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.