A look back at an old idea

So this is the first big idea that I've been really proud of.  I developed it in 2000 when I was only 13.

My idea was to find a way to take all of the functionality of a full-sized computer and cram it into a handheld device. It would be a fully functional computer with a touch screen and a docking station so that you could also use it like a desktop.

The pictures speak for themselves:

Anticipation

Also check out my anticipation idea for technology.

Basically, in the future our technology will collect and use massive amounts of data about us, so that it can give us the information we need right when we need it and do what we want it to without even asking.

This is already being done a little bit by Google Now.

See my full idea at https://futurecontest.intel.com/idea.php?id=628

Google Earth Tricks for Presentations

Demo

You can use PowerPoint slides, panoramio images, tours, animation, ground overlays based on 2D PDF maps to awesome-ify your presentation in Google Earth!
YouTube video of what you can do
Google Earth KMZ file of Flood Risk presentation
KMZ of Animated Hurricane Irene Image

Put PowerPoint Slides into Google Earth

It isn't that hard to add powerpoint slides to Google Earth.  There are many ways to do this.  To make them easily fill up the whole screen without fighting they should be a screen overlay.  Screen overlays can't be created by hand in Google Earth but you can pretty easily make one by hand by copying the following code:

<ScreenOverlay id="khScreenOverlay756">
 <name>Slide2 - Flooding</name>
 <visibility>0</visibility>
 <Icon>
  <href>C:/YOURPATH/YOURFILE.png</href>
 </Icon>
 <overlayXY x="0.5" y="0.5" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
 <screenXY x="0.5" y="0.5" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
 <rotationXY x="0.5" y="0.5" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
 <size x="0.8" y="0" xunits="fraction" yunits="fraction"/>
</ScreenOverlay>

Ground Overlays from PDF, JPG Etc...

To do this you must first capture just the image of the map you are looking to add.  You will probably need to crop out the background and stuff so that it doesn't look crappy.  To do this I used... uh, um well, I used powerpoint.  To be honest, I love powerpoint it simple, powerful and easy.  In Powerpoint 2010 you can use Insert and then picture or screenshot to select the map you need.  Once it is in PowerPoint you can use the remove background tool to make sure it only shows the part of the map you want.  Once this is done right click on the image go to save as picture and then save it as a PNG.  In Google Earth go to add image overlay, find your image and then adjust the size/position/rotation so that it matches up with Google Earth.  You can get some very nice results.

Animated Placemarks (points):

Animating a set of points is fairly straight forward.  Google earth makes it possible for each point to have a beginning time and an ending time (see timespan in KML reference).  To make it for Google Earth, first make a spreadsheet with the points names, locations, beginning and end times.  Then you must save it as a CSV.  Then you can use a website (such as earthpoint) to make a Google Earth KML file based on your spreadsheet).  This can lead to some pretty awesome results.

Animated Image Overlay:

Example:  Animated Hurricane Irene Image 

So this one was a little harder.  I wanted to get the video of Hurricane Irene into Google Earth.  I first used a program to take a video of Hurricane Irene and turn it into individual  about 40 TIF images, one for each time period.  After that I used Google Earth to add one of the image overlays and stretch and place it in the right position.  The KML code for the rest of the overlays will be exactly the same as the first, except we need to change the filename pointing to the TIF file and we need to have it be visible during a different timespan.  I wrote a program in python that takes the template KML code and then makes a copy of it for each time period, substituting in the appropriate time span and filename.  Once this was done I put them all in the same folder and put them in Google Earth.

The Greek Yogurt Temperature Apparatus (Remote Temperature Monitor)

So, my wife decided to try more and more ambitious recipes and now she's making Greek yogurt.  The trick with yogurt is that you have to keep it at about 120 F for about 16 hours such that the live bacteria cultures can grow.  This turned out to be a fun little arduino project (although next time I'll try Raspberry Pi).

We kept the yogurt at this temperature at first in a crock pot and then in the oven all night.  The trick for the oven is that if you heat up the oven to 200 F and then put your crockpot pot in it (wrapped in a towel?) and then leave it in their all night with the oven light on, it will remain about the right temperature.  So I decided to make a little system to communicate the oven temperature to us, so we could monitor it all night long from the warmth of our bed.

Basically it consisted of:

• Dallas Temperature Sensor
• Arduino Mega
• My PC
• A mobile device

The temperature sensor sent the temperature to the Arduino Mega (over 1 wire serial).  The Mega would send this serially to the computer.  A python script on my computer read it and updated a webpage with the temperature.  Then we used our Nexus 7 to read the temperature.

Unfortunately I didn't start this project until my wife was already well into making the yogurt.  She was asleep once I finally got everything debugged, so I didn't have the pleasure of impressing her.  But she was surprised in the morning when she got up to check on it, and I shouted the temperature from bed.  I'll be more prepared next time.

Useful Quantitative Models

These are all the tools I've learned in grad school that may be useful to my thesis.  My thesis is on  trying optimize the design and maintenance of individual infrastructure elements (such as road segments or substations) so that they are more resilient to hazards and the like.

Maybe I'll add references later.

•Concept of Resilience

•Decision Tools

–Life Cycle Cost Analysis

–Cost Benefit Analysis

–Multi-criteria analysis

–Decision Tree

•Design Philosophies

–Existing Building Codes/Standards: Design Storm

–Performance Based Design

–Genetic Algorithms

–Threat depended versus threat independent design

–Reliability based design

•Risk Assessment Tools

–Failure Mode Effects Analysis

–Event Tree

–Fault Trees

–Markov Chain

•Operations Research Tools

–Stochastic Programming (LP/NLP)

Simulation (monte carlo, discrete event, queueing, stochastic processes

Rough ideas for my thesis come together on prezi