2010 ARCS-Honolulu Kresser Award in Engineering

Every year, the Honolulu chapter of the ARCS Foundation (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) presents scholarships to a select number of graduate students working on research in the various sciences at UH Manoa.

This year, there were 12 awards given to students ranging from the physical and natural sciences to health sciences and engineering. I was one of two students (both from Electrical Engineering) to receive an award from the College of Engineering.

In exchange for the award, the ARCS Foundation asks the students to prepare short semi-technical talks and posters to share their research with the donors and coordinators. I took this as a great opportunity to hone my (slightly rusty) public speaking skills, and prepared the slideshow below to augment my ten minute talk.



(edit: It looks like the video player has cut off the title slide. You're not missing much, but the whole thing is available via the links below)
The slides and poster are both also available as PDF's.

In addition to practicing my speaking skills, the presentation session was enjoyable because it shed some light on the interesting research being done by 11 other bright scientists around the campus. Some particularly interesting work is being done by Jim Baker (EE) in compact high-frequency radio antenna design, Brendan Bowler (Astro) in the search for extra-solar planets, and Tiffany Anderson (Oceanography) in shoreline erosion due to storms.

New Site, v2.0!

That's right, after about a one month hiatus, my website for all things academic is back in action. I really would appreciate any comments and criticism you have about it. I am an utter n00b at most of this.

Wondering what motivated the revamp? To be honest, I was quite happy with the old version that I built with iWeb. It turns out that iWeb was not as happy with it. After adding a blog entry in the native iWeb interface, the application crashed and would continue to do so after any further modifications to the blog pages. Since I don't really foresee this type of website changing very often (aside from the blog section), it didn't make much sense to me to continue along that path.

I made the effort of actually taking my computer in to an Apple store to see if their employees (I find it pretentious to refer to them as geniuses) could offer any suggestions. The technical support rep was congenial and sympathetic to my plight, but in the end, entirely unhelpful in resolving issues with a corrupted iWeb site.

At this time, I sought the advice of the foremost computer guru I know: Ben, one of my best friends for over 10 years now. His advice on which GUI-based website builder to use: None. Every site he's written has come from the vast white wasteland of a plain text editor (he recommended gedit, by the way). I can't really blame him; nothing teaches you how something works like building it from the ground up.

So, I pulled all of the site's files down from the University of Hawaii server and set out to write my second website (the first being the v0.0 of this same website, but its layout was worthy of Geocities, and I don't really like to talk about it).

In this process, I've become much more familiar with HTML elements (and the fact that there are only about 20 or so relevant tags), cascading style sheets (CSS) to format the content, and browser versus server functionality. None of these would have come out of simply recopying the iWeb site. Throughout the process, the website HTML Dog proved an invaluable resource for me to constantly look up (and re-look up) the proper terminology for the effect I wanted to create.

As of today, the site is up and fully operational. Features I am particularly fond of are the Post-it "contact" info, and the embedding of this blog in the "News" page. If you'd like, go ahead and unsubscribe from the old blog's feed and add this one. Also, yay for comments.

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Clay