Board Game Storage: Carcassonne

For a birthday a few years ago my wife purchase me a Carcassonne Big Box: the base game and multiple expansions in one box (and the box was big at 39" x 18.75" x 55.75").  (She claims I had mentioned being interested in it; I think she was reading my mind and gave me one of the best gifts I've ever received because it was a complete surprise.)  But the Big Box was way too big for what boils down to a large stack of cardboard tiles.  My experience in condensing my game of Settlers of Catan gave me confidence that something similar could be done here.

Back to Hobby Lobby with a pile of Carcassonne tiles in tow, searching for boxes that these tiles could fit in neatly.  I'm sure the Hobby Lobby staff were not quite sure to do with the grown man sitting on the floor at the back of the store, trying box after box in various permutations, but my efforts made them (a small amount) of money that day.  The result is the cleanest, densest game storage box to date.

Along the back of the larger wooden box are my self-designed and hand-crafted tuck-boxes for the player game pieces.  Unlike the treasure chests in my Catan box, these comfortably fit all the pieces I have with no special stacking effort.  The manilla one on the end is empty and I leave it in as a spacer to keep all the others snug relatively immobile.

In front of the player piece tuck boxes are three more wooden boxes that contain all the Carcassonne tile sets; more details in the following picture.  The scoring board in front lays on top of the player pieces and the three tile boxes quite easily.  The lid closes cleanly with no hassle.

Looking at the three tile boxes you can see I've made tuck-boxes for each expansion that I own.  Working from left to right you can see Inns and Cathedrals (green), base set (no tuck-box), Tower (black), King and Cult, Count, and River II (all three in the blue box), Traders and Builders (gray), Princess and Dragon (red), Bridges, Castles and Bazaars (manilla), Abbey and Manor (yellow). I made the labels on the flaps for each one and the underside of the flap lists the number of tiles for each expansion; I can't tell you how much of a good idea that has turned out to be when it comes time for clean-up.

And when there are extra pieces for an expansion that don't fit in the tuck-boxes...?

Using some scrap metal I had laying around and some not-very-strong magnetic-tape, I constructed caps that created an enclosed space in the lids of the two appropriate boxes.  I used a little bit of gaffer tape (motto: "We do all the things you think duct tape can do but actually can't.") to create pull tabs to make the caps easily removable.  It takes a little wiggling to get these metal caps into place but the don't come out inadvertently.

Using a similar principle, I created a false bottom for the large box to store the instructions and the tile-holder that comes with Tower.  Unfortunately, the magnetic tape is only marginally strong enough to hold the metal lid in place.  Most of the time its not an issue as the box is either resting on the table bottom side down or being carried with a hand or two helping hold the bottom in place.

Incidentally, deconstructing the tower and folding it flat is probably not a good way to ensure its longevity.  Its a wonderful thematic addition to the game and provides an easy way to pass around the stacks of tile for all players to draw from but the regular assembly and dis-assembly will certainly shorten its life.  It is fun while it lasts, though.

Give how nearly perfectly this set-up stores all that I have of Carcassonne, I'm reticent to acquire any more expansions.  There aren't that many that I'm missing and what I have is more than enough, especially when multiple expansions are used in a single game.  And to be honest, Catapult really doesn't interest me that much.

Board Game Storage: Catan

As I've mentioned previously, Settlers of Catan was the game that started it all for me as it was the first modern board game I purchased.  (I actually can't remember if I purchased it or it was a gift. Regardless.)  This was back in 2005 and the game was clearly gaining traction but you couldn't find it in Barnes and Noble yet; there was still a bit of a niche aspect to it.

To make the game more profitable for its producers, it was sold in a very modular style: the basic game played four players and you could buy an expansion that would allow you to add two more players.  In fact, each major expansion (Cities and Knights, Seafarers, and Barbarians and Traders) has progressed in this two-fold manner. About the time I owned the the base game and Cities and Knights for up to six players I realized I had a serious storage problem.  This was one game (at least in my mind) spread across four boxes with a lot of empty space in each box; it was time to consolidate. Over Christmas back in Portland I picked up an art box and six treasure chests and began the process.

I found some powdered dye online in the same six colors as the Catan pieces for each player and with a little bit of trial and error, was able to color the six treasure chests to match.  This very minor innovation has been the creative foundation of the storage system and continues top impress other Catan players when I bring out my set for us to play.

In fact, until last year, that first version of the Catan box worked quite well.  I kept the cards, tiles and border pieces in rubber bands (which often broke and were replaced), the chips in little plastic bags and each player's game pieces in a colored wooden treasure chest.  Life was reasonably good; everything fit snuggly in that art box.

Then Traders and Barbarians came out and I had a problem. Though it was a tight squeeze I was able to fit all the player pieces in the existing treasure chests.  (No more haphazard dumping of the pieces back in, though; now they had to be meticulously stacked to fit.  I consider this the after-game game and most of my fellow players agree.)  The rest of the new cards, tiles, and pieces were a no-go, though, and the only solution was a bigger artbox.  I made a trip to Hobby Lobby and picket up a larger box along with a few other sub-boxes and with a bit of organizational effort, found a way to make it work.

The last piece of the organizational puzzle was tuck-boxes: folded pieces of card stock assembled to form a box. I had already been making tuck-boxes for my the box I was using to store Carcassonne and  when I decided to apply the idea to my Catan box.  The tuck-boxes  allowed me to keep the cards and pieces for each expansion separate and easily accessible.  In fact, I stumbled across some very professional tuck-box designs for storing the resource hexes and with the help of FedEx Office (which will always be Kinko's in my mind), printed and folded these nifty little creations.

And here is the final product, packed and opened up for a fuller view:

The wooden box in the upper left contain my custom color-coded tuck-boxes for the cars of the various expansions (black for Catan, green for Cities and Knights, and red for Traders and Barbarians).  The box in the top right is entirely devoted to just some of the new pieces in Traders and Barbarians; the golden men (barbarians, I think) and camels are their own boxes down below on the far right.  The fancy "professional" hex tuck-boxes are in the center with the hex markers in their little boxes to the far right.  (I've sorted those markers into the four-player and six-player variant with the Seaside pieces also on their own). Along the bottom are the colored treasure chests for the player pieces and the slot in the top of the box contains the rules and the border pieces (not very visible).

There are a few minor changes I'd like to make to this set-up.  Since my original game is the older artwork and style, I have more ocean hexes than the newer version and there is no tuck-box for them. I might just print out another page of the ocean hex tuck-box and put them in in that.  The cardboard boxes on the right outside the box are not marked on the outside so there is also a bit of guess-and-check to find the appropriate pieces; something needs to change about that.

It is true that the box is large (16.5" x 13" x 4.5") and heavy but it all fits and relatively compactly as well.  The game doesn't travel back to Portland on the airplane any more but I've indoctrinated my family enough into modern board games that they have plenty of their own now. Of the three "custom" storage boxes I've done so far, the evolution of this box has been the most involved and demanding from a design standpoint.  But its done (more or less) and I like it.

Gotta love those treasure chests, too.

Duck Truck

Wichita has a Duck Truck.  The name is mine and a misnomer but it came to mind when I first encountered said truck.  The Duck Truck is a pickup truck with speakers in the bed that drives through downtown Wichita playing what I assume to be aggressive sounding bird calls to scare away other birds from the buildings.

My first exposure to it was seven years ago on a Sunday night.  I was on my way home driving through a vacant downtown when I pulled up beside the Duck Truck. I couldn't believe my eyes and ears but before I could get a picture, it drove off.  We were living close to downtown at the time and often heard these hugely amplified calls in the distance as the Duck Truck did its thing.

Today, all these years later, I saw the truck again, parked downtown. I was on my way to drop of my motorcycle for repair and by the time I was able to get back there to photograph it, the truck was gone.

The sighting has rekindled this desire: I desperately want to photograph and/or make a video of the Duck Truck in action.  Spring is returning to Wichita (73'F today!) and with the nice weather, I'm sure the Duck Truck will be out again.  I see some evenings in my future where I prowl downtown like a superhero looking for villans, windows down and ears perked to hear the mechanical bird calls from this mysterious truck.  My day will come, I'm sure of it.

Recent Winter Snow

The last remnants of last weeks snow storm are all but gone but we have photographic evidence of what transpired.

One disadvantage of having a landing strip for a driveway: shoveling can take a while.

As a special bonus, we also have two videos of Anise chasing/hunting snowballs.

Board Games

I have my good friends Troy and Lauren to thank for my love of modern board games; they spoke often of their weekly games of Settlers of Catan and I had never seen a board game with such a devoted following. I didn't get a chance to play the game until about a year later and I loved it.  It didn't take long until I had graduated to Cities and Knights and then Seafarers (and just recently, Traders and Barbarians). The game was wonderful, varied, easy enough to get other non-gamers playing, and it became the catalyst to my further exploration into board games.

It was several years after my first game of Catan that I was recruited into the first and only board game group of which I've been a part.  The four of us, all trained as engineers, got together once a month to play board games that we figured less analytical people would find boring, tedious, and/or  overly taxing.  I don't remember what we played in those early games but as we met over the years our repertoire expanded to include Puerto Rico, Carcassonne, and Agricola.  We also played Thurn and Taxis and Scotland Yard once but they didn't seem to have the staying power. The group has grown in membership over the years as our schedules have become busier but most board game nights garner only four or five attendees.

The most unique addition to the pool has been Power Grid and not because of anything particularly unique about the game but because none of us in the group had ever played it prior to our first game together.  I was the speculative purchaser of the game and spent the day of the game reading and re-reading the rules, trying to get my  head around how the game played.  When it came time to play that evening I discovered the rules had been left at home; we downloaded a PDF and made do.  In fact, the game has been very popular in my group and we play it often.

The most recent new addition has been Dominion; it was recommended by a group member who had played it with some other friends.  I bought a copy of the base set on this recommendation and have enjoyed it a great deal, so much so that I have also ended up with the Intrigue, Alchemy, and Dark Ages expansion.  One of these days I'm sure the remaining expansions (Seaside, Prosperity, Cornucopia, and Hinterlands) will make there way over.

And there's more to say about this hobby: the storage systems I've assembled for games and their expansions, the iOS versions of games we play, the simpler, smaller games that we use to introduce our friends to modern board games....

I'm sure I'll get around to some of these later but I'll leave you with this: The game of choice between my wife and I right now is the iOS version of Le Havre.  We don't own the physical game but have played this version in bed many evenings over the past three weeks.  She really loves it and it goes without saying we wouldn't play it near as much if we had to set it up and take it down every time we wanted to play; as my favorite review of the game says, "Its Chit-tastic!".

Writing Dates

XKCD web-comic from today captures my sentiments exactly.

I know this is not how we do things in the US but doesn't it make the most sense?  YYYY-MM-DD. Dashes are great as the universal delimiter but with the rise of the web I'm totally fine with the decimal point. 

The slashes, though, they get to me every time.  Its like writing"A/C" for "air conditioner".  At Cessna I saw people use "A/C" for "aircraft".  Or "b/c" for "because".  Coming from one with limited grammatical skill, this makes no sense.

The Progress of Progressive Odyssey

My timing was perfect/awful.  Right after the first storm this past Thursday and Friday, I ran my computer in for repair.  We were literally on our way out of town and I wanted to drop it off so the repair could get started over the weekend hoping it would get back to me more quickly. I didn't anticipate the second snow storm that closed the school the following Monday and Tuesday.  No access to school, no computer at home.  Like it or not, I took two days off from working on my dissertation.

I used this forced hiatus to do some organizing here on the blog, categorizing all my posts and getting a chance to review what I've written about over the years. (The categorizations now appear on the right side of the home page.) I'm also going to be migrating photos that I linked to on Flickr back to the blog itself; just trying to keep everything in one place.

Reviewing and re-reading what I have written over the years is a great activity for a snowy winter day. Though writing for this blog has been far from the super-regular activity I thought it would be, I have managed to put up over 300 posts over the past (almost) eight years.  This has been the length of time I have spent in Wichita; my first post was several months after moving to town.

The topics for this writing have been as varied as I would have expected, being determined by the events of my life and the thoughts running through my head.  Going back to school has brought in a lot more of the academic material from my studies and the semi-revival of my hobby electronics projects has also been a significant theme as of late. I'm very much a board game player as well but it doesn't look like I've written a single post on that topic.  That will probably change.

And regarding the topics: this blog is a poor reflection of the entirety of my life. Most of what gets put up here is the miscellany of my life with many many subjects I care deeply about getting no webpage space at all.  There are a variety of reasons for this:

• It is hard to write clearly and effectively for an audience that consists of the entire internet.
• There are areas of my life that I don't want broadcast to the world.
• Keeping the material here on the lighter side means the stakes are a lot lower and the burden of writing well is greatly reduced.

When I set out writing this I hoped to keep most of the material accessible most of the time and looking over my writing these past years it seems like I've done that. The more technical material is challenging to this cause, though, particularly the hobby electronics.  In the spirit of the internet I'd like to be able to contribute back and post the technical details of my projects for others to use but I don't know if this blog is the place.  I guess its easy enough for you the readers to skip over the material you aren't interested in but maybe a separate blog just devoted this topic would be in order.  I'll have to think about it.

Foreign Graduate Students and Industry Employment

I read an article in Bloomberg (PDF) recently; it was titled: "How Foreign Students Hurt U.S. Innovation". (The URL for the article reveals a more aggressive title: "Glut of Foreign Students Hurts U.S. Innovation".)

The article builds the following case:

1. Though there are plenty of domestic STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) undergraduates, there are very few domestic graduate students.  
2. Domestic graduate students are virtually non-existent because
1.  Wages in the STEM fields (academic and industry) are lower than they should be due to the oversupply of foreign graduate students.
2. Universities choose foreign students over domestic students "because they can pay" (versus those students who pay the much reduced, tax-dollar subsidized in-state rates).
3. Domestic STEM holders of bachelor's degrees are being diverted into non-STEM fields due to lower wages in STEM fields.
4. To encourage development of our STEM talent pool, we should focus on the domestic students by removing competition from foreign students.  This will reduce the supply of STEM workers, raise wages, and provide an economic incentive for domestic students to continue in their STEM education.

I am a STEM graduate student now, worked for eight years previously in a STEM job, and since I am working towards being a professor in a STEM field, I think I can safely say I have the means, motive, and thanks to this blog, the opportunity to speak to this issue. Here are my opinion-neutral observations (as much as such things exist).

Item 1 - There are a lot of foreign students in the graduate program at Wichita State.  All of my graduate classes here have had far more foreign students than domestic. I would guess that most have been over 80% foreign students. In some, I am the only domestic student in the class.  Most of the faculty in our department are foreign-born.  I would expect this to be the case in many universities around the nation though I only have my experience at conferences to extrapolate from; no hard data.

My time in the engineering workforce also showed that there are a lot of foreign workers.  Not near as high as Wichita State but I would guess a that one-quarter to one-third the department was employed through a work visa. I don't know exactly how these visas are granted but it is clear that my employer was going to some amount of legal effort to get these foreign-born engineers jobs in the US.

Item 2 - Universities do enjoy getting the extra funds that foreign students provide.  As state support of public universities and colleges has diminished over the years, these institutions have become more dependent on private donations and student-derived income to continue as a going concern. The amount of student-derived income is much larger for foreign students than domestic (in-state) students so universities have an incentive to admit more of these higher-paying students. 

Item 3 - Wages in the STEM fields are lower for those who posses STEM skills.  For reasons that are still not clear to me, the invisible hand of capitalism has recently valued positions in finance (for example) over those in engineering and if a student is simply looking for the highest-paying job, they won't choose STEM.  For the amount of effort and difficulty it takes to graduate with a respectable STEM degree, the STEM industry pay does not seem proportional.  This is not to say that STEM workers are universally impoverished, just that the cost/benefit trade-off does not provide a strong incentive for students to pursue STEM fields.

In these fundamental ways I can agree with the article. I don't know enough to speak very well to many of the specific facts cited in the article but my experience generally echos sentiments alluded to by the author, an academic himself.  My personal experience makes it easy for me to believe the general trend of items 1 through 3 above.  Its item 4 that gives me pause.

The author believes that limiting the number of foreign students will reduce competition for domestic students who desire to enter graduate school and allow them to continue on with their education.  To make this case well, the author would need to provide some evidence of a direct connection between reduced domestic graduate student enrollment and increased foreign graduate student enrollment. In other words, are domestic graduate students being pushed out?  The article implies this is the case but provides no evidence.  My question: do domestic students want to go to graduate school but can't get in because all the slots are taken by foreign students?  I don't know.  

Clearly universities have the financial incentive to admit more of the higher-paying foreign students.  If the financial needs of the universities are the only barrier for domestic students, the solution is simple: remove the incentive for universities to balance their books through income from foreign students by providing more public funds. If the admissions office is being run with the university finances as the key factor, tax money from the states will change the equation. This will only work, though, if money is truly the only barrier for domestic graduate students; I suspect it is not.

The author also seems to equate a strong STEM workforce with a strong STEM academic workforce.  The F-1 visa program is for students and the article deals strictly with this type of visa.  The H-1B is the common foreign worker visa and is completely separate from the student visa. A glut of F-1 visas may in fact be the core factor in the lack of domestic STEM graduate students but what about all of the STEM employment options outside the university? It is entirely possible for the U.S. to have a thriving STEM industry that is achieving many of the things the politicians want while having a limited representation of domestic STEM students in graduate school.

Said simply: I believe the power of the American STEM industry does not primarily lie in advanced degrees.  Those degrees help and may even be a central piece in forming a the business but it takes more than an academic understanding of an issue to make a company successful. Entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and daring ideas don't come simply from working towards a PhD; the gap between a good idea well proven through a dissertation and a game-changing company is large.  The problem with the STEM industry in this country cannot be so simply tied to foreign graduate students.

Snow Day

Over the past 24 hours Wichita has received about a foot of snow.  This is enough snow to:

• Force me to shovel the landing strip that is our driveway.
• Get Katie home from work early yesterday and let her work from home today.
• Force the closure of Wichita State University starting yesterday afternoon and continuing into today (not that it keeps me from having to work on my dissertation).
• Give our dogs plenty of snow in which to play.
• Force the use of our kerosene heater to dry out the dogs after the aforementioned activities.

Photographic evidence:

Garage Heating

Graph from yesterday's home temperature measurements:

Of particular note are the garage (dark blue) and attic (green) traces. There are three bumps in the graphs that mirror each other and are co-incident; these events are when the garage door opened to let a car in or me out to shovel snow. The two areas are connected by an access hatch that I tend to leave open, allowing air to flow between them easily.  During these bumps in the graph, the garage temperature falls and the attic temperature rises.  The warm air that has formed in the garage is displaced into the attic by the cold air moving in through the open door.  When the door closes, the temperatures in both places begin moving back to their former state.

This leads me to to observations:

1. The air flow through the garage is not very large when all the doors are closed.  The space is far from air-tight but it must be tight enough because the garage warms back up once the doors close.  The cold air from the outside isn't getting in near as well.  And where is that heat that is warming the garage coming from....
2. The insulation between the living space and the garage could be better. The heated house is the only source of energy that could be warming the garage after the door closes.  This has implications for the summer; keeping the garage cool by opening doors and allowing air to flow will hel reduce the cooling demand in the living space.

The Best Cup of Coffee I've Never Had

During one of the podcasts I regularly listen to an off-topic conversation developed regarding how to make coffee.  The podcasters claimed the following:

• Most people have never had a good cup of coffee because most coffee is made poorly.
• Coffee, straight, black, simple coffee tastes great when it is made properly.
• The formula for good coffee is not very complicated but it can't be mass produced easily/cheaply.

1. Filtered almost boiling water.
2. Good beans.
3. Burr-grinding.
4. Aeropress coffee maker.

To me coffee has always smelled good and tasted terrible.  I love coffee-flavored anything, really, and am sure that I would enjoy coffee with enough cream and sugar in it.  This all seems like cheating, though, and the prospect of straight-up coffee that needs no doctoring is appealing.  I'm tempted to experiment with the above formula but the cost of the equipment is too high to take a gamble at this point.  So I'm asking around, trying to find somebody who thinks they can make a cup of coffee that is so good nothing needs to be added.  Any coffee perfectionists out there that want to try to convert me?

Sunday Bake-Off

Yesterday my wife and I found ourselves in an inadvertent bake-off with/against each other.

My entry was the product of my (three week old) weekly tradition of making a loaf of bread on Sunday afternoon.  I use a bread machine which is, obviously, very convenient and easy to use as well as able to produce excellent results. This week we decided to try an oatmeal bread and of all the alleged oatmeal breads I've had, this is the first I can recall that definitively had a distinct oatmeal taste.  My wife loved it.  A lot.

There was symmetry in our enjoyment of baked goods, though, as I found her entry fantastic: apple crisp/cobbler. We couldn't remember if she had made any baked apple deserts this winter; this is clearly a sign that such a treat was in order.  The apples were delicious and the cobbler top had an excellent chewy and crunchy texture simultaneously.

Best way to end a Sunday.

Reading Academic Papers

Today marks the day that I have been working on my dissertation for one month.  By "working" I mean that I have been devoted full-time to the endeavor; last semester the time I put in was severely limited due to the course I was teaching.

And what I have been doing the past month: reading, mostly.  A little bit of writing as I try to organize, collect, and synthesize the material I've been reading.  But mostly reading.

Reading academic papers is a bit like reading poorly written textbooks.  The value in the writing is not in how it is said but in what is trying to be communicated; there is no poetry in these papers.  The papers are not entertaining, there is no florid language; at best, they are interesting because of the results they present and the conclusions they purport.

"Reading" is even a strong word for what I'm doing; mostly its just skimming.  Read the abstract, maybe a little bit of the introduction, read the section headings, look at the tables, charts, and graphs (even graduate students like pictures more than words), and slowly skim the results and conclusions.   I highlight any important details I happen to catch, rate the paper on its expected usefulness, and sort it into folders that I've set up for my dissertation.  I "read" most papers I for the first time in less than ten minutes, more interesting ones that I know will be useful I spend a bit more time on, looking for specific details.

So how many of these have I "read" this past month: 214.

I've got 32 in the queue and am constantly adding more, usually referenced from a paper I'm currently reading.  There is also a significant subarea of my research I haven't specifically been reading in so you can be sure that there will be more reading once these 32 are done.

Flat Band-Aid

I was able to successfully use an emergency bicycle tire inflator on the way home from school today.

What you see above is a bicycle multi-tool with an integrated compressed-air cylinder (the brass-colored, shiny part in the middle).  In case of an emergency flat that needs re-inflating, put the red nozzle at the top over the stem of the tube and press down.  The compressed air will inflate the tire quickly and you'll be off and cycling again.

At least that's how it is supposed to work.  The first time I had a flat after purchasing the miracle worker, I couldn't figure out how to operate it. Aften ten minutes of puzzling, I gave up and walked the last two miles home.  Once home I spent another fifteen minutes messing with it and still had no success.  The break-through came when I realized I didn't know how to replace the compressed-air cylinder; figuring that out revealed that the cylinder had been installed upside down (I assume to prevent accidental discharge during shipping). I flipped it over and a test yielded a short blast of cold air.

So today when my front tire started deflating an hour from home, I knew what to do.  I pulled this little guy out and in less than a minute the tire had inflated enough to get me the rest of the way home.  Not only did it save me a bit of walking time but a successful field test is always reassuring.  

The big question now: do I need to replace the cylinder or is it good for another use? There is really no way to tell so I'll probably just grab another cylinder and keep it in my bag for now.  

Teaching is Hard

Feedback from my students over the course I taught last semester.

• "I can't understand his English. the voice. the way to talk. not only me but also many foreign students agree with this."[sic]
• "He should understand his student, not just teach this course."[sic]
• "I like this course. However, I don't like the instructor" [sic]
• "He is a really good researcher, not a helpful teacher."
• "Should improve himself."
• "Hardy is a new teacher. He doesn't know how to teach professionally."
• "Many times he cannot answer to student problems. He always avoid those by saying 'Uhm, I haven't think about it' and I never get the 'right' answer from him."[sic]
• "The tests and quiz are way too hard. For some reason, he thinks that those must be very tricky."
• "Rate 2/10" [sic]
• "Office hours are there to help students answer or solve problems not to give vague answers or make them feel dumb for coming."[sic]
• "Please instructor needs to improve seriously on teaching and communication skills. Answer the students question, of course the student makes an attempt to answer but if WRONG PLS ANSWER THE QUESTION."[sic]
• "I HIGHLY DO NOT RECOMMEND HIM A PROFESSOR."[sic]
• "I like nothing. This class was a waste of time."
• "Teacher is unhelpful and the material is hard."
• "This is an easy class. The instructor made it difficult by having too much workload."[sic]
• "He was rude and inconsiderate. Graded harshly. How he worked the total grades was generally poor." [sic]
• "The grading, oh my God."
• "Listen to Minorities in the class, we pay tuition fee too." [sic]
• "I felt like you don't care about the students who struggle in the class, Never even listen them."[sic]
• "I wish they would be Dr. Teshome back, Your worse Instructor ever come across in my 4 yrs in college." [sic]
• "This Course seems to be interesting about I guess I would have gain more of it if the instructor knew more about the subject." [sic]

The composite scoring of the multiple-choice part of the survey showed very low scores as well.  The students who took this survey scored me in the bottom 2% of 35771 courses ever taught at Wichita State (since this survey started being given, at least).

The feedback from previous classes I taught tended to be of the opposite nature so its a bit tricky to figure out how to interpret these results.

Well, you can't win them all but least there was this:
"Basically you're a super harsh teacher but I learned a lot in class. I know you will be a lot of backlash because this class had a bunch of assholes in it who got by in their other classes by having a super easy teacher or copying shit and that's practically impossible to do in your class. I think you were a good teacher."

Outside Heating the Inside

It may be January and the heart of winter but today the high temperature for the day is going to be in the mid-70s; I've turned our whole-house fan on and am heating up the inside of our house using the nice, warm, outside air.  I will not be doing the same tomorrow as the high for the day is expected to be 57'F.

I will not make the joke about "Don't like the weather? Just wait five minutes." because I really don't find it funny.

It does seem to be true here in Wichita as of late, though.

VHS Transfer

Part for what has kept me busy this past month has been the long process of converting the contents of a large stack of VHS tapes for their original analog form to a more relevant digital format. This task was inspired by a recent cleaning binge in which I negotiated the removal of our VCR and said tapes if I could make DVDs out of them. A fair number of these tapes were Hollywood movies and after sampling them on the TV we decided that, yes, the VHS tapes can be safely considered low quality and not worth the effort. If we cared enough about these movies, we would be best off  buying DVDs.

Which left the home movies. Hours and hours of home movies.  We ended up hitting up parents on both sides of the family for contributions and ended up with a substantial pile of cassettes.  Thankfully, the transfer process itself was simple: the output of the VCR was fed into a (borrowed) digital video camera which was connected to the computer.  iMovie recorded the footage and allowed me to do any necessary editing and each event was exported as a stand-alone movie.  To make DVDs I used iDVD to build up the DVD menu structure and assemble the individual events onto the disc.  Discs were burned, memories were preserved.

The process is time-intensive but most of it is spent with the equipment unattended while the VCR plays and the computer records.  The format that the video camera puts out (DV) consumes hard drive space rapidly and I used a dedicated 300GB hard drive to collect the footage.  This ended up not being enough for all the tapes so once the drive filled up I created DVDs of the footage and erased the original DV source material.

Several people have suggested I set this up as a mini-business; I have no interest in this. Ignoring the time involved in just copying the footage, doing a good job of transferring this video requires having at least a passing familiarity with the content so intelligent decisions can be made when assembling the individual events on DVDs. Multiple times I had to ask my wife to interpret the events I was transferring, helping me with chronology and relationship. I suppose if I was willing to just make one big movie out of the tape that would not be very time intensive.  I suspect, though, that customers would not be very happy with the product, even though they think this is all they want. I suspect what they actually want is a DVD with high production values that allows them to easily find specific events from the original tape.  The format comes with inherent expectations that are not always recognized and I'd rather not get in the middle of stated and unidentified expectations.

Exploitation

Every year at Christmas my wife and I donate to Samaritan's Purse, a Christ-centered emergency relief and development organization.  The group puts out a gift catalog, highlighting specific projects that donors can participate in: water development projects, emergency surgery for those without access to medical care, bicycles for traveling pastors, et cetera.  The donations are most easily done through the organization's website and this year I noticed something funny when I popped over to start browsing the online catalog.

The web address for this pages ends in "gift_catalog_exploitation".

This is not reassuring, to say the least.

Workout Schedules

A Plant Fitness gym opened up near our house recently and, tempted by the five minute walk from our house and the $10/month membership fee, my wife and I decided to join.  So far, we have both made regular use of the facility and are easily getting our money's worth.

The last time I was in there was a flyer at the main desk showing the average number of members in the gym for every hour of every day (the gym is open 24/7) for what I assume is the entire length of time this particular facility was open (about a month).  This big table of numbers had the most popular times shaded with the tacit advice to all members that working out during less busy times would be a good idea.

Being the data nerd that I am, I was pretty excited to see the facility publish this. Admittedly, with only a few weeks in operation, each entry in the table was probably only averaged over four or five data points but its better than nothing.  To help make the data more easily interpreted, I made a graph.

The data clearly shows the after-work time slots are the most popular with the before-work time periods also being commonly used.  Weekends tend to not be busy and of course, the dead of night is a good time to have the gym to yourself.

I'm hoping they update the data and republish in a few months.  I'd be interested to see if a larger data set produces any significant change in the data and/or trends.

I'm Famous (Again)

The commentator in one of the podcasts I listen to, John Siracusa of Hypercritical, has a regular section at the beginning of each show where he further addresses issues brought up in previous shows.  This follow-up is usually prompted by listeners writing in and offering further insight, often based on previous experience.

During last week's episode, John was speaking about a rumored deal between Apple and the semiconductor manufacturer TSMC and expressed a little bit of confusion about why the particular deal would be arranged in a particular way.  Based on my time at Micron, the deal made perfect sense to me and so I took ten minutes to email in my thoughts.

As I'm listening to this week's episode, I hear John begin the follow-up section and my brain snaps to attention: if my comments are going to get on the air, it will probably be on this show.  I listen carefully and the follow-up begins to wander toward the Apple/TSMC deal.  John begins to provide context for the story, reminding the audience what was a little confusing about this rumor.  My breathing is quickening and I can feel the nervous energy beginning to course through my body.  This is the same anxiety I've felt when presenting my work in front of other like when playing a musical solo or presenting my master's thesis.  My fingers seem unable to stay completely under my control, I have an incessant urge to wiggle my toes.  Externally these are the only signs but my mind is singular in attention and body seems to know this and wants to run wild.

By the cadence and tone of John's voice it is clear that the moment of truth is quickly approaching. In just a few words he will reveal to the world the comments sent in by a listener and judge them as worthy or not.  The set-up seems so focused, so inevitable, like his words are leading the audience down the path, to the stage where my contribution will be shown.  But will they be mine?  Perhaps another wrote in with the same experience but expressed it in more concise and insightful way?  I'm all but certain that the past sixty seconds of John's voice are for me and I simultaneously fear I have deluded myself, that I have heard this all with rose-colored ears and reality will disappoint.

Here is what actually transpired.  (Starting around 6:45).

Unlike my last claim to fame, this one actually involves me being named.

Replacing Windows

Apparently the University reads my blog. I posted my dire warning showing the flexing of the Engineering Building upper hallway windows in a storm and now the windows are being replaced.

Two years later.

I'm taking credit.

Dead Bicycle Tire

After a ride to school and back with an annoying rhythmic sound and very minor damage to my bike, I identified a tumor of the sidewall of my real tire (always the rear one, the harder one to get on and off).  I feared the tire was failing and that I was going to have to replace it.

I was right.

This is the interior of the tire after I turned it inside out for inspection. I don't know what caused this but the damage is done and there is no repair that I know of.

New tires are on order but I suspect my riding to school won't resume before the end of the semester.

Save Icon

I recently was able to upgrade my Mac version of Office to 2011, the latest version.  Today I used it for one of the first times and in opening Excel I saw this:

A floppy disk (or disc?) being used for a save icon.  I was alive and computer-aware enough when the transition to those rigid discs took place and it was decades ago.  When was the last time you held one of those discs?  Its been at least five years for me, maybe even close to ten.  There are students in college now who are very computer literal and have never used one of these.  I'm sure they are aware that it means save and might even know that it is a floppy disk.

 I vote that we find a new image for saving. And I'm not the only one who is talking about this.  Always easier said than done.

Secret Project Revealed: The DIY Digital Picture Frame

If you've been following this blog, then you know I've been writing cryptic snippets about a secret project. The secrecy was necessitated by the fact that this project was a gift for my wife and posting your plans for her gift to internet is not a good way to keep a secret.  Her birthday is now passed, she is in possession of said item, and the secrecy can be diffused.

The gift: a DIY digital picture frame.

The project got its' start when my mother-in-law turned over to me a dead laptop, one that had died of a video card failure which was not economical to repair.  This was quite unfortunate for her as the laptop had a 17" screen which I knew to be working perfectly fine.  My response: do nothing with it for six years.

It was during a recent cleaning spree that I disassembled the laptop, scavenging for parts, and was able to completely remove the LCD panel from its' frame.  I held in my hands a perfectly good panel and wondered, what would it take to make this into something useful?

I Googled around, talked to a friend, and thus was born my ambition to make a digital picture frame.

Problem one: I needed a way to plug a VGA, DVI, or HDMI signal into this panel. All I had was a mystery connector running out of the back of the pannel and that wasn't getting me anywhere.  Upon advice from my friend, I found a place in China with an eBay store that sells a kit which plugs into the panel and provides a VGA and DVI port as input.  Update 1 was made as a test of the kit shortly after I received it.  I took the VGA out from my wife's computer and plugged it into the kit now connected to the panel.  It worked; I was happy.

Problem two: I needed something to actually push the images up to the display, something like a really small computer.  You know what? They make those.  They go by the name "Raspberry Pi" (one of many products but this quite popular right now) and for not much money, I could have a computer slightly larger than a deck of cards with an HDMI output I could use to put images up on the display.  The Pi's default OS is a Linux variant and I would need a way to make it display images from a folder of my choice on the screen in a slide-show fashion.  The command-line program fbi fits the bill perfectly. Update 2 was my testing of the Raspberry Pi running fbi on a folder of test images.  The display being used was our TV; the Pi has an HDMI and composite video output but no DVI or VGA.

Which brings us to problem three: putting the pieces together.  The Raspberry Pi runs off of 5V, the display driver kit runs off of 12V. I needed to covert the HDMI output of the Pi to DVI or VGA.  I wanted to add wireless network connectivity to the Pi but that required using a powered USB port as the power available on the Pi was widely documented to be inadequate for such an application.  This is systems integration and the devil is in the details.  How does this signal get there?  What voltage needs to be here?  What type of connector is needed here?  Will this piece communicate with that?  I spent several hours playing with different configurations and wirings and paper and when I physically put the pieces together, I ended up with this: Update 4.

In addition to the wireless network connectivity (which allows my wife to add and remove pictures from the pool the frame will display), I had the ambition to include a motion sensor that would turn the display on and off based on the presence of people.  Again, more design decisions and playing around to try to figure out what would work best.  Update 3 was a test of how low a voltage could be used on the display driver kit; it says it needs 12V but it worked at 9V and I'm pretty sure the voltage I'm using right now is a bit below 8V.

My plan was to write a little bit of code for the Pi that would read the sensor, keep track of how long it was since motion had been detected, and after a pre-programmed time, kill power to the display driver kit and effectively shut the display off.  All of this required a bit of external hardware and Update 5 was the completed circuit I constructed to facilitate this.  (This is the blank brown board in Update 4 now filled-in.)  Oh, and the wonderful frame, I didn't make that.  I took the display into Hobby Lobby and had them make a custom-sized shadow box frame.

There were glitches, set-backs, unexpected complications along with way that I'll fill in when I write about the full technical details in a forthcoming post, but the system is up and working as I write this.  My wife loves it and is duly impressed. She thinks there is a market for something like this and so do I; my ambitions go beyond what I've built here.  Maybe down the road I'll upgrade the system and see if I can make some of these other ideas a reality.  Always more to do than I have time or money to try.

Portal 2 Cooperative: The Greatest Game Ever

I do enjoy me some video games.  The demands of a responsible life means my time playing is limited and often in relatively small chunks.  One of the games that has fit this lifestyle well is  Portal and its' sequel, Portal 2.  The strength of both of these is a truly creative game-play mechanic: the ability to connect two points in space with a portal.  Rather than trying to explain any more than this, I'll let the video below do the talking.

(The humor demonstrated in this video also persists throughout the game, adding to the enjoyment).

Portal 2 added more of the same in all departments as well as expanding on the repertoire of mechanics with fluids that allow your character to run faster and jump higher, bridges made of light, and catapults that throw you across the room.  I loved it all from the humor filled introduction sequence to the difficult (for me) final showdown with the test-obsessed robot overlord.

Except I didn't get to play it all.  There is a whole second half to the game which you must play with a friend, each of you controlling a character with a portal gun to solve puzzles that couldn't be solved otherwise.  Until recently, I had no friends....

.... who had played Portal 2 and could join me on this mission.  That changed a few weeks ago and though our time playing together has been limited, it has been a fantastic experience. I can't highly recommend enough playing the co-operative test chambers with a good friend. I look forward to every minute of it, even though those minutes are often weeks apart.  One of these days we will finish all those test chambers and the satisfaction will be high.

(This will only leave all the community created test chambers, both single-player and cooperative.  I just discovered these when I started playing cooperatively with my friend.  The software developers have provided the tools for game players to become game creators by developing there own test chambers and posting them online for others to play. There are over 200,000 of these, more than I will ever play.)

Secret Project - Update 5

I've had to rework part of the design a few times but what you see below has been tested and is working 100%.  The software to use the board has also been written and tested and the board has been integrated into the system as a whole.

The project is nearly complete and I'm waiting on one more item that should be coming in soon.  Plug it in, make a few more software changes and it will be done.

Daylight Savings Time

This is the effect that the time change had on my home temperature measurement system; look at the green and red traces between 1am and 2am.

Everything's Working (Mostly)

As I wrote a few days ago, this week was off to a sub-par start in the Hardy household: our furnace broke and my computer hard drive crashed.  The good news is that both are up and running again (for the most part).
We had a lucky break regarding the furnace in that the cold snap was only a snap and the weather warmed up enough that we didn't need it much past the weekend.  Our electric and kerosene heaters helped us limp along and by the time the repair people came out Wednesday, we were back into the 70s.

The furnace guys confirmed my suspicion that the gas valve was the problem.  This is the main valve that allows gas to flow from the house's gas line into the burner tray where the heat gets made. Our furnace has a pilot light and as a safety measure, a temperature sensor is installed close to the pilot light to detect its combustion and ignition ability. If the light is out, the gas valve won't allow gas to flow into the burner tray or to the pilot light.  When lighting the pilot light, holding down a switch on the gas valve allows a manual override of this sense and gas can flow just to the pilot light.  Holding the switch down and lighting the pilot light allows the temperature sensor to warm up and once its hot, the switch can be released and the pilot light will stay lit; the temperature sensor has given the thumbs up to the gas valve that the gas being released to the pilot light will get burned. In our case, releasing the switch extinguished the pilot light indicating that the gas valve was under the impression that the pilot light was not heating the temperature sensor.

When replacing the temperature sensor didn't solve my problems I suspected the gas valve would need replacing; it did. The furnace guys spent a bit over an hour cleaning the furnace and replacing that valve. They said our furnace was in good shape and that our particular brand had a reputation for longevity (though not efficiency).  A few hundred dollars to the nice repair men and we had a working furnace.

The computer repair has been more laborious. When your hard drive dies, all the data on it dies as well; hard drives die all the time and to the extent that data is valued, a robust backup strategy is a good idea.  Much to my surprise, I ended up using three of the four backup strategies we have in place during this repair process.  As I write this, I'm still working out a few of the details but I suspect everything will be back to normal shortly.

Strategy 1: Superduper!
Superduper! does one things extremely well: make a complete copy of your hard drive onto an external drive.  The most beautiful, wonderful thing about having a exact copy of your formerly working drive is that you can immediately pick up where you left off when your main drive dies.  This is exactly what I did: when I realized that Apple's oddly prescient email had come true, I booted from my cloned drive, did a few last minute house-keeping items for school on it, and then shut the computer down to take it in for repair.  Having the cloned drive gave me peace of mind that all was well and that I could safely send the computer in. (I clone our drives every night so at most, we should be out a day of data).

When I got my computer back from the shop, Superduper! also made the restore process easy: I simply used my clone as the source for the data and copied it all back onto the internal hard drive.  Six hours later (!) I rebooted my mac using the new internal drive and all was exactly as I left it a week ago.

Except for iTunes.

Though all the data was still on my drive: iTunes had some serious memory problems.  I suspect this had to do with the program being in the middle of downloading podcasts when the drive died.  It had forgotten all of the podcasts I had subscribed to and almost all of the applications and data on our iPad. When I plugged in the iPad yesterday evening (after getting my computer back up), it "backed up" the iPad and removed most of the apps that I no longer had listed in iTunes.

To be clear, we still had all the applications and data for the iPad on my computer; the iPad just didn't know it.  So how to get my iPad looking like it did a week ago?  iTunes only keeps one latest backup and that one was missing all applications and data.  If only there was a way to get iTunes to use an older version of the backup...

Strategy 2: Time Machine
Time Machine specializes in keeping historical records of files.  Superduper! remembers nothing but the most recent state of the entire drive; Time Machine keeps track of previous versions of your files and makes it pretty easy to copy an old version from its' archive back onto the main drive. (The big disadvantage of Time Machine is that you can't start your computer up from it.  Once your computer is running and you have a working hard drive installed, you can use it to restore your data but there is no painless, up-and-running-again like Superduper!).

I found where iTunes keeps its backup of the iPad, activated Time Machine, went back a week to right before my hard drive failed, and restored that larger, complete backup of the iPad. Then using iTunes I restored the iPad from this complete backup and in ten minutes, my iPad was back to its original state.

As far as the podcasts go, I decided to resubscribe to them manually.  I still have the files for any of the historical episodes I like to keep, and the resubscription process took only a few minutes.

Strategy 2: Crashplan
We use Crashplan as our doomsday, online backup. In the event our house burns down or a tornado takes all our computers to Oz, our most valuable data (photographs, legal documents...) are all stored off-site in the "cloud" and can be retrieved once our lives get back in order.   Though I didn't need to use Crashplan to restore any lost data, I did use it to get access to my resume while my computer was being repaired.  Crashplan provides a browser to all of the files it has stored and if you known where to find the file in question, it can be restored to whatever computer you're using at the time.  Though I don't recommend using this as a primary "cloud" file storage solution due to the laborious interface, it allowed me access to my files when and where I needed them and that is very handy.

The Library, Its Full of Books

I have been unsure about my career in higher education since before it began. In fact, I let my ignorant fears and misunderstanding of the typical university professor job description scare me away since finishing my undergrad. Now that I'm on this path I my ignorance is decreasing but the uncertainty is receding much more slowly. I enjoy teaching so much that I have been fearful the other demands of the professorial life will hinder me from this task and turn the work into drudgery.  More specifically put, being a university professor is more than being an excellent teacher, particularly at bigger schools where research is most highly valued.

To better understand what I would be facing, I undertook the reading of "Balancing Acts: the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers" by Huber. (Micro review: Outlines four professors who found ways to make teaching a priority despite working at research-oriented schools.  Good read but definitely thickly written in the ways of academics.) As is common in academic works, this book cited many sources including "Advice for New Faculty Members" by Boice.  This title was so highly recommend that I began to hunt for a copy.  Amazon had it and for $40 would let me own my own copy.  Wichita Public Library had not heard of it; no surprise.  I felt I had run out of options until I remembered, Wichita State has a big library, they might just have this title.

They did.

And many, many others, all on this seemingly obscure topic of managing an academic career.  Literal shelves stacked with books covering topics from the failings of universities to finishing a dissertation topic to being a mentor.  More books on the topic of university life than I could read even if that's all I did for the six years of my PhD.

I shouldn't be surprised, though; academics writing books about the academy.  It seems obvious in retrospect.  "Publish or perish" and all that.

#1 Halloween Fan

One of my favorite podcasts is 99% Invisible a show about design and its unseen power to make or break our experience with the objects around us.  At the end of each show the host, Roman Mars, gives his thanks to the supporters of the show, often corporate sponsors.  It is at this point that is son, Maslow, gets his 30 seconds of fame and often steals the show; steals is outright during what can safely be described as commercials.

Case in point: Series of Tubes.  The whole show is great but to hear the little man in action, skip forward to 15:37.

"Hall-a-ween"
"Hall-a-ween"

Cute even on radio.

Everything's Broken

I found out our furnace had a problem after the weather did thus to us:

Almost a 30 'F drop in three hours.  When we went to bed Thursday night it was 73 'F and when I went to school the next morning it was 43 'F.  I spent Saturday trying to get the pilot light lit with no luck; a repair man is coming by tomorrow.

Also, about two weeks ago I got the following message from Apple regarding my computer:

Apple has determined that certain Seagate 1TB hard drives used in 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac systems may fail. These systems were sold between October 2009 and July 2011. Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider (AASP) will replace affected hard drives free of charge.

Apple is contacting affected iMac owners who provided a valid email address during the product registration process to let them know about this program. If you have not been contacted, but think you have a 1TB Seagate hard drive, you can enter your serial number below to see if it's part of this program.

My serial number was in the selected range and, to confirm this, my hard drive failed last night.  I tried using Apple's built in disk utility but it was not able to repair the drive so I'm without a computer until I can get it taken in to the local "Apple Authorized Service Provider".  My overkill backup scheme is paying off right now as I've lost virtually no data; at most a day's worth of podcasts. Maybe by the end of the week I'll have a working furnace and computer.

Air Conditioner Thermostat Strategy

If you are a frequent reader of my infrequent writing, you'll know that last summer (2011) I installed a system to measure the temperature in and around our house as well as keep track of when the central fan is running (when the air conditioner or furnace is on). Last summer I ran two experiments

1. What is the effect on the attic temperature due to installing additional attic ventilation?
2. What is the effect on the amount of time the air conditioner runs during the day based on whether I turn it off or leave it on while the house is unoccupied?

The data from the first experiment showed about nine degrees of cooling after adding the extra ventilation determined simply by comparing the average temperatures before and after making the change.  The second experiment was far less conclusive and as I said at that time, a more complex statistical analysis would probably be necessary to make a determination.

That was a little over a year ago and I now have another season of data and the desire to jump into the statistics. You science nerds ready to rumble and see where this leads?

I made the choice this past summer to throw in another variable: rather than just measuring the effect of turning the air conditioner off during the day, I also investigated the effect of changing the thermostat set-point.  Every week on Monday morning I would re-program our thermostat with a different set-point and then each day of the week decide whether to bypass the schedule and leave it on all day or let the schedule run, cooling the house in the evening to the set-point I had chosen.  The three set-points I chose were 77, 78, and 79 degrees Farenheit; sadly, the 79 degree data set turned out smaller than I would have liked so I won't be able to use it for this analysis; hopefully by the end of next summer this will not be the case.  

I threw two summers of data into the statistics machine and hoped to answer a few questions:

Question 1 - Is it more energy efficient to turn off your air conditioner during the day (or when the house is unoccupied)?

This questions has been asked for many decades and the technical term I've found describing the strategy is "thermostat setback".  Much of the research seems focused on using this strategy during the winter for saving energy on heating and the internet is full of opinions.  I haven't looked very hard but I did find one academic paper from 1978 ("Energy Savings Through Thermostat Setbacks" by Nelson and MacArthur) in which the researchers used a computer simulation to try to answer the question.  Their general conclusions support the use of thermostat setback with an unsurprising caveat: the effect of the setback is most noticeable when the degree of the setback is large and the length of the setback is long.  The lower the change in thermostat setpoint and/or the shorter the duration of the change, the less significant the effect. In scenario at our house, both of these conditions are satisfied (roughly): the setback period is at least 8 hours and the change in temperature is high enough that the air conditioner does not run at all when setback.

To do the analysis on the data I had collected, I split the dataset into three parts based on the thermostat setpoint when it ran during the evening.  Each subset contained data showing the daytime state of the thermostat (cooling or not), the evening thermostat setpoint, the 2-hour average peak temperature of the day, and the number of hours the air conditioner ran that day.  I then ran a multi-regression analysis using the air-conditioner run-time as the dependent variable and the outdoor temperature and day-time state as independent variables. (For those of you who don't know, multi-regression analysis tries to determine the mathematical relationship between variables based on a set of data.  More importantly for our purposes, it will also calculate whether a given input variable has a significant impact on the stated output variable. Specifically, it will tell us whether the daytime state of the air conditioner has a statistically significant effect on the air conditioner runtime.)

Answer 1

• Thermostat setpoint = 77'F: Daytime state does have an effect on how long the air conditioner runs for the day.
• Thermostat setpoint = 78'F: Daytime state does not have an effect on how long the air conditioner runs for the day.

It looks like I just happened to stumble across the turning point.  The statistics imply that if I set the thermostat at 78'F, I will not experience longer run time if I just leave the air conditioner on all day rather than turning it off when I leave in the morning.  If I set the thermostat at 77'F and do choose the turn the air conditioner off during the day, the statistical model predicts a reduction in air conditioner runtime of almost 2.5 hours if I choose to do this. 

Question 2 - Does the thermostat setpoint have a significant effect on how long the air conditioner runs for the day?  If so, how much?

I haven't done the research on this one to have an informed opinion so I'm just going to jump to my analysis. Dataset was the same as above but this time was split into two datasets, one in which the AC was running all day and one in which it was off during the day.  I then ran the same statistical analysis to build a model of that would allow me to predict how long the air conditioner would run given the two-hour average peak outdoor temperature and the thermostat setpoint.

Answer 2 - The thermostat setpoint is statistically significant in determining how long the air conditioner will run each day regardless of whether the air conditioner is off or on during the day.

• Air conditioner off during day:  Each degree Farhenheit the thermostat is reduces saves 0.65 hours of air conditioner run time that day.
• Air conditioner on during day: Each degree Farhenheit the thermostat is reduces saves 0.80 hours of air conditioner run time that day.

Question 3 - How much money can be saved by using thermostat setback or increasing the thermostat set?

Answer 3 - I recently was able to measure the power of my air conditioner: 4kW when its running. Let's use the ballpark value of  $0.10/kWh for energy.  This means I'm charged $0.40 for every hour my air conditioner runs.

• Thermostat setback - If I choose to set my thermostat to 77'F and turn it off during the day (rather than leaving it running), I'll save almost 2.5 hours of air conditioner runtime which translates into $1.00 of savings per day.  Over a 30 day month this is $30 in savings.
• Thermostat setpoint increase - We can save $0.26 to $0.32 each day per degree the thermostat is increased.  This doesn't sound like much and over a 30 day month, this is a total reduction in the cooling costs of $8-$10 per degree.

All of the statistical models were linear in nature and we know from Newton's Law of Cooling that the heat loss rate of a house is non-linear; the hotter it is outside, the faster the house heats up. It should take much more cooling effort to keep a house 20 degrees cooler than the outside than just 10 degrees.  A linear model predicts it will take exactly half and this is not correct.  The model predicts the same amount of reduction in air conditioner runtime by moving the thermostat setpoint down one degree Farenheit whether it is 85'F outside or 110'F outside.  A non-linear model would work better here but until I figure out how to make the magic statistical software do this, we'll have to stick to the linear model.

That's what I've go for now.  Until next summer when I've got more data, this is what I know.

Secret Project - Update 4

I'm getting close.  I've got a few more parts on the way and then some final assembly still to do.  I should be done in time.