Day 5

This morning I listened to Xiang's P.h.D. defense. It was my first time ever attending a P.h.D. defense, so it was very interesting to see how the process worked. Xiang gave about a 2.5 hour presentation, intertwined with frequent questions from the committee. It looked very exhausting to do, but he definitely knew his subject well and had done his research.
After this I finished checking the ArcGIS project with Manu. All of our data was very close to each other, and we believe that the minisucle error arose from very minor changes that we made to the automatically created routes to make the route pass closer to the cities given to us in the Excel documents. Later, Xiang taught us the steps for our risk calculation as the next step in our ArcGIS project. These calculations will give us an effective method of interpreting all of the data that we've collected from ArcGIS this week. He taught us some more about what exactly risk means and the different terms involved in the calculation process. Next week, I'll complete these risk calculations. For the rest of today, I'm going to read about the ValuJet flight 592 accident.