Year 3 – Chapter 3 – Fall Break

by skyrien

It IS break again, and I have so much crap that I need to do. It wouldn’t be fall break without a visit to NU, another NU-UIUC Football game, and yet ANOTHER loss for the Fighting Illini. Something just doesn’t work with our school’s football team: always winning for at least 10 minutes, then faltering, and continuing to falter till the end. With that ending, the bagel in my stomach did not sit well.

This is while we were winning 17-16

After the 27-17 loss…

Oh sure, it was definitely worth going to though. I find it hard to actually care too much about football outside the school-related setting, but something about it being OUR team makes is seem worth caring about. But that’s just me, I’ve never really been a sports buff. If you haven’t gone to a college football game, make it a priority.

Unfortunately, it looks like the rest of this break will have to be less-interesting. There’s a pile of crap that needs to be worked on. I need to make a list, or else I’ll never get it all done. I might as well make some longer term goals as well.

Short term (for break):

Finish input entities, simulate operation for 385 project. Send to Jason and work on other problems (By Wednesday)
Read books and work on ethics research essay (worth an entire 40% of our grade).
Catch the hell up in CS 225. Finish MP (if one is released)
Learn PHP , make rudimentary uh… program?
Dive into .net! I didn’t get Visual Studio .NET for nothing!
Play around with Matlab
Reinstall 3ds max. Watching that Kiwi video gave me new inspiration!
Sunday: CCMC. I think I need to.

Mid term (for the year):

Keep up and get back on top of classes. (Rodeo time!!!)
Learn two more tie-tying methods. Thanks to EWah for the Double Winsor. Best one yet!
Work on a simple animation for 3ds max. Render and place on Youtube .
Gain 15 lbs and get Amephistophelian that funky hat!

Oh, and speaking of hats… I’ve been playing around with new styles, thanks to Capt. Kirk Junior. What do you think?

Long term (for the rest of college) :

Achieve greatness!
Win at least ONE of each: A writing, art, and business competition.
Further the cause of medical neuroscience.
Get published, dammit! Novel or article, I don’t care!
More as they come to my head.

Uh, I think that’s enough for now…

Also, regarding the Kiwi animation, there seems to have been a few people that didn’t understand the meaning. Well, look around fools–that animation was deceptively simple in its message.

Yep. Till next time!

By the way, this is a great book, with many insights into why we are who we are.

…she does not think the happiness of a fulfilling life an be won without a realistic willingness to make the effort and pay the costs required. For example, you have to be willing to make a relationship work. What many of her clients want instead, she thinks, is an ideal relationship in which they will be loved completely without having to do anything in return. “This is the person who is going to be there to talk to, to go somewhere with them, or, you know, a person who’s just going to be there and is going to understand them. Most people don’t want to have to tell you how they feel. They want you to divine that. That would be perfection. Someone who would understand them so thoroughly that they would never have to say a word and just always be there for them and who would just make them feel really secure and really, oh not alone.” What people need to accept is that it is ther responsibility to communicate what they need and what they feel, and to realize that they cnnot expect someone else magically to make them happy. “People want to be made happy, instead of making themselves happy.”

Year 3 – Chapter 2 – Looking Ahead

by skyrien

So. This year has been rather busy–surprising since I’m only taking 12-hours. This week especially has been a hellish time: exams, papers, projects; it seems that my four classes have plotted this revenge for my slacking… (having missed 50+ classes so far, the first time I actually lost track!). Mleh. Still, things chug along; I’ve finally started making some more progress on the real-world front:

I’ve had a couple of interviews so far, one with Apple, which I unfortunately did not do so well (not knowing how to use a Mac didn’t help), and another with Cummins, a big diesel engine company. The latter was more promising, and it’s the first time I realized how flexible my resume was. Flexible… and unspecialized; this is my third year, I feel like I should have some more areas of expertise, but no matter. Lately I’ve felt that I was barely inching along, knowing what I needed to know to (barely) do the class work, a far cry from the glorious freshman year days. But on Monday, I realized I do have a few areas where I’m already quite informed. I talked with a professor (doing neuroscience / EE work) a couple days ago, with the hopes of possibly getting back into research. It was the freshest conversation I had in a while. His research interests coincided with mine, and I found that I *actually* know what he’s talking about, and even had a few suggestions of my own! Not to sound so upbeat (I don’t know if he’ll have room in his lab), but it’s always a nice feeling to know you have something that few others have; it’s an asset, whether it’s an interest or skill. In any case, hopefully I’ll be able to put my past to use, and network some more within the EE/Neuroscience departments here.

Beyond that, I’ve been having some conflicting thoughts about the future as of late; especially since going to this talk at the ACM Conference. I wondered when I’d be able to get back into neuroscience on the ECE track, and it looks like I’m finally there. If there has been any single driving force in my career interests, this is the closest thing to it; neuromorphic computers; computers that mimic the brain in the way it learns. This might sound a bit silly, but I got into the idea of human-computer interface while watching Exosquad as a 7 year old. Exosquad, in case you didn’t know, was Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon with “mech-like” space suits that connected to its pilot by a spinal implant, which, in the cartoon, allowed the pilot to control the system by thought alone. Of course, it wasn’t the first time something like this was seen on TV, but it’s what got me into that whole, human-neural connection stuff.

I found substance in it all as I studied more in the years to come… jumping (way) ahead… I mean, we already have dishes of rat neurons controlling F-22s, why not apply the same principles to hardware abstractions? With over a billion transistors (and growing rapidly) in the latest Itanium processor, performance gains aren’t holding true to Moore’s law. So, this guy here proposes that we apply the brain’s system for learning to developing future chips. We only have 20 thousand or so genes to encode everything of our existence, and nearly a trillion neurons, and a thousand times as many neural connections; obviously it can’t all be stored in those genes. The genes just provide the starting point: which cells differentiate into neurons, where they go, and maybe some basic connections. The rest of it all; the dividing and reconnecting, is <i>all</i> done on the order of the tissues themselves. How they all connect with the correct inputs and outputs of the human body is beyond me. But the one researcher is begininning to unravel that mystery. He has found that the simple “learning” done by neurons themselves (long-term potentiation, etc…) provides scalable results all the way up to the organism level. Pretty incredible stuff. So, pretty much you give the necessary methods for “learning”, and the rest is done for you. So yeah, I’d love to work at this guy’s lab for grad school…

But that’s Stanford for ya.

As for me… I’m just getting started. And I CAN’T wait to get out of here!

Yeah yeah, so this quiz doesn’t say much about computer savviness, I mean, come on… who would really rather be Linus than Bill? At the top of the Microsoft Empire, even the smallest rebel would have more power. Anyway, so yeah, biased libertarians… *cough*SHANEAL*cough*…

October 31, 2006

Year 3 – Chapter 1 – Here we go again

by skyrien

So, here we are again, the first chapter of another year; another year to forge memories, and all that crap. Or… another year to just blow by and be forgotten (like the last one). I don’t know what it is, maybe it’s just that sophomore-junior transition, but I just feel lost in the chaos of it all. Taking a step back and reflecting where I am shocks me with: “Holy crap! After this, there’re only 3 more semesters left?!”

Sure, it’s can be exciting to know that after this, I’ll know where (out there!) I’m going to be putting my life’s time, but it’s incredibly scary while you don’t know. That was perfectly acceptable as a freshmen, but I still don’t quite know… oh well. I’m sure it’ll come to me.

In any case, it’s 6:31 AM right now at the ECE Student Lounge, and I’m putting my paper off so that I can jog my creative brain, (which as of late, hasn’t really been). Jon is hilariously sleeping off to the side (noted for funniness). A business school kid in the heart of engineering. Hah. Just kidding, really. People are waking up to start their days right now, and here I am, still working. Jon commented that it shows our dedication to academics. I think it shows my latent senioritis.

Jon snoozes happily on someone else’s foot dust

Senioritis and dogged laziness has dominated respectively, my nights and mornings. It’s so easy to ditch ECE 414 in those damned mornings, and of course, why bother with going to CS 225 after that? Especially when the material from those lectures can easily be self-learned through lecture slides and notes? (and of course, Wikipedia) So far, I’ve estimated about 40 skipped classes this semester, and that’s on a 12 hour schedule. Wow. I’ve long wondered what the purpose of a university education was if so much of the material is just as easily learned independently? Even worse, I’ve found that in some classes, the material is better learned away from the classroom by acquainting myself with the problems and seeking peer advice. So really, what is this university education worth? Are our universities providing us what we’re paying for? Or am I just out of the Great Enlightenment that is college education?

I think it’s rather, the latter. Of course, I’m not really criticizing the existence of universities; where else would you find such a concentration of knowledge, talent, and eagerness to learn? The raw materials are all there, in each field, and within each person. I do, however, criticize this particular system of university, and it’s subpar ability to promote enthusiasm amongst us. Yes, we’re adults now and it is each individual’s responsibility to motivate themselves to BE what they should be, but shouldn’t this place, the system that we pay our money and devote 4 years of our lives to, help to encourage us even further? I mention this particular “system”, and here, I’m refering to the public education system of Illinois. It may be beyond my due respects to place judgment, when I know so little of alternatives, but I honestly feel that this university (and less so, public education in general) does a terrible job at breeding motivation in students. Too often, I have felt that this school tries to cultivate a sense of elitism by making administrative things outrageously convoluted, frustrating those with less patience, less aptitude, and most certainly, less experience with red tape, to a point where it is okay for a dean to say “if you can’t handle it, get out.” ECE classes in particular are nortorious for pushing educational Darwinism–(i.e. in the words of a fellow classmate: throw the kids in the deep end, and see who don’t drown. Then throw in the sharks). Maybe it’s because as a school in the top four, it needs to preserve it’s ranking by quickly eliminating those who can’t keep up, or maybe it’s that as a public school, it can’t hire enough happy deans. In any case, I feel that many students, don’t feel at home as they should within this school.

Actually, the paper I’m supposed to be working on has something to do about that. It’s a research paper for ECE/PHIL 316 Engineering Ethics. By far my favorite class this year (and ironically, my worst performing), I’ve been introduced to the existing philosophical paradigms for the first time. Normative ethics in particular caught my attention, and I loved the readings (especailly the SparkNote versions ). Yet my paper focuses on the public image of engineers and why it sucks. Yes, we all know that engineers are often seen as nerds and geeks, but come on now, if you’re studying for any of either the LSATs, MCATs, GREs, or any engineering material, you’re automatically a nerd, so it’s hard to tell how far-reaching that stereotype is. Some of the readings have some particualrly scathing public criticisms of engineers, for example:

“Engineers are too often characterised as being male, socially inept, politically naive and aligned with self-serving developers and they are finding themselves at the centre of controversies they don’t fully understand. Increasingly engineers are subjected to law suits because the public, which has an unrealistic perception of the nature of engineering, blames them when things go wrong.”

“In Britain engineering is “seen as dirty, boring, unfulfilling and financially unrewarding,” says Robert Payne an engineer at the Polytechnic of Wales. British engineer, K. Strauss (1988) , has suggested that the engineer is “seen as a soulless apparatchik, building ever taller, slicker, quicker, more coldly efficient devices that few want and that fewer can afford, which from time to time go hideously wrong.””

A US survey of public attitudes towards engineering found that the public thought of engineers as having “poor social skills” and being “self-absorbed, loners, rigid with a one-track mind” (Braham 1992) . Yet this is not so far from the way some engineers see themselves.

That last part is the worst… an acceptance of low worth. And it gets worse; the effects don’t stop at hurt egos:

“In the business world, engineers are often seen as being preoccupied with technical issues to the exclusion of all else, unwilling or unable to appreciate contextual imperatives or to contribute effectively to business and political decisions. This has probably been the main factor leading to the ‘de-engineering’ of the public sector, and to the view of engineering as a commodity to be purchased when needed–not a critical strategic capability requiring long-term investment and development, or an integral part of decision-making. (Review of Engineering Education 1996, p. 54)”

(All quotes were taken from Expanding Engineering Education )

What is with all this negativism? Honestly, where is all this coming from? And what are the moral causes and effects of it all? Those are the questions that I propose in my paper, and hope to answer through research. Engineering, as a profession is a far more people-oriented subject than any of the previous quotes seem to imply. I think sometimes, even engineering students forget that. The developments from the field are
seen everywhere, from the way things are made, to the way things are seen, this quote speaks what engineering represents: “Scientists discover the world that exists; engineers create the world that never was.”

Blah, why am I writing so much here? It’s nearly 7 AM, and I need to write my paper now. I just hope that things change… maybe this paper will be the start. And then maybe in time, the rest of engineering will re-learn to apply its principles to itself. Or at least… get happier deans.

In any case, here’s a simplified course outlook for the next 3 semesters. Insane… just 3 left? Also, I’m thinking about switching my James Scholar Honors Contract from biomedical engineering to neuroscience (or cognitive science). What do ya think???

[Spring 2007]
——————-
ECE 329
ECE 410 – DSP
ECE 448 / CS 440 – Intro to AI
MATH 415 – Linear Algebra
STAT 400 – Stats.
NEUR 412/ MCB 417 – Modeling Neural Systems

[Fall 2007]
——————-
ECE 430 – Power Ckts/ Electromechaics
ECE 470 – Intro to Robotics
ECE 486/CS 443 – Control Systems

[Spring 2008]
——————-
ECE 440 – Solid State
ECE 445 – Senior Design
ECE 489 – Robot Dynamics & Control

PSYC 516 – (I think?)

IlliNexus Link

Actually, I’m putting this all here because my computer is on the verge of crashing.