Today we started with a blast! We recently took up random activities and games to help team synergy. Most of us come a few minutes before working hours to be safe, and in those times at the start of the day we usually search for fun activities we can participate in as a team. Today we saw one of our crewmates playing a game with spheres of various sizes. At http://agar.io/ you get to choose a nickname and you spawn as a tiny agar ball. There are supplements to help you grow all around the environment, and as you consume them by steering your sphere with your cursor, you grow. As a drawback, your rapid speed which you spawn with at small size decreases as you get bigger. The trick of the game is to eat as many opponents as possible and be the biggest. Incase you want to consume an enemy who is faster than you, you can split your full size into two equal part and shoot one half towards your cursor, and if it hits the enemy sphere, you consume them. You can regain your past size by touching your two parts to congregate into a bigger previous blob, however you have to wait a while as a consequence of splitting up the first time. If you want to assist a friend, you can always shoot out small balls of yourself and aim it at a friend using “w” key and if the small blobs contact, your friend consumes them and grows in size.
After the early fun, we moved on to a lecture by Ahmet hoca. He talked about numerous things, and connected them to each other at the end of the presentation. We started with proteins, and how the most significant factors are enzymatic activity, and interaction information. Imagine two proteins, one with 1000 active/allosteric sites, and the other with 1500 active/allosteric sites (Active Site: a region on an enzyme that binds to a protein or other substance during a reaction, Allosteric Site: An allosteric site is a site at which a small regulatory molecule interacts with an enzyme to inhibit or activate that specific enzyme; which is different from the active site where catalytic activity occurs. The binding of the allosteric effector is in general noncovalent and reversible.). You would have to interact every site of the first protein with all the sites of the other protein. This leads to a very tedious process, which is worse for larger protein samples. He recommended we read a book called “Think Bayes” which is an introduction and explanation of Bayesian statistics which we might use in the future. Next he mentioned how siRNA are used to create knockout animal samples. He mentioned Enhancers and Silencers, and how they impact the binding ability of DNA dependent RNA polymerase. It works just like a car in a park spot, if the spot is full, no other binding can occur, if not however, binding is more probable. Enhancers work to increase binding, whilst silencers work the opposite way. He also mentioned that the DNA dependent RNA polymerase can bind anywhere on the DNA strand, even where no TATA boxes are present, but the stability of the binding is not as robust, hence is unfavourable and less likely.
Next we took a lunch break and had a medium pizza each, out in the shade on the grass, under a small tree. We went indoors after eating and attended our second lecture of the day about Game Dev Tycoon. In Game Dev Tycoon you replay the history of the gaming industry by starting your own video game development company in the 1980s. You have to create the best selling games, research new technologies and invent new game types. Your aim is to become the leader of the market and gain worldwide fans, and of course, make millions of dollars in the process.
We moved on to presentations on chapter 9: Getting Data, from the book; Data Science from Scratch by Fatma and Ahmet. Ahmet hoca was present and he did have is input on the subjects where we amateurs struggled. Fatma went first, she presented on “stdin” and “stdout”. Next, she explained the “pipe” function, and Ahmet hoca said we would use it in the near future. The pipe sign: “|” basically takes the function to the left of it, and applies it to the right. There can be multiple pipes in the same line. For example; “x|y|a|b”. Ahmet was next and he presented on Scraping the Web. He touched on HTML and the Parsing Thereof. Next he explained BeautifulSoup, which is a Python package for parsing HTML and XML documents (including having malformed markup, i.e. non-closed tags, so named after Tag soup). We packed up afterwards, said farewell and called it a day.
