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Anatomy of Destruction

  October 16, 2014

Innovative work often goes in unplanned direction. One moment you’re working on a great idea… and the next you’re moving in a completely different direction than you started out… or even intended. In certain situations this is more literal than others. The GSU Library, along with the Anthropology Department and Geosciences Department have obtained small unmanned aerial systems from DJI called the DJI Phantom. More than a few of these systems have suffered from some unplanned innovation in the form of crashes. These systems are specialized, and DJI ( based in china) doesn’t have the best tech support or service for US customers. This post will essentially be a photo log of the tear down process for the DJI Phantom II owned by the library. The aircraft fell around 11 stories without power, crushing a gopro camera and it’s mount on the quad, as well as crushing the landing gear. It was also apparent that there would be internal damage to the craft as well as what was initially visible. In order to determine the extent of that damage I had to do a complete dis-assembly.   The first step in disassembling a DJI Phantom is removing the propellers and the landing gear. Then the body shell must be disassembled A this stage it becomes possible to begin testing components. Once I have determined what parts look like they will need replacement, I proceed with removing the internals completely from the body shell With the internals removed, I am ready … Continue reading

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Drone Flying

  October 16, 2014

Hi Everyone, I bought a drone quadcopter last week. The one I bought was an Ares Ethos FPC. It comes with a camera that shoots in HD mounted on the bottom of it. I am pleased with it so far. I’m really happy I got the economic quadcopter first before I bought the really expensive one for several reasons. Mainly because the likelihood that you will crash a drone is 100%. It takes practice to land, how to maneuver in the air, how to not panic when it is not doing what you want. One of the scariest things is flying around people. No matter if you are really high in the air on down low, when you are not secure in your flying skills the awareness that you will get from the quadcopter dropping out of the sky out of control and hitting someone, or causing a car accident is VERY real. I suggest if you ever fly one to do it in an open field away from trees and people. I am attaching clips of me flying at grant park. It is really cool when you get the hang of it. Definitely go cheap first before you spend too much money and you have to pay more to fix it after a bad crash. Ameer

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Innovation and Education

  October 16, 2014 ,

Innovation, a word describing a new idea, device or process that is an original, something to bring society up to another level. However, when discussing innovation and education I do not think it has to be in terms of something new, something never been used or discussed, because when it comes to innovation in education I am a firm believer in not “recreating the wheel”. What I mean by that, is that societies have been educating themselves and their fellow men and women for centuries- that is a ton of data to draw from, and in the work I do, when you have centuries worth of data you might want to extrapolate some of the points made before you try and invent what you think is an entirely different approach.  By using the idea behind genetic algorithms, or Darwin’s theory of natural selection, we could try and find the best combination of education methods to create or innovate the superhuman of education history, through centuries of education, across hundreds of societies and cultures. The United States is supposed to be a “superpower” of a nation, yet we are significantly lagging behind many other countries when it comes to education.  This could be attributed to many factors, but I feel it also has to do with our size and our age as a nation.  Although there are other countries that have centuries of education to fall back on, years of trial and error, we are a newer nation that feels that … Continue reading

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“Tell me, won’t ya tell me, won’t ya tell me, won’t you tell me…”

  October 16, 2014 ,

While I have been working diligently on finishing the first safety video and planning out the next installments, I wanted to shift the focus to another interesting project I have been working on – the Tools Wiki.  The Tools Wiki is the brain child of Valerie and will be a clearing house of online resources with GSU examples for students to use and expand.  For example, for assignments that require students to build website, they could use the Tools Wiki to find what other students have used in the past and see examples of their works. We are now in the prototyping phase where Valerie, Wasfi, and I are all making our own versions to experiment with to see how people interact with it and use it.  You can view mine below: As always, I am open to any and all feedback, so if you check it out, tell me know what you like/dislike/expected/etc. Roxanne Greeson Below is a “new to me” band, the Mother Hips from California with their song “Third Floor Story”, I found it to be a great jam song with a catchy chorus and of course a couple of Ooo OoOoo’s thrown in for good measure.

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Deliberate and Develop

  October 16, 2014 , ,

This week at SIF has been a brainstorming week. Everyone in the team has been putting lots of thoughts into the development of the Deliberation Mapping tool.The major discussion has been about the functionality of the Deliberation tool. We are planning to develop the tool in such a way that it is scalable and expandable.The application has so far been developed using Javascript for the client side programming. We have also planned to develop it by using PHP and mysql in the back end. However, considering the complexity of the application, we are now considering to migrate the code to ASP.Net and MS SQL Server. We are now checking for the feasibility of the migration. ASP.NET is used to create web technologies and is an integral part of Microsoft’s .NET framework vision.It allows us to build compelling web applications by making use of Visual Studio. We have also been informed that the Deliberation mapping tool will be integrated into the Desire to Learn system of GSU. So, we need to make sure that there would be no problems during integration and possible upgradation. We are yet to get the information regarding the desire to learn back-end system. There are a couple of meetings scheduled in the next few weeks to discuss about the possible integration and also finalize the design functionality. So, probably by the end of this month we will be finalizing the design and start the development of the application. Siva Kondeti