Days 13 & 14: Implications of the Pandemic and Its Silver Linings

        Yesterday I spent the first 30 minutes in our everyday morning meeting, where we discussed how everyone was doing. Frankly, I was very apathetic and nervous as I was anticipating a call from my parents, who started experiencing symptoms of coronavirus on Saturday. Kyrgyzstan's hospitals are overwhelmed with patients as the government did not properly implement any of the state opening phases. There are no new hospital facilities, and doctors are incredibly underpaid and understaffed. I found out today that regular people are fundraising to equip the hospitals with ventilators. On top of all this news, the day before, my mom told me that they had a fever and started losing the ability to differentiate smells...
        Whenever the morning meeting ended, I called my parents and was relieved to find out that their fever was gone. It felt like I myself could breathe again. This subject is important to document because I am a human being who codes, not a coder who also lives a life. As much as I want to stay unbothered and productive, this news was affecting my experience: I had a hard time focusing on researching, connecting with my colleagues, and being enthusiastic about the process, in general. After the update on my parents' health, I realized what I had been experiencing up to that point.
        Now, back to our workflow. Rebekah, the team leader, was researching an online cloud platform that could power Jupyter Notebooks or a tool with similar "static", line-by-line capabilities. Today she presented Azure Notebooks as a platform of choice as it completely mimics Jupyter Notebook's experience. This is good news as it meant that we would not need to make changes to the book's text and images. I spent an hour working on Azure Notebooks, copying the platform's template datasets, and working on the assignments for class. I was then notified that we will be instead switching to Google Labs, because of Google's contribution to the How to Think Like a Data Scientist book and their overall extensive support of Runestone Interactive. I very soon realized that we will need to make changes to the book as Google Labs uses a different Notebook system.
        It is clear at this point that How To Think Like a Data Scientist is the largest portion of the entire  Computer Science summer institute at Berea. We started as a group of 4 and then added 2 more students. Developing book material through research and analysis is a great challenge that will be especially helpful when I apply for grad schools. When analyzing different tools against the available datasets, I learned that the dataset for Chapter 5 was missing from the textbook. I immediately contacted Dr. Jan and was told to contact Brad Miller, the founder of Runestone Interactive, during his office hours. He shared that some of the datasets are hidden in metadata, and need to be implemented in the book. This experience was exciting as I got to speak with the founder of the tool we are using via a Zoom call, which, as I thought of it later, is one of the silver linings of the pandemic...

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