Summer

So it's been about a month after classes ended, and it's going by so fast! I haven't really been doing much other than working full time at Company. I did however get a chance to register for my classes, and it looks like everyday except for Friday I have classes from 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM if I decide to drop the Statics class. So far I'm signed up for Physics II with horrible teacher, Chemistry, and Calculus III. I was hoping to take Statics or an intro to computer programming but it completely fills up my schedule and I will be unable to work. I had originally planned on taking a leave of absence or quitting for this upcoming semester, but I recently changed positions and now am working on an SAP operations job which launches mid semester. I just feel bad leaving before the project 'completes', especially since the people here have been great and are so much more professional and nice than the previous program I supported.

I am worried though because I was hoping to study up on some physics II topics and chemistry refreshers so that I'm more 'prepared' for the semester. So far, I have done zilch preparations for either. And also, for some reason before school ended I responded to an email from ASME asking if anyone would be interested in being a webmaster for their website. I have no website design/programming experience other than an AJAX class I took over a year ago through UCLA's extension program....which means I completely forgot what I learned and didn't learn. I just logged into the system today and looked at the files already developed by the school administrator and am completely lost, and clueless. I have much to learn, and so little time. On top of that I need to get my butt moving on updating this blog's About section, and About Us. Keeping busy is good :)

Grades are in!

After much anticipation, I've just learned that I can now wash my brain of all things trigonometry(har...har) because I passed! Well, I did better than passing but less than an A; you figure it out.

And thanks to astrophoenix for passing on this excellent read: A Mathematician's Lament.

According to this awesome write-up about the current state of math in the US, I just finished this segment of training:

TRIGONOMETRY. Two weeks of content are stretched to semester length by masturbatory definitional runarounds. Truly interesting and beautiful phenomena, such as the way the sides of a triangle depend on its angles, will be given the same emphasis as irrelevant abbreviations and obsolete notational conventions, in order to prevent students from forming any clear idea as to what the subject is about. Students will learn such mnemonic devices as “SohCahToa” and “AllStudents Take Calculus” in lieu of developing a natural intuitive feeling for orientation and symmetry. The measurement of triangles will be discussed without mention of the transcendental nature of the trigonometric functions, or the consequent linguistic andphilosophical problems inherent in making such measurements. Calculator required, so as to further blur these issues.

Robots!

Opening Doors on the Way to a Personal Robot

By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: June 8, 2009
Consider it one small step — or a roll, actually — for a robot, one not giant, but significant step for robotics.

Willow Garage, a Silicon Valley robotics research group, said that its experimental PR2 robot, which has wheels and can travel at speeds up to a mile and a quarter per hour, was able to open and pass through 10 doors and plug itself into 10 standard wall sockets in less than an hour. In a different test, the same robot completed a marathon in the company’s office, traveling 26.2 miles. PR2 will not compete with humans yet; it took more than four days.
For the person who wants to buy a fully functioning robot butler, this may not seem so impressive. But for roboticists and a new generation of technologists in Silicon Valley, this is a significant achievement, a step along the way to the personal robot industry.
Willow Garage was founded by Scott Hassan, one of the designers of the original Google search engine. The company’s name is a reference to a small garage on Willow Road in Menlo Park, Calif., which was Google’s first office. The company is trying to develop a new generation of robotic personal assistants. Roboticists here and at other companies envision creating something on the scale of the personal computer industry, with mechanical personal assistants taking over a lot of drudgery, from cleaning up to fetching a beer from the refrigerator.
This is not a new hope, nor is it the first time that robots have tried to open doors, navigate rooms and recharge themselves. The Beast, a robot built at Johns Hopkins University in the mid-1960s, was able to locate standard wall sockets to refuel. And devices like the inexpensive iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner can locate and dock with a specially designed charging station.
But roboticists said that the Willow Garage robot was the first to integrate the ability to do a number of operations in a real-world environment.
“There are other groups that have opened doors before,” said Andrew Ng, a Stanford roboticist with several students who have gone to work for the company. But, Mr. Ng said, this seemed to be the first robot able to repeatedly and reliably open doors and plug itself in.
William L. Whittaker, a Carnegie Mellon University roboticist and the winner of a Defense Department urban challenge robot driving contest last year, said it was “unprecedented” for a robot to navigate in a building reliably and repeatedly recharge itself. “These guys are the real deal,” he said.
The Willow Garage laboratory is less than a mile from another pioneering mobile robot project that was developed at SRI International in the late 1960s. The robot, known as Shakey, had little onboard computing capability and was remotely controlled by a combination of a mainframe and a minicomputer.
“In 40 years there has been a lot of progress, but not progress you notice,” said Nils Nilsson, a pioneering artificial intelligence researcher who was one of Shakey’s designers. “A lot of the progress has been made in removing the cheats we used.”
To help Shakey navigate, he said, the baseboards in the room were painted black to help identify walls, and objects were painted red so they could be identified by the vision system.
The ultimate goal of the Willow Garage researchers is to build a Robot Operating System, or R.O.S., that would greatly facilitate the work of a generation of software developers.
Microsoft is developing a similar system based on a version of the Windows operating system, but the Willow Garage effort is an open-source project intended to leverage the contributions of a number of robotics experts around the world.
Toward that end, a team of roboticists from the University of Tokyo recently modified the Willow Garage R.O.S. to run on a robot they were developing, said Steve Cousins, Willow Garage’s president and chief executive.
“The eventual goal is to provide a set of capabilities that are so generic and so universal that they can be used as building blocks in more complicated applications,” said Sebastian Thrun, director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and a Willow Garage board member.
The current PR2 robot is powered by several Intel microprocessor chips and “sees” with a combination of sensors including scanning lasers and video cameras. It is able to locate electrical outlets and navigate in a building that is designed to accessibility guidelines in the Americans With Disabilities act. Such buildings do not have doors with round door knobs, which simplifies the task of opening a door for a robot. The PR2 carries its plug on a magnet at its base.
In the recent test, one of the plugs was behind a locked door, so the robot needed to be intelligent enough to abort its effort and move on to the next plug. The doors it needed to navigate were alternately closed, open and partially open.
One of the scientists summed up his feelings about the milestone in a succinct e-mail message:
“Now they can escape and fend for themselves.”

Design It: Shelter Competition

To all you geeks out there! There's a design competition done through the Guggenheim Musuem and Google Sketch Up to create a shelter in a specific location for sleeping and working. Apparently it's Frank Lloyd Wright's 142nd birthday today. The entries are due 8/24 in case you're interested! Here's the links to the competition and more information:

http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2009/06/announcing-design-it-shelter.html

http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/education/sackler-center/design-it-shelter

I tried using Google Sketch Up about two years ago but for some reason I couldn't get it working. I sure hope after my SolidWorks class I'd have better luck with it, but you never know...

The winner of the design gets airfare/accommodation to NYC, so that's enough to get me to participate!

No More Trig!

Like Jennifer, my spring semester has also drawn to a close. As I walked out of class Wednesday night after my two-hour final, my lips burst into a radiant grin. My immediate thought was, "I did it! No more trig!"

As soon as I thought those words, I had to laugh a little. After all, if I keep pursuing this educational path, I'll continue to use and build upon the principles learned in trigonometry. I'm sure there will come a day when I'll look back and say, "Psshh. Trig. That was easy in comparison to (fill in the blank)."

While June is already starting to fly by, I'm still unsure of many things for this upcoming fall semester. I still don't know if I'll be part time or full time at this point, especially since so many engineering classes are dependent on completion of calculus.

I am excited at the possibility that I'll be attending a 4-year college(even if it is a cheap state-run commuter school) instead of floating around in community college purgatory. For now, it's summertime. Time to bust ass working full-time and save up for the future.

Check

I can completely close the book now on my spring 2009 semester. All grades are in, and I am pleased to say I have passed all my whopping 3 classes. In my defense, it's my first semester and I was working part time =). The hardest part after finals was definitely waiting for my grades to come in, especially my physics class. I had an expectation for what the outcome of my grade would be based on how I felt about the final and how I performed previously on tests, labs, etc. I passed, and still do not understand why I got the grade that I did, but despite my curiousity and at my husband's urging, I am going to accept it and try to not investigate it further. The bad news is that since I passed the class, I am now going to suffer this mental rollarcoaster for the fall semester with the same ding dong professor.
I have vamped up my work hours to full time now, and that took some time to get used to. I realized I was in a huge bubble the 3 months I was in school and it feels nice being able to connect with people and to work on hobbies, read, watch tv, etc. I suppose it really is a sacrifice to go back to school, not only financially but also socially as well. I didn't really fully comprehend it until it was all over. But, I guess this is all done in the sheer hopes of forging a positive future opportunity, and hopefully (fingers crossed), a rewarding career.