Wednesday already! Holy Moly!  Let’s see if I can remember what I did last week.  Data collection wrapped up on all projects.  We ended our collection for the art study on Monday (close to a week early) because no one else was signed up to participate.  We ended up with 28 subjects and are working on data analysis now.

People seem to be on edge ( Read more... )

So I find myself a week behind in writing again.  Oh well.  Not a lot new had been happening so I’ll combine the last couple weeks into a single post.  It’s hard to believe we only have 2 weeks left!

Hierarchy data collection continues.  It is probably my favorite part of the apprenticeship, as we get to spend a fair amount of time around the ( Read more... )

This week we started hierarchy observations.  We are observing the chimps and recording their social interactions (east, west and outside) every weekday from 9:00 to about 5:30.  For the first hour after they are let out of the night enclosures, we observe for the entire hour, then from 10:00 to noon and from 1:00 to 4:30, we observe them for 15 ( Read more... )

Let’s see, this past week I was assistant data collection manager for our art study.  That means I helped the data collection manager run our tests.  We set up the experiment about 10 minutes before people were due to arrive and then I would wait for people to show up at the front door, greet them and direct them to the testing room.  The whole ( Read more... )

I am falling behind since I had hoped to post an entry a week about the goings on at CHCI, so let’s see if I can catch myself up by this weekend.

Week 2 (last week) was largely reliability testing.  We have two different types of behavioral data to collect this summer:  recording social interactions for a hierarchy study and viewing video to ( Read more... )

As stated in the previous post, life as an apprentice at the CHCI is hectic, but interesting.  We are certainly learning a lot!  We started with a general introduction to the facility, the people, and safety on Monday.  The sanctuary stresses that everything is “for the good of the chimps” and so the entire place is ran with that idea in mind.  ( Read more... )