"You're in Radiator Springs, the cutest little town in Carburetor County." - Mater (Cars)Data

 "And we'll be counting CARS!"

Background

Image of Vineville Ave. facing West

For our traffic lab, we had to watch the vehicles that passed by a spot for a certain time. (In other words, we got our creeper licenses. Averi Hess was my partner and we watched the traffic from my sun porch on the corner of Vineville Ave. and Corbin Ave. We collected data for 5 minutes (there was a ton of traffic!) The following table shows what we saw. (It was hard to see what the people were doing, so most of the data does not have what the people are doing unless it was extremely clear what the drivers or passengers were doing.)

Data

Calculations

From our data, I broke down the data to see how many cars there were by color, type and direction. I found that there were 55 vehicles going west and 40 vehicles going east. There were 45 cars, 31 suvs, 17 trucks and 6 vans. There were 31 white, 25 silver, 12 black, 11 red, 7 blue, 4 grey, 3 of tan and green and 1 each of brown, yellow and gold vehicles.

From those, I calculated how many of each color and type would have passed by in an hour. I used the conversion 60/5=12 and then used 12*raw data = # per hour to find out the number of types of cars and color of cars that would pass by per hour. 

The following Tables show the number of cars that passed by in five minutes and the number expected to pass by in an hour.

Cars per 5 mins and 1 hour by color

Cars per 5 mins and 1 hour by style

Conclusions

From the data, it can be concluded that there are a lot of cars that pass by my sunporch. Most of the cars are colored white, black or silver and there are more cars and suvs than trucks and vans. 

We are Family! How all Humans are Related.

Who is Mitochondrial Eve and How is She Related to Us? 

Mitochondrial Eve is the oldest known women who is the closest known ancestor of all currently living humans. It is believe that she lived about 100,000- 200,000 years ago. Mitochondrial DNA  comes from the mothers side, and Mitochondrial Eve is the oldest women who shares common Mitochondrial DNA with current humans. Mitochondrial DNA is located in organelles called mitochondria. Since Mitochondrial DNA is past from mother to offspring without changing, every human being is directly descended from Mitochondrial Eve since they share the same Mitochondrial DNA.
The following are examples of how all the people on the earth could be related but look different. Over time, people relocated in different parts of the world and their features changed; therefore you have people who look differently all over the world. 


Jackie Chan: Chinese
Actor
Chinese people are characterized by fair and yellowish skin, small, dark eyes, dark hair, wide cheek bones, small noses, and shorter in height.

Sanya Richards-Ross: Jamaican

Athlete

Jamaicans are characterized by thin and muscular bodies, dark hair and eyes, darker toned skin, as well as by their cool accents. Many Jamaicans are of many ancestors, such as African, South American, Indian and Chinese. 

Mila Kunis: Russian

Actress

Russians are characterized by fair skin, dark hair, round faces straight noses and light grey-green/blue eyes.

Oluchi Onweagba: Nigerian

Model

Nigerians are characterized by dark hair, skin and eyes, pointed, large noses, large lips, large eyes.

 Adam Beach: Native American (Canadian Saulteux)

Actor

Native Americans are characterized by high cheek bones, tan colored skin, almond shaped eyes, large ear lobes and dark hair and eyes.

From all the different types of people presented, we can see how being form a different place in the world makes you look different, even though we all have one common ancestor. As humans have moved across the world and grown the population larger, there have been changes to our physical makeup and characteristics.

Nature is Beautiful

                           Trees

Southern Magnolia Tree (Magnoliaceae Family, 

Magnolia grandiflora)

The Southern Magnolia is found the the Southeastern U.S. It is an evergreen tree that has large leathery feeling leaves with large white flowers. The shape is pyramidal and Magnolias can grow up to 90 ft. tall! 

                                                                               Japanese Cherry Tree (Prunus serrulata)

Native to the Himalayas, this tree has been distributed all over the world in the Northern Hemispheres temperate zones. Lots of these trees can be found in Macon and give us the name for our annual festival, the Cherry Blossom Festival. These trees do not produce edible fruit like their name may suggest, and they are mostly hold oriental purposes. 

 Live Oak Tree (Quercus Virginiana) Also known as evergreen oak because it is an oak that does not loose its leaves in the winter. The term Live Oak is used for the tree in North America. Live Oak is used to build ships, especially for its curved branches to make curved structures on the boat. 

Shrubs/Bushes

Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia)
Native to North America, Mountain Laurel is an evergreen bush that has clusters of white and rose colored flowers that bloom in the spring These bushes are found in mountain valley areas. This plant grows in thickets.

Hydrangea

Plants native to Asia and the Americas. Most of the types of deciduous, but some are evergreen. The common arrangement of this plant that we would see in Georgia are mophead arrangements. These are large round groups of flowers that resemble pompoms. The color of Hydrangeas can be a variety of colors and is dependent on the acidity of the soil in which the plant is growing in. 

The Tree Of Life

Palm Springs Tree

BACKGROUND
We were given two pictures of tree stumps (one of a Georgia Pine and the other of a Palm Springs tree) are were required to count the rings and try to determine how old the trees were. By counting the rings, I found the Georgia Pine to be about 63 years old, and I found the Palm Springs tree to be about 34 years old.  

Georgia Pine

DATA

We also had to measure the width of each of the rings. I measured the rings using photoshop's ruler guide. (I made sure the image was in inches, not pixels.) We also had to find the average temperature and precipitation of the area each tree was found in. For the average temperature and precipitation, I used the June, July and August Months. I used the data from the regional climate center's website. The following table shows the data that I collected from these methods.

I used this data to create graphs that showed the average precipitation and width of the rings and another that showed average temperature and the width of the rings.

We can conclude from the graph above that Georgia receives more rain, but that does not necessarily mean that the tree rings are bigger than the Palm Springs tree. The two groups of data points are centered around the same width measurements, therefore I would not conclude that the amount of rain is correlated to the width of the tree rings.

From this graph, we can see that Georgia and Palm Springs have different temperatures, but again like the precipitation, there are not drastic differences between the two trees tree ring widths. I would therefore conclude that the average temperature is not correlated to the width of the rings. 

WORLD EVENTS

We were also supposed to put major events on the picture of the tree. I borrowed these pictures from Jessica Byers because she did a fantastic job with them.

CONCLUSIONS

The two trees are different types and are from different environments so that could be why no correlations were found between the width of the rings and the precipitation and temperature. A different version of this lab could have been to take two trees of the same type in different parts of the country and see if temperature and precipitation affected the ring widths.