Education ← A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

Differential Tuition in Florida vs Differential Tuition in Washington

Oct

2012

Interesting, Florida is considering “a proposal to lower tuition for STEM majors”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/10/tuition-by-major.html. It is surprising and interesting that the issues are so different between Florida and Washington. STEM programs in key fields at UW are oversubscribed and are turning way students every year. Stimulating demand would be pointless as the programs are capacity limited. The ...

TV Remotes and dogs’ mouths, a perfect match

Jun

2012

Grab bag of entertaining things I read this weekend: * “TV remotes are super awesome”:http://gm.asm.org/index.php/component/content/article/48/313-the-most-contaminated-surfaces-in-hotel-rooms * “French beetle aircraft”:http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/8/3073654/french-beetle-coleoptere-aircraft. Jet fighters meet Dr. Seuss. We should let the French design all our weapons systems. We might not win the war but man would we look trippy. * “Desk optimized for doodling”:http://design-milk.com/my-desk-by-miguel-mestre/. This is not ridiculous ...

I like Udacity but I am dropping out.

Mar

2012

So I’m 2 weeks into my first “Udacity”:www.udacity.com and I’m impressed with the quality of the courseware. The instructor is engaging, the videos are good, the pacing of video and interactive content keeps you engaged, the instruction is derived in bite size pieces which really works. All that said, I am abandoning the course. It ...

Finished my first week of Udacity coursework

Feb

2012

Taking “CS373, Programming a robotic car”:http://www.udacity.com/view#Course/cs373/CourseRev/feb2012/Unit/2/Nugget/1002. Don’t really love the topic, but good material to practice some Python and some statistical inference. So far, the course website seems to work very well, nice intermixing of video with interaction, nice breaking of instruction into short easily consumable pieces. And seems to scale well — in the ...

The day you stop learning is the day you start dying

Jan

2012

My grandfather once told me “The day you stop learning is the day you start dying.” I’ve had a lifelong commitment to education and I am still learning every day. There is so much going on in education, the choices are broader every day, with so many efforts to increase access and lower costs. Some ...

Math software sources

Apr

2011

Saving for later reference…. * “Netlib”:http://netlib.org/ * “NIST”:http://gams.nist.gov/ * “Trilinos”:http://trilinos.sandia.gov/ * “PETSc”:http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-as/ * “OpenCL”:http://www.khronos.org * “Nividia OpenCL”:http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/opencl/sdk/website/samples.html * “Apple OpenCL”:http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/search/?q=opencl * “NERSC”:http://www.nersc.gov/nusers/resources/software/. ACTS stuff dead?

Spring Quarter — High Performance Scientific Computing

Mar

2011

Well, winter quarter’s Computation Fluid Dynamics just about killed me. My lack of a solid fluid dynamics basis certainly was a big reason for my struggles. It may have been a bridge too far for me. Spring quarter will be “High Performance Scientific Computing”:http://www.washington.edu/students/crscat/appmath.html#amath583 and then I will have completed enough credits for my Master’s ...

Point Foundation scholarships

Mar

2011

A couple weeks ago I wrote about our scholarships for Marion County students. We started doing this maybe 10 years ago and are glad every day that we’ve made the investment. The students we’ve helped will certainly make a great contribution to Marion County, to Ohio, or to whatever community they end up in, and ...

OSU scholarships for Marion County residents

Feb

2011

For about the 10th year now we are providing funding for scholarships for Marion County residents and Marion County high school graduates. We’ve used different mechanisms in the past, but for the last 5-6 years we’ve done this through the OSU financial aid office as need-based scholarships for Marion County residents or Marion Country high ...

Computational Fluid Dynamics – my winter quarter adventure

Jan

2011

This course may kill me as I know nothing of fluid dynamics, but I am hoping the computational focus will play in my favor. I’m not so interested in macro-scale behavior but more focused on nano-scale applications. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) is a set of methodologies to solve numerically the governing equations of fluid motion. ...

My fall quarter academic work — vibrations, DEP modeling

Sep

2010

Fall quarter kicking off, hurray! Formal coursework will be ME 588 — Dynamics and Vibrations. Basic theoretical framework, single DOF systems, multiple DOF systems, and continuously driven systems. Not my first choice of material but need to take remotely and the options were few. Informally, I’ll be working on modeling of dielectrophoresis effects at the ...

Mech Eng basics on the web

Apr

2010

Taking Finite Element Analysis this term which would be way easier if I actually had ever taken a basic course in mechanical engineering. Beams, trusses, springs, cantilevers are all foreign to me, I was learning about resistors and capacitors when the MechEs were learning this stuff. Web to the rescue: * “Cantilever calculator”:http://www.efunda.com/formulae/solid_mechanics/beams/casestudy_display.cfm?case=cantilever_endload#target up at ...

An aside — why am I reading bunches of PDFs?

Apr

2010

I finally officially matriculated last fall as a part time grad student at UW and am studying nanoengineering. For the moment I am sited in the mechanical engineering department tho I could just have easily been in the electrical engineering department, materials science department, chemistry, physics, or several other places. And in fact I am ...

What I've been up to — Ohio, Europe, Studying…

Oct

2009

Some silence in last month. Spent a lot of time enjoying family and central Ohio, fall is the time to be in the state with football, color changes, often good weather, etc. And when not in Ohio, I was in Helsinki (recommended: Hotel Glo, Fazer Cafe), Stockholm (Lydmar Hotel, Vasa Museum, Sture shopping area, Skogskyrkogården, ...

Just plain interesting links

Oct

2009

* “If air travel was like health care”:http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/st_20090926_4826.php * “Value added by universities”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/09/value-added-by-universities.html. Interesting way to rank

Installing MatLab on Snow Leopard

Sep

2009

Getting myself up to speed on MatLab for this fall’s classes, the activation fails on Snow Leopard with some ugly error message. Fix is easy — in the Java Preferences app on your system, make 32-bit Java the default. All is well after that. Details on the “matlab support site”:http://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-8GS5S1/index.html?product=ML&solution=1-8GS5S1

Linear algebra, finite element analysis online

Jul

2009

Reardon recommends Computational Science and Engineering. OCW links.

Tensors and Index Notation

May

2009

A couple of good primers out on the net: * A Primer on Index Notation from Colorado Civil Engineering. Practical intro to index notation * A Primer on Index Notation from MIT. A little more theoretical and discussion of use in calculus. Somehow I did not ever learn about index notation in my past educational ...

Ferroelectric or Electroactive Polymers

Apr

2009

Had first lecture in ME 568 — Active and Sensing Materials. Topics include Ferroelectric polymers. Paper here PVDF as a specific case. Strong piezo behaviour Penn State does a lot of work in these materials, as does Stanford

Spring Coursework

Mar

2009

Continuing my educational adventure this spring: ME 568 Active and Sensing Materials: Fundamental knowledge of the nano-structure property relations of active and sensing materials, and their devices. Examples of the active and sensing materials are: shape memory alloys (SMAs), ferromagnetic SMAs, ferroelectric, pyroelectric and piezoelectric materials, thermoelectrics, electroactive and conducting polymers, photoactive polymers, photovoltaics, and ...