studio, ReSharper, and Expression Blend. I do some things to really take advantage of those tools. Two of the blog posts in this series will focus on how I take advantage of strong tooling to eliminate sources of trouble.

To restate more firmly: I do not view a project as the sum of its code. Rather, it is the view of that code through the tooling that it is designed to take advantage of. By targeting my code towards my tools, I can get a lot of value with a lot less code.

There are, indeed, test doubles all over this code. Remember when I said it's messy?
I think that most of these doubles point to design problems with the code. I'll talk about some of them in more detail, later (and show an alternate design for at least one case, which eliminates the doubles).

I find I've just written another test of the sort that makes me wonder "am I doing this wrong?" I could eliminate many of the fakes, and that would make the test more readable in some respects, but at the expense of more setup/teardown code, and would run counter to the "one bug causes one test to fail", as without the fakes I'd invoke code in more units.

Mostly, however, there are parts of it that I can use to demonstrate some of the techniques that I use for mock-free TDD in larger projects. As I stated at the outset, this project isn't my best work ever. However, I think I can use it to talk about some of the common solutions that I use where others reach for a mock.

Mix & Match Design Company provides affordable and approachable online interior design services. We work with e-design clients one-on-one, and provide free education, decorating inspiration, and share projects on the Mix & Match blog.

I recently decided that my home office should be "pixel" themed (think low-resolution, 256-colour graphics from the 1990s). I got inspired after buying and framing this "pixorama" poster. I even ostentatiously re-arranged my office furniture, so meeting participants would see something more interesting than closet doors.

c80f0f1006