Monday, February 21, 2011

The Smart Grid Initiative

This is a pretty good article that reflects what the smart grid industry is all about. As you can readily see, the smart grid initiative is very applicable to systems engineering. My parent company owns both the hardware that reports the reads back in near real time as well as the software to make it go.  A classic systems problem.
http://www.intelligentutility.com/article/11/02/austin-smart-energy-project?utm_source=2011_02_21&utm_medium=eNL&utm_campaign=IU_DAILY&utm_term=Original-Member

Monday, February 14, 2011

Recording your Lectures, other miscellany

I'm embarrassingly late to this, but I am really keen on recording your lectures. It's also very realistic that you might be able to record your entire program from your laptop. This is yet another example of how different school is just ten years later. In addition to your first step for every assignment being google or wolfram alpha, the ability to easily make a high quality recording, I think, is a welcomed technology advancement.
Check with your professors first! I think some of them may object, so is a good idea to check first.

One of the things that I have been thinking about as AMP winds down is how to I retain what I have learned and how do I end game. This being my second graduate degree, I can tell you that I had very unrealistic expectations of what the world would be like as soon as I received my degree. People aren't exactly standing around waiting to call you up as soon as you finish your education and send you a huge check. Well, maybe they are for some people and for better schools but it surely didn't happen for me the first. I'm actually more concerned about retaining the skillset. I don't (fortunately) use probability every day.  Though I can speak to some of the topics I learned in network optimization, if I had to do a bellman ford I would have to go back through my notes.

That's a long winded way of saying listening to your lectures randomly after school is over might help you retain the information better.

"editor's note"
There may be a few more posts to come to talk about, openly, how it might be best to maximize the last stretch of classes. I can tell you that this semester has significantly less homework than the last semester.

That being said, I think I have approached the limit as to reasonable insight into the AMP program. If you are following along and are near this point in the program in years to come, you should have things figured out by now. I also don't want to completely remove any mystery that may be surrounding the program. I plan on giving insight into our capstone project, and I am very much looking forward to the last week in residence, if its anywhere as near as fun as the first week.

Aside from probability, I have been able to put in long enough hours to be reasonably happy with my grades. I'm clearly not one of the elite students in the program, but I have been able to get back up to speed and find the amount of (pain and suffering) study time that works for me. I still want another shot at probability, but at this point I know its best to let it go.

Tuesday, February 1, 2011

R programming for those coming from other languages

Just found this! Could have been useful before stats/sim.

http://www.johndcook.com/R_language_for_programmers.html