I purchased and hung this solar system in my son’s room when he was 2, and he loved it. Today I donated it to my STEM lab for my students and they seem to love it just as much ๐ I built a simple, lightweight winch from an empty spool of 3D printing PLA filament,…
Tag: science
Urban Forestry
I wanted to post about a topic of growing interest to me over the last few years, urban forestry (or micro-forests). They are small, dense forests cultivated in urban areas that provide various benefits. The most popular method of cultivating them is called the Miyawaki Method, after Akira Miyawaki, who pioneered it. Here is a…
Pandemic Tangerine
Fascinating ๐. This is what a tangerine looks (and feels and sounds) like after being left undisturbed on an office desk for roughly 1 year. It was left on my desk pre-pandemic and found almost a year later sitting in the same spot untouched. It wasn’t rotten or mushy but extremely hard and light, I…
Hubble 30 Year Anniversary!
The Hubble telescope has been in orbit for 30 years now! NASA post. I put together this minimalist wallpaper to honor the Hubble Deep, Ultra, eXtreme, Frontier Fields Projects, which spanned almost the entire 30 years. I centered this wallpaper on my Desktop with a black background. The image is from the UVUDF project in…
New Clear Sky Energy Paper
We published a new paper on estimating clear sky energy across the entire skydome. Wide spectrum sky energy is useful for many downstream applications, including PV building energy modeling, panel alignment, rendering, etc. This is a data-driven technique, using regression models on measured sky data. We validated the method with holdout data and with libRadtran,…
Vibrotactile Awareness
Saw a talk today at the Brown Center for Faculty Innovation and Excellence at Stetson by Assistant Professor of Voice, Chadley Ballantyne, titled Whatโs the Buzz? Auditory roughness and vibrotactile awareness. It was fantastic! I admit, I know very little music theory in general (and absolutely nothing about vocal theory!), but Chad’s talk was still…
Diagram Radiometry
I needed to illustrate a radiometry concept recently, but I didn’t want to draw it manually with Adobe Illustrator or whatever. I was afraid that parts of the diagram wouldn’t look to-scale, and I was especially worried that if I had to show the diagram from multiple angles, that proportions wouldn’t line up exactly. I’m…
Dr. Khim Kelly (UCF)
Khim Kelly, UCF College of Business professor, presented a talk today on perfomance-based rewards at our Summer Lecture Series at IST, School of Modeling, Simulation, and Training. Kelly, K., Presslee, A., & Webb. A. 2017. The effects of tangible rewards versus cash rewards in consecutive sales tournaments: A field experiment. The Accounting Review, 92(6): 165-185….
IST SMST Day Poster Award
Won a best poster award at UCF IST School of Modeling, Simulation & Training‘s first research+industry forum, dubbed SMST Day. If interested, here is the poster I presented. Congratulations also to Arash Zarmehr for both his posters! He’s done some fantastic work in the building performance space. You can see I’m always promoting Cacti Council…
LaTeX Assignment Template
Added a LaTeX template for homework assignments on Overleaf. Please feel free to use it. I’m biased, but I think it’s neat and organized (and my TA liked it). It’s even Star Trek themed! Here is an example PDF.