Oh, by the way, Jia-wei is way too smart to actually drink bacteria! LOL☺. He, Betty, Jheng-Fon, Wang, and Aten need special thanks! They have been above and beyond amazing at assisting me and teaching me mind-boggling loads of ideas. They and the rest of my lab mates are really great friends!

For your enjoyment I included some other random pics of things like a night photo of Dong Hua and the river Jamie and I jumped in off the water fall—that was way too much fun! I’ll post photos of all my lab mates later, but some of the pics were taken with another’s camera and I’ve not had the change to get them yet.

I hope all of you in the U.S. are having an awesome summer!

Isaac Deatherage

Missouri S&T graduate student Parthiv Shah and his advisor -- Elizabeth Cudney, assistant professor of engineering management and systems engineering -- have borrowed a statistical method used by manufacturers to improve product quality to try to determine agricultural yields. Their approach, using a method developed by Genichi Taguchi, a pioneer in the quality improvement field, has proven amazingly accurate at predicting agricultural output. The two researchers believe the method could be used by global relief agencies and governments to help predict food shortages or famines.

Employing a method called the Mahalanobis-Taguchi System, Shah and Cudney evaluated two years’ worth of agricultural yields from a dozen industrialized nations to predict the output for a third year. The results of their research were accurate to within 95 percent of the actual yields for the third year.

Working with 2001 and 2002 data on the yield of 12 types of agricultural products – including grains, wheat, meat and dairy products, and fruits and vegetables – the researchers then compared their results with the actual 2003 yields for those 12 nations. “Using just two years of data, we are able to get fairly accurate predictions with this method,” says Cudney in a Missouri S&T news release.

Food shortages have been the subject of recent discussions of global planners, as conferences in Rome and Paris in early June called for more research on long-term agricultural sustainability. The meetings followed a May 29, 2008, report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, based in Paris, that suggested policymakers reconsider biotech or genetically modified crops to improve crop yields.

So, now the good part. We leave and get ready to head back to campus, only to find out that there’s now three fire trucks in between us and the only way we know how to get back. And they aren’t letting any traffic through. Oops. One girl points to a side street on the right and says we’ll be able to get around by going that way. We try. We fail. Once we circle around again, we stop at the police station to ask directions. After a greeting of Ni Hou (Chinese for Hi, How are you?) followed by a Hello (good sign) we ask how to get back to Dong Hwa University only to get a jumble of words in Chinese (bad sign). He finally finds a store owner across the street who speaks English and basically tells us that there is a way around, but to give up because it’s quite a ways. We went to get ice cream to pass the time and eventually found a side street that could get us around the fire (left is apparently the way to go). The end.

Angela

P.S. Oh, about the title, usually when we go out to eat at a new restaurant with the lab, Betty will start by telling us what’s on the menu and we call that story time.

P.P.S In other exciting news, we’re going to Taroko National Gorge tomorrow and there’s a typhoon coming our way either Monday or Tuesday.

Rachel, the rabbit. I just saw it as we were walking around the Dragon Boat festival, and had never seen one so tiny before. When I cropped the picture, I purposely left the Coke bottle in the frame for a size reference. Just one of those random things that I found entertaining.

And for anyone who is unaware, we left the U.S. on May 26, and will be returning July 22. So we’ll be here for eight weeks, with about a week in the middle where we’ll be taking a ‘vacation’ to Kenting National Park and visiting another university.

In other news, we are getting much better at reading menus. Angela and I have collected a menu from every restaurant we’ve been to (and that’s a LOT), with the English translations written next to each item so we remember when we visit again. Menus aren’t provided the same way as in the U.S. It is more of a ticket with a list of all the meals, and you mark what you want and turn the ticket in to the counter with your table number. There’s one restaurant that doesn’t list the meals on the ticket (they are just posted on the wall), so when we go to that one, we grab the server and point to the meals we want, rather than attempt to copy the characters. For lunch we often go with the other lab members, and get introduced to new restaurants. Angela and I usually do dinner on our own; Isaac tends to stay at the lab later and will go out with some of the guys after. This Wednesday we all made plans to go into the downtown area of the city to eat at a particular Japanese restaurant. Afterwards, Betty (the student who drove us in) had prayer and bible study at her church (she is the pastor’s wife as well), so Angela and I window-shopped down the street for an hour. We had just eaten dinner, but the only thing we purchased… was food. Not for a lack of trying though. We went into several clothing stores, and another that sold pretty sparkly things, but we decided 6000 NTD (divide by 30 to get the US equivalent) for a skirt was beyond our budget. The food we bought: we found a bakery and the cakes looked too delicious, so we bought a small one (and it is just as delicious as it looked), and then we found a candy store and filled ourselves bags of various Asian hard and chewy candies. As interesting as some of the candies were, the best part was after we paid for our candy and we were given a free pair of fingernail clippers? I still haven’t figured out why a candy shop would give out fingernail clippers, but now I have a Winnie the Pooh clipper on a keychain.

Sadly, I have no adventures to relate from last weekend. We were supposed to visit Taroko National Park, but someone (read: Angela) had to go and sprain her ankle. I think it sprained itself just to spite her, because she doesn’t recall doing anything to hurt it. One day it just started swelling and hurting. She had a couple of mosquito bites in the area, so we first thought it was just an allergic reaction to the mosquitoes. The doctor she went to a couple days later after a marked lack of improvement said the same thing and gave her FIVE different medications to take for the next three days (two ointments, an anti-inflammatory, an anti-allergy, and we aren’t sure what the last one was). Well, again, after little improvement, it was decided to take her to the hospital. Two X-rays and two doctors later, she is informed that it is a sprain, probably from walking against the current in the river the weekend before. Perplexing, since she didn’t stay in the river that long, she didn’t start to swell until a full day later, and in my experience, it is difficult NOT to immediately notice when you’ve sprained an ankle. But she’s improving now, although she is supposed to wear an ankle brace for three weeks. We’ve rescheduled the excursion to Taroko for this Sunday, so hopefully she’s doing well enough to take full advantage of the hiking opportunities.

And some other random things to share…

There is no Daylight Savings Time, so the sun starts waking me up at about 5 a.m. most mornings. The hottest, most humid part of the day is also the mornings. At 8 a.m., it was already 82 degrees and about 103 percent humidity. The humidity dies away over the day though, and the temperature in the evenings. It is usually quite beautiful weather when we leave the lab at night (anytime after 5).

The main road outside of campus where all the restaurants are is a narrow two-lane road, with no shoulder, and no sidewalk. Parked cars and pedestrians narrow this at some points to about one lane. The rules of the road are quite different here, to sum up in a sentence: if you go first, you win. This makes heading out from campus quite an adventure sometimes. As odd as it sounds, I think I feel safer on a bicycle than I would driving a car. Sometimes Betty (the student with the car who shuttles us around) drives us to lunch, and maneuvers through gaps in her van that I would be afraid to go through in my little Cougar. Cars are the slower form of transportation on this street. Scooters and bicycles are constantly weaving around, which would only add to my probable dislike of driving a car around here.

Glad to know I’m not talking to myself,
Jamie

In regards to your basement:

1) We have had record rainfall this year, even greater than in 1993, so it should be no surprise that you are experiencing some seepage
2) seepage always occurs "bottom-up", just as you describe, because of hydraulic pressure increasing with depth, at rate of 62.4 pounds per cubic foot per foot of depth. The more hydraulic pressure you get against the basement wall, the more seepage that can pass through a hairline crack at the base of the wall stem, where it joins the foundation footing. There is usually a "cold pour" joint at that location which develops a shrinkage crack, and that's where the moisture typically seeps in. So, seepage is all about hydraulic pressure (depth of water on opposite side of the wall), more than any other factor. We've had a really wet year, so all the pores in the soil become saturated, incapable of accepting additional moisture. When it rains the water presure increases very quickly. The other problem is anteceedant mositure. When the ground is near-saturated, rain can't be absorbed by the soil, so runoff increases, dramatically. That's why it floods with a so-called "normal storm (about 1.5 hrs duration), that never previiously caused problems. In the Midwest all of the flooding is intimately tied to anteceedant moisture levels, looking at the past 72 hrs, 1 week, 2 months, and even past 3 months, depending on the size of the watershed.

The bad news is it took months to get into the predicament we find ourselves in right now, and it will take another 6 months or so for us to get out of the "flood danger window," because the anteceedant moisture levels are so high. For example, the Gasconade River experienced its highest recorded flow this past spring, greater than 1983 (the previous record) or even 1993. So from here on everything devolves down to the rainfall patterns that develop this summer, with the most important factors being the duration of dry spells between storms.

Hope that info helps you understand what's going on.

HEY! I know you are reading this, so talk to me! Leave me comments, ask me questions, let me know I’m not talking to myself here. I’m writing about what I think would be interesting to read, but if you are curious about anything, or want to hear more about something, just leave a comment. I’d love for this to be more interactive.

Alright, to start, I want to explain the picture of the fish from the last post, in case anyone else is confused. Yes, that is a tiny fried fish. There was a small pile of them on my plate of lunch the other day. I’ve been pretty willing to try just about everything that’s been thrown at me, but the exception is seafood. Not only do I not like fish, but I have a problem eating something that can stare back at me. So shrimp, one of the few kinds of seafood I actually do like, is also usually not an option, because they are typically served whole, heads, legs, roe, and all.

Sunday we went to the Dragon Boat Festival at a lake nearby. We rented paddleboats, which was fun for Angela and I when the guy on the dock was trying to explain which parts of the lake we were allowed in. We obviously don’t speak Chinese, and he had no English either. We eventually called to one of the students to come over and translate for us. There were all sorts of booths selling food or balloons, or for playing games. There were even a couple selling pet birds. Every half hour or so, there were also longboat races at one end of the lake. I got the impression that these weren’t just random teams of visitors to the festival, but groups that trained just for this event. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any pictures of the races, otherwise I’d post one.

After we left the festival, we went to a nearby river that is a popular weekend spot for the local people. There were lots of families playing in and near the water. We went wading in one part of the river, and I of course promptly slipped on a rock and fell in. Luckily, I made the brilliant decision to purchase a digital camera that is waterproof. So the fact that I was carrying it in my back pocket at the time I fell didn’t cause any problems. Or the fact that I forgot to take it out of my pocket when I later jumped off a ridge into a deeper part of the river. I even tested out its underwater capabilities and took a picture of a 6 of hearts card we found floating in the river. I love my camera. It’s pretty much indestructible. If only my pants were the same… they were ripped by my graceful fall at the beginning of the expedition. Nothing bad though. I think the moss and mud stains will be harder to deal with. All in all a fun day.

Really, really loving my waterproof camera,
Jamie

Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden are testing a spruced-up Toyota Prius, a plug-in hybrid sedan complete with a solar panel attached to its oval roof and a bigger battery in the trunk to supply power in lieu of the gasoline-fueled engine.

Read the full story from the Rocky Mountain News.

The students, by now, were starting to get used to the power of a big blast, but that didn’t diminish their collective enthusiasm for more explosions. During the six-day camp, they would help to generate a 150-foot water spout, feel the concussions of underground explosions, experience demolition demonstrations, fashion fireworks displays and witness the thorough destruction of a store-bought chicken. Because the skin and bone structure of a frozen chicken are so similar to that of the human hand, blowing one up provides a perfect lesson in explosives safety, according to Worsey.

This watermelon (and also a chicken from the grocery store) were sacrificed in order to demonstrate the power of explosives. | photo by B.A. Rupert

More than 100 high school students submitted applications and essays, but the camp could only accommodate 40 people. For the first time in its four-year history, the camp was divided into two June sessions of 20 students each. Most of the activities took place on the property of Missouri S&T’s Experimental Mine. In between explosions, the campers listened to academic lectures, underwent safety training, toured facilities, explored career possibilities, and learned about Missouri S&T’s mining and nuclear engineering department, the only academic department in the United States that offers a minor in explosives engineering.

Even when things got a little boring, the students seemed eager to soak up most of the information – probably because they knew they would soon have another opportunity to see, hear and feel another blast. Babb and Harrison Ray, a camper from Harrison, Ark., confess that they were continually awed by the percussion of such a blast. “It just hits you right in the face,” Ray says.

So I was wrong in my count of lab members. There’s not twelve. There’s eighteen. But I’m doing much better on names, although by no means do I have all of them yet. Every Monday starts with a lab meeting, where each member discusses the work they did over the previous week. It was a long meeting this Monday, because they are not used to presenting in English. There have been some interesting mix-ups in translation, although the only one that immediately comes to mind was substituting “machine” with “mushroom” when explaining the menu at a restaurant.

But not everyone shows up at 8. So yesterday we sat around doing nothing for another hour or more before anyone was there to show us our next lesson (besides that, they still have their own work to do as well, so we only get lessons when they have the time). Monday we learned how to care for the tissue cells we will be using in our experiments (a line derived from lung cancer cells), and how to make the solutions we need to care for them. Neither of those took much time, but the way the day was broken up with the meeting and then a big lunch break (courtesy of Dr. Lee, Dr. Huang’s counterpart here at Dong Hwa), there wasn’t enough time to teach us anything else, so we spent a lot of time on our computers. Yesterday we accomplished more; we learned how to treat our cells with quantum dot and use the confocal microscope to examine them. We also transformed E.coli cells to insert the DNA for the different proteins we will need for the experiments. We can grow these cells, and they will produce the proteins we want, which we can then isolate for use with our tissue cells.

Today is a little ironic. We actually have some work to get done, but we haven’t been able to get to it yet (and won’t until after lunch) because of the other training we are doing. I found that kind of funny, considering all the free time we’ve had the last few days, just waiting for work to do. Our work is going to start picking up now, since we’ve learned the basics for creating the “tools” for our experiments, and now need to maintain them (which is a daily task). Lunch was fun too. We ate in the cafeteria for the first time. Angela and I went first, by ourselves, and were a little lost at first. Then a random student comes up and points us to where Dr. Huang and Dr. Lee are sitting. Somehow everyone on this campus knows who we belong to? Well, Dr. Huang helped us figure out how the cafeteria worked, and Isaac came in shortly after with several students from the lab, so we all ended up eating lunch together.

Alright, moving back in time to the weekend now. Betty (one of the students) took us to a nearby beach on Sunday. Couldn’t swim, it’s too dangerous, but we did play in the surf. Well, all of us but Isaac. He decided to wear jeans and tennis shoes. The rest of us were wearing clothing a little more accommodating to hiking up out of the surf. Regardless, we all still got drenched to the hips from some rogue waves as the tide moved in. After that, we went up the road a bit to a “museum” showing how a special fish called katsuo is prepared. The end product is a dried, smoked fish shaved crumbling thin. I’m not a particular fan of fish, but I tried a piece it, and it really just tastes like woodsmoke.

We still had some shopping to do for supplies for our apartments, so we went to this huge department store called Carrefore’s. It’s like your typical department store combined with a Walmart Supercenter. Angela describes it as a supermarket on crack. Multiple stories, but the problem of maneuvering a cart between multiple levels was solved ingeniously: magnetic escalators! And not step escalators, more like the moving sidewalks at airports, at an angle. I tried overcoming the magnets to push the cart down a level, and it did not go very successfully.

And back to the lab: Dr. Lee has a lab class in a few minutes that we are going to go sit in on and watch, so time to go! I’m working on uploading all my pictures to Shutterfly, and will post a link when they’re ready.

Trying to decide whether the rain of the last few days or the stifling humidity is worse,
Jamie

So I’ve heard it said that every plan has to have its glitch, and I think our trip has already had its share, just from the travel to get here in Taiwan. First, Angela has a ridiculously turbulent flight from KC to Detroit, while Isaac, Dr. Huang, and myself decided that we had a new pilot for our flight from St. Louis, judging from the weaving on the runway at takeoff, and the bouncing on landing. If that had been all, it wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. But after that, our flight out of Detroit was delayed for three and a half hours due to a broken plane. We are all boarded, head out to the runway, accelerate… and stop. Some light is apparently going off, so the pilot tells us we are going to try again, see if it was just a computer malfunction. Such a reassuring turn of phrase when dealing with air travel, wouldn’t you agree? Well, it happens again, so once more we just accelerate down the runway only to stop and head back to the terminal. After holding us on the plane for an hour while they try to fix the problem, but they end up making us deboard and move to a new plane. Which we have to wait another hour to board. This one at least works the first time, and we finally take off. Oh, and I’m being blamed for the glitch, seeing as the same thing happened to me when I traveled to China a few years ago.

Thankfully, that was the end of it. The connection in Japan went smoothly, and we arrived in Taiwan a mere two hours late (although it took another two to get out of the airport and make it to the apartment where we would be staying). So, we ended up traveling between 28 and 30 hours, and completely skipped Tuesday. We woke up between 5 and 7 on Monday morning (CDT), and arrived at the apartment around 2 AM Wednesday morning (Taiwan time), and promptly went to bed, even though it should have felt like lunchtime. Taiwan is 13 hours ahead of Missouri, so we woke up Wednesday morning around the time all of you back home were finishing up dinner on Tuesday.

We toured around Taipei Wednesday and Thursday, courtesy of Chuan-Chin (one of Dr. Huang’s graduate students, who also happens to be from Taiwan, and is home for a visit). We visited the National Palace Museum, which is a collection of historic objects one of Taiwan’s early leaders had brought over from mainland China. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take pictures, so we can’t share with you the amazing intricacy and detail on a majority of these pieces. There were magnifying glasses positioned at several of the displays in order to fully see some of the details. We also visited the memorials for Taiwan’s first two presidents.

I didn’t know this, but Taiwan is home to the world’s tallest building (unless it’s been surpassed since its completion in 2004), and the view from the 88th floor observation deck of Building 101 (named for its 101 floors) is quite amazing. All of the city can be seen, and all of the mountains surrounding it. Hopefully I can get some pictures posted soon.

We traveled to Hualien on Friday morning by train, and got our first views of National Dong Hwa University. Angela remarked on the presence of the Engineering Building as we drove through the campus. Building. As in one. Very odd for us Missouri S&T students. We met the members of the lab, but I couldn’t tell you their names yet. Not only are there twelve of them, but only some of them have English names, and the Chinese names are hard enough to pronounce, let alone remember. I think I remember about half, but maybe not, we’ll see what happens when I see them again wearing different clothing. We didn’t have to do anything in the lab yesterday, and we got today to ourselves. Tomorrow the students will be taking us out to show us around Hualien some.

We are set up in very nice apartments on the campus, one for Angela and me, and one for Isaac. Unfortunately, the apartment Angela and I are in is too far away from the wireless router in the building (since the one on our floor apparently doesn’t work), which is already proving difficult, since like any good Missouri S&T student, we are completely dependent on our access to the internet for survival. The campus here is many times larger than Missouri S&T so thankfully, we’ve been provided bikes to get around. There is a 7-11 on the campus (as there was on every third block in Taipei), and a couple restaurants as well, and at least one good one just outside the campus. The food has all been delicious. Unfortunately, none of the restaurants have picture or English menus, and the workers don’t speak English, so we’ve had to have the students translate and tell us what to order. I’m looking forward to dinner tonight; we won’t have the students with us to translate. I never before realized how difficult it is to communicate with someone who shares no verbal language with you.

Well, I think that is quite enough verbiage for now. I hope to post frequently, and so hope to post shorter posts as well.

Wishing to everyone that their weather is less humid than ours,
Jamie

The group that was working in the bathrooms was stalled for the first half of the day so that they could help lift the stairs into place. But now that the stairs are almost mounted the bathroom crew should be placing the new pipe and also pouring concrete to set the pipe permanently in place.

Today the registered nurse, Kathy Donohue, that traveled with us went from classroom to classroom handing out toothbrushes and toothpaste showing the children how to do it properly. Through the translations of both Phil McGee and Gabriel Olivio the kids thoroughly enjoyed the demonstration and the free toothbrushes after the show. We even saw a group of kids head straight to the sink at their recess and start brushing their teeth the way they were shown.

That is all for now... there should be more tomorrow.

So far in Guatemala everything is going alright. Yesterday (Sunday May 18th) we flew out without a hitch. After leaving St. Louis around 5:45AM we spent approximately 4 and a half hours on two different planes. After we got off the planes we had to spend a bit more than 4 hours driving from Guatemala City to Solola.

Once we arrived in Solola we were surprised by our in country contact Mario Corzo that we had a slightly better place to stay than we originally thought. Instead of staying on the floor of the school that we are working at we were told that we could stay in a small house at an agriculture school on the other side of the city of Guatemala. We are still sleeping on the floor, but now have showers and mattress pads to sleep on. It makes the shock of living in a different country a little less. After we showed up at the house, we went out and got dinner from a local restaurant. Then we were so tired we all went to bed at the late hour of 9:00PM so that we could wake up for the next days work at 6:00AM

Now it is about 2:00 in Guatemala and we took a small break after eating so that we could send this letter. We currently have three different teams working at the school. One team is taking some prefabricated stairs and connecting them from the ground to the second floor of the school. Another group is finishing off the little block laying that needs to be done, and also pouring concrete to form the pillars of the rooms. The third group is currently working on disinfecting and washing out one of the bathroom units. The bathroom group is also chiseling out a clogged pipe from under the concrete urinal so that it can be replaced.

That is about all that is going on currently. I´ll have more information on what is being worked on at a future date.