Baton Rouge Capitals

Baton Rouge is the capital of Louisiana and it has a fantastic capital building.  Actually it has two fantastic capital buildings and both are impressive in their own right.  The old capital is a smaller, castle-looking building that has been turned into a museum.

The interior of the building is equally impressive, very ornate, sparkly, and colorful. The main lobby area has a steel staircase winding up to the second floor which holds exhibits and a portrait gallery of former governors.  The staircase, though, gathered my attention immediately.  Because it was made of steel and felt very different than the stairs I normally tread.  It took up much less space than concrete or wood staircases which lead to a small magical feeling, like it was impossible that something so insubstantial could possible support my weight.  And stepping on the stairs had a different tactile feel; no thud of concrete or squeak of wood but a slightly springiness and vibration.  The stairs felt responsive and nimble, not monolithic.

There were several examples of stained glass wonderfully made.  The ceiling above the central staircase was all stained glass and several windows in both legislative chambers were done as well.  Both of these rooms were beautiful and we were told that they were often used for receptions.

The other capital building, the one where the politics gather to work, is an art deco tower  similar to the capital of Nebraska, at least on the outside.  In fact, it was noted in several places that the Baton Rouge has the tallest capital building in the world, Nebraska's is second.

The main lobby of the capital is a barely lit place.  It seems almost every surface is covered in dark marble, dark stained wood, or bronze.  The day we toured was a working day at the capital and there was a constant flow of professionally dressed people in and out of the building.  The lobby was busy and loud; I felt out of place as a tourist, as if I somehow was intruding or getting in the way.

At either end are the legislative chambers, equally ornate but much better lit.  The Senate was not in session but the House was very busy passing legislation.  In the twenty minutes we were there about eight bills were passed.  It was all very perfunctory, so much so that most legislatures spent most of the time talking, ignoring the proceedings, or not being present.  This didn't keep them from voting, though.   The voting used electronic devices at each representatives seat with a big display at the front of the room showing the status of each representatives vote.  On several occasions I saw representatives voting for those around them who were absent.

And there were the pages.  Most say off to the side with nothing to do, waiting to be called on and be made useful.  The only two I saw busy were those assigned to the printers on either side of the front of the chamber.  When a representative printed a document, the page delivered it.

I have no reason to believe that what I witnessed is abnormal in any way as compared to other legislative bodies in this country.  Compared to what is normally airing on CSPAN, the attendance here was quite impressive.  It seems that there is something fundamentally wrong with how our country governs itself when laws are created in such a manner, when the act of governing is given is little attention.  This is easy for me to say, though; I've never had to do what these people do.

Lastly, like Nebraska, the Capital had an observation deck at the top of the tower. The view of the area is impressive: the Mississippi river, the refineries north of town, the downtown area, the LSU stadium and arena.  And the surrounding jungle/bayou/swamp, the ever present explosion of green.

Baton Rogue Landscape

My wife and I just returned from a brief trip to visit family in Baton Rogue, Louisiana where I had my first up-close experience with the Cajun south, the swamplands and bayous that make up the low-lying Mississippi basin. Its easy to under-appreciate the rampant life that this land breeds. From insects to alligators to ancient oaks to strangling vines the whole region explodes with growing things; its probably most accurate to think of the area as a less temperate jungle. one that occasionally almost freezes in the winter.  Its easy to see why agriculture took root down here.

The Mississippi river enables all of this growth and the seasonal floods that we have mostly contained with levies still drive the ecology of the area.  The water table is always just below the surface; I have no idea how they build houses, bridges, and skyscrapers with soil that is always so saturated with water.  The water is always in the air, as well.  The humidity allows the famous Spanish moss to grow of the oak trees and caused me to sweat whenever outside, even when the temperature was not very high.

Our more structured human life is also enabled by the River.  the Mississippi is famous for the commerce it enabled and the area plantations all took advantage of it from the beginning.  We still use it today, but for more sophisticated goods like oil.  North of Baton Rogue is a large oil refinery complex that receives tankers coming in from the Gulf; I don't know if the refined product is similarly transported out the way it came in but it easily could be.

The most exotic creature I experienced was the famous alligator, living in a wildlife refuge we explored.  Most of the time all we saw of them were the famous pair of eyes, watching us watching them.  We were also luck enough to catch sight of one fully out of the water, hiding in the shade of a tree.  None of these animals were very large (by Hollywood standards) but all seemed more than capable of defending themselves from pesky photographers like me.

That same refuge had a bird sanctuary; large platforms several feet above the surface of the water to provide a place for the birds to roost and be protected from the previously mentioned predators.

More to come in the following days ...

Nerd Corner

Behold, the efforts of several months of labor: my basement nerd corner:

Due to my hobby and school projects often monopolizing our dining table, my wife and I agreed that if I could find a desk for cheap, we could rearrange things in a basement a bit and give me some space where my sprawling mess could live.  In a week or so of hunting Cragislist I found this "L" desk for $50.  The desk is an oak monster and the effort in getting it downstairs dulled my enthusiasm for the project somewhat. I got all the computer stuff re-situated and then at a much more relaxed pace re-organized the material in my old desk into the new drawers.  This evolved into a culling and scanning activity where the amount of physical paperwork I had on hand was significantly reduced.

A month or two ago I realized the utility of the desk was significantly reduced due to all of my electronic components and tools being in boxes rather than readily available.  I began a hunt for shelving options and, again, with my wife's input and guidance, found a way to construct some ugly yet functional shelves with scrap lumber we had on hand.   The result is shown on the left, resting on the desk and almost reaching the ceiling.  Another Criagslist find got me the "mailbox" shelving on top and after spending WAY TOO much on fishing tackle boxes, I was able to sort and store virtually all of my components.

The component storage taking up the top half of the shelving, I left myself some work space in the bottom half and put a shelf half way up for miscellaneous tools.  To store the rest of my tools I cut up a dowel into pegs and drilled holes everywhere I pleased, hanging tools throughout the shelving.  For lighting, I purchased a plug-in work light and screwed it into the bottom shelf.

Today I added two small finishing touches.    The blue patches on left is masking tape holding up some cheap red/green LED lighting in a very ugly manner to provide a small amount of light for the tools on the bottom shelf.  I also added some hooks to store my banana cables behind the shop light.

Having this work space has been fully wonderful and I am some thankful to my understanding and supportive wife in this.  There may come a day when we don't have the space for something like this but for now, it is a great blessing in my life.  There is enough space that projects can live on the desk and not interfere with the rest of our daily lives.  My wife gets a cleaner kitchen table and I get space to nerd out.  As they say, its a win/win.

Wichita PSERC Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of the spring 2012 PSERC conference and this year Wichita State is hosting. Unfortunately, due to the reconstruction of the student center on campus, we're hosting the conference at the newly remodeled Drury Plaza Hotel Broadview. The hotel is great but it's not the same as being on a university campus. There was a lot of interesting material covered yesterday (at least for power nerds like me) but there was one talk in particular that seemed more widely applicable; it was titled "Do We Need a 21st Century Electrical System?". The speaker's answer was a resounding "YES!" and he made a compelling case. The system we are using today is by and large over 50 years old and was built in a very piecemeal fashion with each utility around the country doing its own thing. As the system grew these utilities began to connect to each other which allowed more and more energy exchange between the utilities, helping each other during emergencies and other unexpected events. These energy exchanges soon became the daily norm these local utilities found themselves as parts of a much larger system, each controlling a small part of the system and being influenced by the choices of others, even those geographically distant. The grid when it was built was not designed with this kind of operation in mind. Energy is now routinely flowing long distances from the generators to customers and a much higher degree of coordination is needed between the utilities. More and more we are thinking of the "grid" as a single entity and a greater need for information regarding the state of the grid is becoming evident. Customers are using more and more energy and the ability to build additional transmission lines is becoming more difficult due to population growth and the lack of available land in and around urban centers. We, the power industry, are being presented with a unique opportunity. In a relatively short portion of time, much of this aging equipment will be replaced and/or upgraded; we have the possibility of largely transforming a patch-work system that has been organically grown to meet pressing needs of the moment into a system that has been designed with intentionality and foresight to handle the expected needs of the future. The hardest part of making these changes in a unified fashion is the question of coordination. Standards need to be agreed upon by all the industry members and decisions need to be made with the bigger picture in mind. This is extremely difficult to do purely from a technical standpoint, never mind the vast political complications. I don't know how this will turn out. I think we as power engineers all desperately want a better system that we have now and recognize the opportunity we have. But will we choose to sacrifice and expend effort to together to make this happen? I don't know, we'll just have to see.

Summer is Nigh

The weather is changing.  This week the overnight lows have been right around 70'F and the highs have been in the mid 80's.  We've been using our whole-house fan all week and its been keeping us cool enough but the first day for the air conditioner is just around the corner.

We had our second major thunderstorm of the season on Monday, one of the few rainy days we've had this spring.  I was able to get a few lighting pictures out of it; something I've wanted to do for a while.

On an unrelated note, I caught Ansie doing her confused head-cock on the porch yesterday afternoon.

Wichita Wildlife

As I was biking into school last week I realized that throughout my entire life in Wichita, I have lived very close to the river that flows through town.  The places I have called home, all three of them, have literally been a stone's throw from the banks of the Arkansas (locally pronounced "Are-Kansas").

This occurred to me on my ride as the path took me along the river and I startled a beaver in the water.  He quickly dove into the brown water and my view of him changed from a swimming nose to the characteristic large flat tail.  This was my second wild beaver-sighting in here in Wichita (more than I ever saw in Oregon, the proverbial Beaver State); the first was shortly after I got married.  I was taking out the trash at night and in glancing down the street I saw a very large, short-legged animal duck into the storm drain. By "large" I mean larger than most dogs, maybe the weight (but not height) of a St. Bernard.  Again, the tail gave him away; definitely a beaver.

Last week on a bike ride along a storm-water canal running right through the center of the city my wife and I saw a fox running through the weeds and grass growing along the bottom.  The bright orange was easy to follow but it moved quickly, faster than we could bicycle.  This was also my second fox sighting, the first being along the same bike path by the river on the way home from school.  The dark of the night and the quietness of my bike lead to a very startled orange blur moving from the bath into the bushes.

The birds here are different than where I grew up.  I see cardinals every year, often in the winter and early spring.  I grew up around blue jays and blue birds which are equally vibrant but somehow the cardinal red seems more special and unique; it feels like something I am privileged to see. There are owls that frequent the banks of the river near our house now.  We hear them often at night with their characteristic hooting. The first time I heard them I didn't even notice as it seemed perfectly appropriate, like the right soundtrack cue was being played.  I eventually noticed I don't live in a TV show and that this was the first time I had ever heard a live owl.

We even have birds of prey.  Several times I've seen a hawk or falcon (I don't know which) flying through the neighborhood; there was even one on campus yesterday, hanging out on the lightpole.  Famously, there is a bald eagle that has taken up residence at a small lake a few blocks south of our house.  I haven't seen the bird myself but there is a regular small crowd at a nearby parking lot hoping to catch sight.

And of course there are rabbits.  Many rabbits.  My morning walk with the dogs is not complete without there multiple attempts to catch a rabbit.  Most of the time the are frustrated by the leash before they get close enough to claim the spoils of a hunt.  Occasionally they just aren't paying attention and a perfectly capture-able bunny escapes before they even know what happened.  Our dogs love the thrill of the chase.

Updated Home Temperature System

I've been having a problem with my home temperature system for a while and the issue really manifested itself over this winter.  The some of the sensors, some of the time seemed to head off the deep end and this winter, the outdoor sensor took a turn for the worse.  Here's what the system recorded on February 11, 2012.  Note the red outdoor trace headed off to Saudi Arabia.  Over the past week or two the trace has literally been off the charts reading over 140 'F all day long.

Based on the the little trouble-shooting I had done to try to fix this problem it seemed that the problem was rooted in the type of sensor I was using: semi-passive and analog.  The device is cheap and very easy to use but the output is weak and lacks the ability to consistently drive the relatively long cable runs (~50 feet) from sensor to processor.  Most of the sensors seem to work most of the time but I was having enough trouble that it seemed time to make a change.

My plan was simple: put an amplifier out by each sensor to provide enough drive to be immune from the unidentified craziness that seemed to come and go.  I found a candidate part and when it arrived this past Saturday I prototyped a new little sensor board Saturday evening and built and installed the rest on Sunday.  As you can see from the results below, things seem to be working much better.

Besides an increased reliability, the amplified sensors allow me to greatly increase the performance of the system overall.  The number of samples I average per log entry went from 35 to 1000 (take that central limit thereom!) and the time between log entries went from 3.5 minutes to 1 minute.  I could have easily pushed to system more in both direction but for now this seems more than adequate.

Before installing the sensors I tried to calibrate them with little success.  I placed a bad of crushed ice and water over the sensors with the hopes that all the sensors would reach the freezing point and I could compare their outputs.  After ten minutes of this it was obvious to me that this wasn't getting the sensors cold enough and so I settled for the next best thing.  Once the sensors reached room temperature again I simply compared their outputs and added an offset in the processing code to each one, bringing them all into rough agreement.  All the sensors now read the same temperature but there is no guarantee that this temperature is the correct one.  All six sensors are now consistent but not necessarily accurate in absolute terms.

I'm very happy with the results so far. The system is much less noisy and the higher update rate is nice; its like my temperature system is brand new again.

Nerd Details
The TMP36 is a nice little sensor but lacks drive; the output is high impedance and so it seems susceptible to static build-up and noise over these long cable runs I have.  Additionally, to measure multiple sensors on the Arduino, the high impedance forces long delays between read and multiple reads per sensors to get things accurate.  This limited the rate as which I could collect data and even then things didn't work so well, as can be seen above.

The op-amp I used is the MCP6002 which is a low-power, rail-to-rail op-amp. I did a quick characterization of the op-amp as a voltage follower and it followed the input 1:1 from 0.1 to 5V, more than enough range for the expected output of the TMP36 (and much better than the other op-amps I tried, see below).  Doing a little algebra revealed I could probably even amplify the signal a bit to push my nominal values a little bit out of the weeds (77'F is 0.75V).  Instead of configuring the op-amp as a follower I set it up as a non-inverting amplifier with a total gain of 2.82.  To prevent oscillation in driving my long twisted pairs and the capacitance they tend to create I used this table to make an informed guess and added a 470 ohm resistor in series with the output.  Finally, to make installing the sensor much easier, I used a three pin terminal block as the connector.

The changes to the Arduino code were trivial.  I got rid of the extra analogRead(), reduced the delay between reads down to 10ms (I tested at 5ms and it seemed to work just as well), changed the number of reads from 35 to 1000, changed a couple data types to accomodate the much larger values I'd be generating in the running total, and added a unique offset that is applied to each final averaged sensor value based on my quick and dirty "calibration" I had done at my desk.  Oh, and I divided the final converted temperature by the 2.82 gain factor the op-amp introduced.

Neighborhood Power Simulations

I'm taking a class on smart grids this semester and a good chunk of the classwork is actually working on a large project. I'm working with a good friend of mine who specializes in networking and we are trying to study the effect of residential power customers (normal people like you and me) and how we all might be more involved in helping the power grid run more efficiently and economically. One of the ways this can be done is to limit the amount of energy being consumed during the periods of peak demand, specifically those hot summer days when everybody's air conditioner is running like mad.

To study this more in detail we are using a relatively new simulator called Gridlab-D.  This simulator is, in a word, quite amazing.  It was written by Pacific Northwest National Lab  under a grand from the DOE specifically to address the problems with simulating in a smart grid environment.  Smart grids are tricky because they break a lot of the traditional thinking about how the grid works.  With the old power system, the power flows from the generators to the customers and whenever the customer wants more power, it is available on demand.  The new smart grid paradigm allows for customers to become something closer to peers in the relationship: solar panels on the roof or electric vehicles in the garage putting energy back onto the grid, customers changing their consumption to save money as the prices or energy changes throughout the day, customers voluntarily limiting their AC use during peak periods for a price break the rest of the year, charging of electric vehicles being co-ordinated among owners (by computers) so that large surges in power don't occur at in-opportune times, all of these can allow the grid to operate more efficiently but require much planning and development if they are to become a reality.

And that's where the academic nerds like me come in.  With Gridlab-D, we can simulate these kinds of situations and see what happens on the power grid.  Specifically, if somebody has a promising idea about one particular aspect of the smart grid concept, it is likely that it can be programmed into Gridlab-D and we can run a simulation to evaluate the idea.

To do this, Gridlab-D has been provided with incredibly detailed models of neighborhood power grids. These models include things like:

• Number of houses in the neighborhood
• Size of houses
• Insulation level of the houses
• Thermostat set-points for the houses
• Efficiency of the air-conditioners
• Number and size of windows in each house
• ...

Almost any type of house you could imagine can be set-up in this simulator.  The houses that come "pre-built" have all of these variations built in so that they mimic the actual variations of houses in a neighborhood.

And the weather.  Gridlab-D allows the user to define which set of recorded weather data to be used so that the neighborhood can be simulated as if it is in Wichita or Chicago or Miami.  You can run the simulation for a day or for a year. How much sunlight hits the houses, how the wind blows, all of it is there.

I'm just getting my feet wet with this simulator and managed to get a simple simulation up and running today.  I took one of the built-in neighborhoods and subjected it to the summer weather here in Wichita, running the simulation four times, each with a different thermostat set-point applied to all the houses in the neighborhood.  To see what happened, I looked at the amount of power the neighborhood consumed throughout the day and I looked at the number of air-conditioners running at any given time.  Here are the pretty pictures:

As you can see from the graph above, the power consumption in the neighborhood goes up as the heat of the day sets in and then backs off as the evening cools down.  Also note that more power is consumed if the entire neighborhood set their thermostats to 73 'F (blue line) vs (81' F).  Going further, we can see that the biggest difference in energy consumption between these two cases is from 8am to noon.  That's kind of interesting.

Looking at the number of running AC units we can see a similar phenomenon.  As the day heats up, more AC units are running and that lowering the thermostat causes more units to run, particularly after 8am. 

Just to make the nerd case clear, this is all being run in simulation.  The simulator is taking the weather data and the house data, calculating how fast the house is heating up, calculating when the air-conditioning turns on, calculates how much energy it is going to consume and does this all for all the houses for the entire day.  That I, with my limited programming ability, could get this all up and running in a week or so is a great indication of just how powerful this simulator is.

Now that I've validated that I've got the simulator running, its time for the real work to begin on our project.  I'm looking forward to this.

Minority

I found out today that I was turned down from a program at North Carolina State designed to help aspiring faculty get a better handle on their career path.  The program is mostly geared towards "under represented" (I think this is the new term for "minority") graduate students and being a white male, as always, my application was kindly rejected.


The irony is that a quick survey of the faculty in the electrical engineering departments of most universities would show that most faculty are not white males; south-central and east Asians rule these programs. In every graduate course I've taken I have been the minority.  I would say that in most cases I am out-numbered 50 to 1.  Its not unusual for their to be more Asian women in these classes than white men.  


And don't even get me started about all the scholarships for women when women out-number men on virtually all US campuses and have for several decades.  These programs seeking to correct injustices and imbalances in higher education appear to have accomplished their goal yet continue to exist, pushing the balance past the point of equity.  I hear of opportunities all the time for women in engineering; where are the special promotional opportunities for men in fields traditionally dominated by women?  Do you know of any scholarships for men seeking to be nurses or elementary school teachers?  I don't.  


There may be a day when our culture decides to value men but I don't think that day is coming soon.

University Education

A good friend of mine gave me an interesting model for defining the roles of universities: discovering new knowledge (research), disseminating knowledge (education) and preserving knowledge (libraries). Though there are many other aspects to universities (dorm life, campus clubs, and don't even get me started on the tail-wagging-the-dog of athletics), these three seem at the core of why universities exist and their traditional value in society. 

If asked to rank these three in order of centrality, I bet most people would place education at the top of the list. When we think of colleges and universities, we think of going to classes, cramming for tests, and reading books (among other things). We have the phrase "a college education" for a reason and for most people, we aspire to such an education. Being college educated means something in our culture and the effort it takes to get that diploma is generally respected.

Without an education role, universities would look very different and be unrecognizable.  There would be no lecture halls and classrooms, no student union, no students milling around campus.  There would be labs and libraries filled with older men and women working on the next great idea.  In some sense these would be like monasteries where the chosen or the elite go to their private work.  It may be possible to visit and observe but it would be difficult to ever be a part of the life of the university.  They would be places where important people did important things and most of us would never really participate.

Thankfully, this is not how most of our universities exist today.

Sort of.

Though our universities continue to espouse a role in education, classes continue to be held, tests administered, grades given, it doesn't take too much time of being a university student to discover that something is distinctly  wrong.  Classes can be large, instruction may be provided by graduate students instead of faculty, instructors don't always know their students by name, textbooks are expensive and unreadable; students can feel like small cogs in the university machine.  Getting an education, actually learning something, takes place in spite of the system, not because of it. Pay these fees, pass these classes, get this diploma, feel college educated.  And the larger and most prestigious the university, the more alienating this feeling can be. How did the education part of university become so lacking?


At least part of the answer (perhaps all of it) becomes clear when the other half of the eduction process is examined: that of the knowledgeable professor who it would seem has been charged with filling eager young minds with profound thoughts. Particularly at larger, research-oriented universities, job security for faculty members comes from the number of scholarly articles they write, the number of conference presentations they give, and the general esteem they develop for themselves and the university as a result of their research. When the time comes for the university to decide if they will retain a professor indefinitely (tenure), the primary factor in that decision is often their research activity. A professor can have documented proof in the form of student surveys and complaints demonstrating a distinct lack of teaching skill or disregard for the education process and still be granted tenure at many universities.  The converse, an excellent educator who has mediocre or poor research accomplishments has virtually no chance of being retained.

So you can see the problem.  Even if a new faculty member desires to be a good educator and wants to invest the time and energy into providing an excellent classroom experience for his or her students, there is little incentive to do so.  The new professor can read the writing on the wall and if he or she wants to still have this job ten years down the road, the path is clear: produce original research, get published, get noticed.  In this context, classroom responsibilities are a hindrance and barrier holding back the new faculty member.

In light of the incentives universities have placed before their faculties, it is easy to see how a university-level education isn't always what it is cracked up to be. New faculty can't be bothered to care about classrooms, their jobs are on the line if they don't produce research.  Even tenured faculty who do have a large degree of job security have no specific incentive to become excellent educators.  If they desire to do so they have that freedom but it will mean walking away from the traditional measure of a successful faculty, namely research. Using graduate students as instructors in lower-level classes allows universities to free up faculty to do research, provide instruction at a much lower cost, and provide graduate students an opportunity to learn how to teach in a very trial-by-fire manner. 

The scenario described above is obviously a generality but it is true.  There are universities that have avoided this problem and generally they do it by choosing to be not research-oriented.  Many of these colleges and universities have no graduate program and have very little if any research being conducted. Often they are also smaller, less prestigious, and private (rather than state-funded).  But because the faculty make their bread-and-butter teaching, the instruction can often be excellent and the students get the benefits of a true college education. 

To the extent that big state schools have diminished or forsaken their role in truly educating their students, they have become corrupt, placing the prestige of the institution over the good of the students.  The students in these places are forced to make a choice: do they stay in the system that has walked away from education to get a name-brand diploma or do they find a smaller school that can provide a high-quality education.  (Often, there is little choice due to other factors like cost and lack of feasible alternatives.) So the universities keeps producing graduates who may or may not have learned what they should have learned and the diploma of a school is less and less a marker of quality and more a symbol of which club the graduate belonged to.

The situation is more complex than I paint it here and as you might suspect, money is wrapped up in many aspects of it.  My point is simple, though.  Despite these complexities if a university is not providing a worthwhile education, if the faculty has little or no incentive to provide excellent instruction, if the seal of approval that is called a diploma does not certify something meaningful and valuable about the product of a given university's education process, then the university is failing in one of its fundamental roles.  Furthermore, the value of the university to society will diminish over time and what a college education once meant, it will mean no longer. If graduation from a given university is not related to the demonstration of the acquisition of something (skills, knowledge, expertise of some kind), then the university has become a diploma mill and we are all the worse off for it.

Political Parties

Says Newt Gingrich:

"You need a solid conservative because you have to be able to draw the contrast.  If we [Republicans] run a moderate who is in any way close to where Obama is, we'll lose."

I understand political parties have a primary goal to win elections.  These parties are formed so that somewhat disperate beliefs can be unified behind single candidates that are generally close enough to the parties common goals.  Its always an imperfect fit and everybody is always unhappy in some ways with the candidates and leaders they put forward but everybody in the party agrees that having their candidate win is better than letting somebody else into office. Political parties are fundamentally about winning.

Newt Gingrich is a very experienced politician and he understands this in very practical ways much better than I probably ever will.  His words above make sense, too, because he is the "solid conservative" compared to the front-runner and more moderate Mitt Romney.  He is making the case that a moderate candidate will appear too similar to President Obama and all those in the center of the political landscape will view little distinction between the candidates.  If there's no difference between the two, why vote for one over the other. Even if a voter doesn't care for Obama, he or she may reason it is better to stick with the "devil you know" rather than vote for a similar but unknown candidate.

Here's the fundamental flaw in Gingrich's argument: you can't win an election if most of the voters don't want a
"solid conservative".  It could be that most voters are more interested in more moderate candidates and that running a candidate too far from political center will ensure that only a minority of voters will be interested in said candidate and the election will be lost.  If this is the case, the Republicans are in a difficult spot: they need to run a candidate who is centrist enough in beliefs to attract enough votes to win but distinct enough to motivate voters away from the politically similar incumbent.

And, of course, there's the more general problem with political parties and their focus on winning: if the goal is winning and beating the other teams, its easy to lose track of what should be the more fundamental goal of making the country a better place.  I suppose political parties do believe that their way is the best way in which case what is best for the party (winning elections and being in political power) is best for the country.  For this equality to hold, the other side must be void of good ideas, completely bereft of worthwhile plans, and lacking in any moral authority; it takes arrogance to make this claim.  If "best" equals "our team" then by definition the other team must have nothing to offer, there can be no good ideas they can contribute; if the other side did have something to offer, the combination of ideas would be better than "best".

To ensure victory often means discrediting the other team, even the ideas that may be good and helpful.  My friend calls this "football politics", placing victory in the political contest above the good of the country.  It seems that the major political parties today have decided that winning is the most important thing and seem to do all they can to vilify, discredit, and destroy their opponents.  Each side seems to have decided the only way to victory is through the complete refutation of the other side including the ideas that might be helpful.

This is why I'm an independent.

PDX Wonder

Of all the airports I have visited, I enjoy the Portland, Oregon (PDX) airport the most.  I like the skylights,  the central listing of flights right after security, the floor map of the rivers, the MAX terminal, the glass canopy, the sky-walks and the free wireless internet. (I don't care for the carpet which has not changed style for as long as I can remember.  It may not have been changed period, even when the airport was redesigned.)

This, though, this is my absolute favorite part of the entire airport.  It serves no purpose but to whimsically amaze and it works on me every time.

I'll leave it to you to figure out the magic.

(The fixtures are on both sides of the ramp down from security at the start of Concourse C.  With the "new" connector in place once you get through security on either side you can walk over and examine the miracle for yourself.  I highly encourage this.)

The Amazon Return

I just spent half an hour dealing with Amazon on trying to start the return process for a defective gift I received.  I've had great experiences with the retailer in the past but this time it was awful.  All of the problems I had stemmed from not having the order number for the item.  This seems like an unnecessary burden to place on me, the gift receiver.  I know what the item is, I know who gave it to me and I know it was ordered from Amazon.  It seems like this should be enough to uniquely identify the transaction and process the return.

It isn't, though.  I can't process the return online without an order number and despite the statement on the return webpage that I can contact customer service to get the order number, I still don't have it.  I did an online chat with a customer service representative (hi, Alvin!) who said that without a tracking number or an order number he could not start the return process.  My second attempt (once it became clear to me that Alvin was not a top-notch support specialist) was a phone call that was quickly answered but where the representative stated a similar story. This time I countered that the return webpage stated I could get the order number from him if I provided certain details on the sender (name, email address, ...).  I provided the particulars, he put me on hold and then hung up.

Clearly there has been a holiday hiring binge and I don't expect these representative to be the best Amazon has to offer.  I do expect them to be competent, though, and I do expect there to be agreement between what their website says and what the representatives say.

For now, I'm trying to get an order number and see if I can actually get the return processed.  I think the downsides of the gigantic online retailer are becoming more clear.

Conference at Berkeley

A week ago I was fortunate enough to head out to another power conference, this time it was off to Berkeley where the 60'F temperatures were much more welcome than the 16'F temperatures I left behind.

First up, look what I found in my purse after arriving in California:

This is a saw blade (about the size of a pocketknife) that I accidentally smuggled onto the plane and I didn't find it until my second day in California.  I have no idea why the x-ray machine did not catch it; maybe it looked like a comb?  This is one more anecdotal indication that taking off our shows and belts doesn't seem to be keeping weapons from making it onto planes.

We stayed at a hotel within walking distance of campus that is by far the fanciest hotel I have been a guest at: the Claremont.  As was proudly displayed behind the check-in desk, this was a four diamond hotel.  In the lobby was a large, two-story Christmas display. The hotel looked like a palace from the outside and it was clear after spending some time inside that this was an old building constructed in a time long before Berkeley was the place it is today. 

What's more, for reasons I don't quite understand, the room I was staying in was upgraded and I was put in a suite for the two nights I was there.  One bedroom, one bathroom, and one common living room and dining room.  The desk clerk said the room was $1500/night and in the high-priced housing market of the Bay area, I would believe that.  Its a shame we were in meetings all day and didn't get a chance to enjoy the room.

We did have a little bit of free time to spend walking the neighborhood and it was interesting to see how living was managed in such a space-constrained area.  This was definitely an urban neighborhood;  I saw very few apartment buildings but only the most wealthy seemed to be able to afford a front yard.  Some neighborhoods were row-houses packed right next to each other and some were only slightly more spread out.  Lots of people of bikes, not much parking and a fair amount of pedestrian traffic.

I also saw a church in our walk with a very interesting architectural style.  Mostly concrete with a very cubic design (that doesn't show up well in the photograph).  It looked more like a bunker than a place of spiritual communion; I have no idea if the building was designed as a church or not.

One of the residents used their small plot of garden/front yard for an orange tree: I think this is the first time I had ever seen one.

And what would a trip to Berkeley be like without out some politically liberal culture.  I have here for your examination disposable silverware made from potatoes and a protest recruitment poster.

The conference itself was great as usual.  I always enjoy the opportunity to hear what others are working on and the ideas that are being kicked around.  Within hours of the completion of the even, one of the presenters made a great point about how the power grid is changing right now.  Up until recently, it has been the responsibility of the utilities/generator owners to ensure that they could provide enough power for all customers on demand; the generation followed the load.  With the growth of renewables whose output is beyond our control we are starting to see small reversals in this trend where some load is starting to follow the availability of the generation.  

For the longest time the electrical industry was a one-way street where there was no negotiation and the electrical customer was always right. If the customer wanted electricity, the customer got it.  Now the relationship is starting to gain elements of negotiation and the utilities are trying to find ways where they are providing incentives to allow them to control customer's loads (like charging an electric car or running the clothes drier) based on when cheap electricity is available.

Something to think about and keep in mind when you hear stories about the smart grid or changes in the power industry.

Bicycling

After nearly two years of having my bike in mothballs, I was back on the road today.  The weather was beautiful today and I greatly enjoyed the ride.  My plan is start my year-round riding again, even though fall is fading fast and winter is near at hand.  I'll need to figure out my commuting routine, how to handle shleping my stuff back and forth to school and work out some details with my afternoon-oriented school schedule. 

But I'm back on the road and it feels great.

Earthquake and the Internet

As some of you may heard, the normally seismically boring Plain States (that's what I'm calling the part of the country where I live) have had a number of tremors over these past few weeks.  The epicenters have been between Oklahoma City and Tulsa and all have scored under 6 on the Richter scale.  This past Saturday evening one of them was large enough that we felt it here in Wichita.

I was mostly asleep and was waken by the shaking of our bed. The shaking was minor enough that I thought one of our dogs had broken out of its kennel and was up on our bed busy trying to relieve an itch.  The fog cleared in  my mind to realize that probably wasn't likely; I then noticed our rafters were popping and cracking like the wind was blowing heavily.  This wind, though, was very rythmic in nature and just so happened to be blowing in a way to match the vibrations of our bed.

My mind was still futily trying to figure out what was going on and I asked my wife if she was casuing this rucus.  I have long suspected her of having superpowers but she flatly denied responsibilty. 

The shaking stopped; she and I stared at each other in the dark, not knowing how to respond. 

"That was an earthquake."  I knew I was right the moment I said it but how to confirm this?  I read a newspaper article yesterday that said over 300 residents of my fair city called 911 to report the news or ask for confirmation.  I was almost one of these but realized the operators probably wouldn't appreciate the call and weren't seismological experts.  Local TV news?  Maybe, but I'd have to get out of bed for that and who knows what they would say.  There was a computer right by the bed so I grabbed it and started trolling the internet looking for an authoritative source that would provide details.  After several minutes of general searching I tried the United States Geological Survey website and a few more mintues after that found this page.

In less that 10 minutes I knew that yes, there had been an earthquake just minutes before, the epicenter was down in Oklahoma and it was significantly larger than many of the recent quakes in the same area.

The USGS has a great website that put the data up quickly.  The internet made the data available quickly.  We had our confusion oblviated quickly and fell back asleep.

Published

Sometime in the past few weeks I officially began my career as recognized academic: my paper got published.  The paper in question was one I submitted for the conference in Detroit at the end of July and for reasons that I don't understand it took them roughly three months to get it posted online.

But here it is.

As circumstances would have it, just yesterday I started writing the paper I'll be submitting for the 2012 session of the same conference.  The deadline is the end of the month and I've got all the research done; all that's left is the process of assembling the words in a clear and helpful manner.  This paper will be on a completely different topic: rather than dealing with wind turbines I'm looking at the effect on the electrical distribution system of the addition of a significant amount of generation.  Said differently, when a bunch of people, businesses, and manufacturers install solar panels and wind turbines, how does that affect the operation of the neighborhood electrical system?  Traditionally power flows from the big generators to the customers but in this case, if enough people install solar panels, that flow may end up reversed.

(For the power nerds out there, here are the details. Due to the effective limitation in IEEE 1547-2003, inverters can only contribute real power to the distribution feeder.  At high penetration levels this could lead to a case where real power is flowing towards the substation but reactive power is still having to be supplied by the substation and/or capacitors on the feeder.  My paper seeks to discover if this counter-flow between real and reactive power is a significant issue or not.)

My greatest fear is going through the process of submitting it through the IEEE website.  Last year it was a torturous process due to an unspecified problem with how their software interpreted the files I sent over. Now that I'm aware of the problem I'm going to try to get it all squared away before I submit it but there is a lot out of my control and I expect there will be problems once again.

Federal Tax Burden

The Occupy protests sparked my curiosity yesterday with their "99%" slogan.  Specifically, it got me thinking about tax burden in the United States as it relates to income. I did some digging around this morning and came up with some data from the Congressional Budget Office and put together a chart that confirmed by suspicions.

The above chart splits the US population into fifths and shows the percentage of total federal tax dollars each group would be paying under two different taxation systems: a simple flat tax (outer ring) and the 2006 tax structure (inner ring).  Again, this is all about actual federal tax dollars, not about marginal tax rates.

The data on the 2006 tax structure comes directly from the CBO.  To calculate the (highly) theoretical flat tax revenues, I used the CBO numbers for average income for each income bracket  and population for each income bracket.  I chose to compare the actual 2006 data to a theoretical flat tax not because I am necessarily a proponent of such a system but because a flat tax is probably the simplest tax structure. Everybody pays a certain percentage of their income, no matter where the money comes from or how much they make. (Because of this fact, in doing my tax revenue calculations, the proportion each income bracket pays is unaffected by the flat tax rate.  The total number of tax dollars would be, though.)

Items of note:

1. Even under a flat tax, the richest 20% of tax-payers will provide over half the tax dollars the federal government collects.  The obvious reason for this is that the richest 20% make a lot more money; 10% (for example) of $1,000,000 dollars is a lot more than 10% of $10,000.
2. In 2006, the richest 20% paid ~70% of all the federal tax dollars.
3. The poorest 20% hardly paid any of the federal tax dollars in 2006 (~0.8%).  Under a flat tax they would pay ~4%; this would be a five-fold increase in their tax rate.
4. If we moved to a flat tax, everybody's tax rate would go up (each group would be expected to pay for a larger portion of the total tax revenue) except for the richest 20%; their's would do down.

I'll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

Results from Measuring Household Temperatures for Most of the Summer

The temperature measurement system I installed in late June has been running for several months now with only minor problems and with the highs now in the 80s, two of the experiments I've been running over the summer have come to a close and I'd like to share the results.

Let's do the easy one first: attic temperature.  A month or so after I got the temperature system going we could see that our attic was getting quite warm on those hot days, often above 130'F.  I talked with my wife about it, we did some reading, and decided that adding a bit more ventilation would be good idea.  The cost would be minimal and we hoped it would lower the difference between the outside air and the attic.  Thankfully it did; the results are below.

The difference between the old and new ventilation is pretty clear: adding the ventilation did lower the temperature difference between the outside and attic air. The statistics show a nine degree cooling in the attic by adding the extra ventilation.  (For you statistics nerds, the sample size is ~25 for both conditions, and standard deviation is ~5 degrees.)

The other experiment I ran was based on a conversation I had at a cook-out over the summer.  One of the gals there said her father was a HVAC guy and that he recommended keeping a constant set-point during the summer; that is, don't turn the AC off when the house is unoccupied.  It was hard for me to believe that this would use the same amount of electricity as a more "conservative" approach of turning it off when gone but I realized I didn't actually have anything more than opinion to back up my assertion.  Time to do some science.

I decided to test this theory and added a sensor that would show me when the central fan in our house was running.  The fan only kicks on when the air conditioning (or furnace) are on and so this allowed me to measure how long the air-conditioner ran during a given 24-hour period.  I semi-randomly changed the programming on our thermostat to either hold a constant temperature all day or to turn the AC back shortly before we got home from work and school.  Here's an example of each:

The yellow line at the bottom is the state of the fan: 55'F is on, 15'F is off.  For a day when the AC was on a schedule, it turned off around 7am and would come back on around 2:30pm in an attempt to get the house down the temperature by 5pm when we came got home.  You can see the purple (kitchen) and cyan (hallway) lines rise throughout the day and then when the AC comes on in the afternoon, begin descending.

When we kept the thermostat constant all day, the AC cycles to keep the temperature in the house at the thermostat set point. The purple and cyan lines stay at an even value throughout the day.  (You'll notice the basement sensor is relatively unaffected by the AC.  This is why everybody should have a basement if they live in a place that gets hot.  Basements are the best.)

After a summer of running both cases, here are the results.

The results are much more mixed than I would expect.  I think to make any good conclusions a statistical linear regression would need to be done; I haven't done that yet and probably won't ever get around to it.  Its clear that the run-time of the AC is strongly related to the peak temperature for the day.  This should be no surprise to anybody.  It is less clear which thermostat schedule uses less energy.  For the very hot days (> ~105'F) you could make a pretty good case that turning the AC off when you're gone at work will save some energy.  For days when the highs are less than 100'F, though, it seems there is very little difference between the two cases.

These results are surprising to me.  I would have expected that keeping the AC off for seven or eight hours a day would cause it to run less in the grand scheme of things.  It may but the difference isn't huge. I may try repeating this experiment next summer, just to see how it turns out.  I guess the good news is that if you're home all day with kids or work you don't have to feel too guilty about having the air-conditioner running the whole time; its not killing your bill much worse than the rest of us.

New Skylight

For the past few weeks I've been "in-progess" on installing a tubular skylight for the stairwell leading to our basement. There was been no overhead light from the day we bought it which means the stairs were always dark. No longer the case: I give you before and after pictures taken at the same exposure for an apples-to-apples comparison.

Both of these above photos are deceptive; it wasn't that dark before and isn't that heavenly bright now. Such are the limitations of the dynamic range of today's digital cameras. Below is something that is more akin to how my eyes perceive it now.

The installation spanned multiple weeks due an unconventional installation that lead to needing extra parts only available online. These tubular skylights use a dome on the roof to collect sunlight and then channel that light through highly polished and reflective tubes to an opening in the interior ceiling. Due to the stairwell's location, to get the dome on the west side of the roof (where it would get the most sunlight) meant making a very non-direct route for the light to follow from the dome to the ceiling opening.

The hardest part in all of this was determining which extra parts I would need and if the installation would work at all. You couldn't do a test fitting with all the pieces until they arrived and that didn't happen until I knew which parts needed to be ordered. Very chicken and egg. I think if I had all the parts in hand, it wouldn't have taken me more than five hours to complete the project.

This is the second such skylight in our house and we are very happy with them both. When we bought the house there was one in the dining room and we were so happy with it we decided to try this one. I don't know why it took us this long to get around to it but now its done.

I think there's a good chance the hallway will get one as well.