User:Djs53

About Me

I am an undergraduate student from New York City studying at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University. I hope to major in civil engineering with an architectural certificate and a minor in economics.

Grand Challenges for Engineering

Articles:

Viterbi School to Co-Host Grand Challenges Summit, USC Viterbi, Updated 8 January 2009, Accessed September 5, 2013

Getting Solar Off the Ground, Lee Billings, Seed Magazine, Updated July 28, 2009, Accessed September 5, 2013

The heat is on for the world's biggest laser, Breck Hitz, Optics.org, Updated 14th August 2009, Accessed September 5, 2013

MATLAB Demonstrations

Demonstration: Viewing a Penny

This demonstration was my favorite of the several I looked at for a few reasons. First of all, this demonstration was extremely cool. The idea of taking a commonplace object that is minute (not scientifically, but for practical purposes, extremely small) and examining the surface of it with a three dimensional computer model is awesome. Secondly, looking past the individual example, this demonstrates an approach that is practical and has some real-life applications that I could see directly through the example used. Whether I'm examining old infrastructure at an almost microscopic level, or constructing three dimensional models of bigger scale, knowing how to use a program with measurements previously inputed, allows me to now understand what to do with such information (graphically and numerically analyze). Finally, using graphical analysis to look at something like a penny is something I would have never thought to do before, and is another reason engineering excites me. Learning to use contour plots, colormaps, pseudocolor plots, surface plots, Laplacian lighting models, and other interesting and foreign methods of looking at an object like a penny will allow me to view the world and the possibility of advancement through new lenses.