The beginning of the SCOPE semester has been a little rough. After deciding that we weren't going to continue pursuing some paths we'd considered, we've rearranged team roles, so there's been an adjustment period for that. It's also going to be a few weeks before we have the data we were planning to use to drive our main modeling work for this semester and to validate last semester's work. We're trying to both reshuffle our schedule to frontload everything that doesn't rely on data and start on some of the modeling work even without the intuition from the data.
This has involved reading some books and papers in fields with which none of us is familiar. Two of us spent far too long trying to make sense of a couple of pages of a book that were filled with entries of three different but related matrices, starting with one that nothing on the internet seems to explain. Also, one paper refers to the work in the area of research we're looking at as "sparse and not complete." Thanks, random paper; that makes us feel so confident that we'll figure something out.
Luckily, when Brian visited he suggested we start by approximating everything with springs, and that was easy to work out. We're taking some data on our own while we wait for the more comprehensive data sets, so hopefully we'll know within the next couple of weeks whether that simple a model is effective or not.
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