May 26 (1)

Created Wikipedia Article: N-Version Programming

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I’ve been trying to contribute to Wikipedia more often these days, particularly in the sciences since I’m supposed to be knowledgeable in that field. Today, when I was writing a paper on electronic voting systems for a humanities class (PS 12), I stumbled upon a paper about a e-voting system that used N-Version Programming (NVP). Now, what is NVP? You ask. That’s a good question. I went over to Wikipedia to learn about it, but Wikipedia didn’t have an article on N-Version Programming! No way!

Well, I found out more about NVP through reading a few papers and decided to contribute back to Wikipedia by creating the article: N-Version Programming. That’s right, everything on that page right now should be my work (check the history to see if other people have modified it). It took me over about an hour to write the article and to reference the heck out of it. But overall, I’m glad I finally created an article in Wikipedia.

Most of the time, however, I’m making small edits here and there. You can view my list of contributions here.

Edit: Maybe in my paper, I should cite the wikipedia article and see if the grader thinks I’m plagiarizing off of the article :).

By Michael | Posted in Research | Comments (1)

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May 17 (5)

Caltech Ditch Day…Yesterday

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Shoot, I should probably post something…right?

Uh, clocking in at only one day late, is my announcement that Caltech’s Ditch Day was yesterday!

Quoting my explanation of ditch day to a friend:

According to wikipedia: “On Ditch Day the seniors ditch school, leaving behind elaborately designed tasks and traps at the doors of their rooms to prevent underclassmen from
entering. Over the years this has evolved to the point where many seniors spend months designing mechanical, electrical, and software obstacles to confound the underclassmen. Each group of seniors designs a “stack” to be solved by a handful of underclassmen. The faculty have been drawn into the event as well, and cancel all classes on Ditch Day so the underclassmen can participate in what has become a highlight of the academic year. This year, Ditch Day falls on May 16, 2007.”

So I didn’t have any classes today! That was great! Unfortunately, the ’stack’ that I participated to solve wasn’t well designed, and it ended up mostly being “walk around campus to find things stack”. Some of the other stacks were much better designed with more interesting and cool puzzles to solve. Years ago at Caltech, the stacks were even more elaborate with people having to open locks, break down walls, use science knowledge to solve things…

Yeah, I’ve been busy…

By Michael | Posted in Home | Comments (5)

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