Author: Drew Wicke

Drew Wickehttp://drew.psib.org

Build tools

So, I’ve been learning about some software engineering tools so that I can make my life easier while developing:

jitpack.io and https://travis-ci.org

jitpack makes it super easy to depend on a repo that is able to be built using gradle or maven.

travis-ci does continuous integration for your projects.  This means that if you are testing your code you will be doing it all the time.  And well I’m still not sure how to create test cases for mason as it doesn’t necessarily create the same output every time.  So…  But it is still cool.

Speed, Resiliency, and Sustainability these are important to me

So, I have been reading about the effectiveness of the current methods for determining the efficiency of fire stations.  Most fire stations look at efficiency by cutting there budgets.  Their argument is that basically lowering input (the budget) is not a good measure of efficiency.  They argue that you have to look at the value of the property saved

“the mission of the fire service is to be resilient and fast, not necessarily efficient”

https://medium.com/@esaylors/fire-departments-are-response-models-not-production-models-f7943d5c623d#.uybf5afb8

Efficiency would mean minimizing costs.  Essentially, this is reducing the budget.  In disasters we need speed, resiliency, and sustainability.  Currently bounty hunting doesn’t minimize the budget.

A bounty hunting system gives the agents more autonomy to chose the task they want to do rather than being governed by the results of the auction.

Would incorporating different types of bounty hunting strategies rather than just maximize the current bounty alone be the most effective approach?

I’ve already since starting this post have created a measure for speed and the jumpship bounty hunters are quite good at being speedy even under adverse situations in comparison to auction methods.

Ethics and Incompleteness

So, I was talking to my wife 🙂 about ethics and the types of ethics.  She told me that there is this form called consequential ethics and deontological ethics.  And there are I’m sure a bunch more.  But, what I have discovered is that they each have a set of axioms and from these they base all of there conclusions.  However, I believe that we here are encountering a similar problem as Godel’s incompleteness theorem.  Basically, a complete and consistent set of axioms for all ethics is impossible.

http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/31726/can-g%C3%B6dels-incompleteness-theorems-be-applied-to-ethics is a link I just found and he references Tarski’s undefinability theorem.

Comps and Proposal Scheduled

This week I finally got a lot of stuff I have been working on for the past couple months to the next stage.  I finally got comps and dissertation proposal scheduled and my proposal approved by the chair of my committee to be handed out to the rest of my committee.  I am so very excited!

Wild fires and resource allocation

I ran across another interesting paper “Resource Sharing for Control of Wildland Fires“.  They have the problem of resource sharing between different fire stations that need particular resources.

This seems like a job for bounty hunting and raffles!  So, we have the tasks of providing particular resources.  Basically people request for a resource by putting a bounty for providing it.  Urgency of the need is mirrored by the bounty.  Resources that fire stations are not using can be put up to bid on in the Chinese auction and fire stations can use the tickets that they have acquired through going after tasks or received via auction to participate.  By structuring the sharing mechanism in this manner we motivate the fire stations to participate and due to bounty hunting being the mechanism we use to request particular resources the fire stations get what they want when they want it.

A similar problem appears in re-allocating food resources between food banks.  The same formula of bounty and auction style system could be applied.

Alexandria and Resource Allocation for Food Banks

The day before Halloween Les and I went to Alexandria and we did some of the scavenger hunt.  It was a amazing warm weather and there were all of these dogs dressed in costumes.  It was really fun.  We ate at Red Rocks Pizza, which my brother recommended, but we found to be not that great.  However, because we were still hungry after the pizza we ran across this burger joint Burger Fi.  There fries are the best and the milkshakes are so so so thick and delicious and the burger of course was juicy and tasty.

I’m nearly done my dissertation proposal.  So, should get back to working on that…  But before I stop, I found a paper “Challenges in Resource and Cost Allocation” by Toby Walsh published in AAAI just this year.  He claims that food bank distribution of food to people is a challenge problem.  This is awesome!!  I would so very much love to be working on trying to come up with solutions to this problem.  I have experience working in food banks and know the trouble with fair distribution and expiring foods.  Well, ok, back to writing.

Getting married tomorrow!

This is my last night as a bachelor!  Tomorrow I get married to Leslie Ann Brown (soon to be Wicke!).  This past week has gone by lightning fast.  We finished moving all of Leslie’s things and Casey and Louis and Audrey came from Germany.  Wow…  I am so excited!!!  I can’t even write in a coherent order.

So I’ll just list things:

  1. Brother, Stephen Emerick, Stephen Kuhl and Cameron Paterson took me to the Taste of DC Oct. 8th for a bachelor’s party :).  Was a very rainy day but fortunately for us the rain stopped and we were able to still do it.  It was great to see my brother and my friends before I’m married.
  2. I showed Audrey the robots at the lab and she likes them :).  I can’t wait to see her grow up and become a Godly young woman.
  3. I made breaded chicken breast in the wok!! They were delicious.

And so so so very much more I can’t remember right now.  I’m so tired.  I can’t wait for the wedding stuff to be done!

I love you Leslie <3

Update on life

Wow!  This week has been crazy busy.  Last weekend Les and I packed up my stuff from Hildey’s and she had her bridal shower in Hanover.  Then Monday we moved my little stuff into our first apartment and then Tuesday we moved the bigger stuff.  Stephen Kuhl helped with the move both days!  He was a great help.  Steve Aden was an enormous help, he helped move the big stuff with his truck.  He literally came straight from the airport to Hildey’s to help us!  By now Les and I have gotten just about everything of hers moved in except her dresser and one of her bigger book shelves.  Our places is looking nice!

The, yesterday Leslie’s sister, brother-in-law and niece arrived from Germany!  Was so great to finally meet them in person and have dinner with them.  Audrey is so so energetic.  She had only five ours of sleep and was still running all over the house and up and down the steps.  I wish I had that much energy.

This Saturday, if the weather holds up, my friends have put together a bachelor party and we are going in to DC for the Food Fest!

Today, we are planning on getting some of the books onto the shelves and out of the boxes and then run some errands.

I can’t wait until we are married!!  It is so close.  October 15th at 10am it begins and then by noon we should be back to our apartment and married 🙂  Then hopefully things will start to calm down again and I can get more work done.

I am hoping to propose and do my comps in early December so I have an enormous amount of work to do.  Leslie’s freelance stuff seems to have produced a number of leads and given more time after the wedding we hope some of them will pan out!  It is all so very exciting 🙂

Praise God I have a wonderful bride, a caring family and extended family, and great friends.

Bioengineering

So, I was thinking that it would be interesting if we made a uniform harvesting mechanism.  Essentially all produce such as potatoes, corn, tomatoes, grapes, carrots, etc would all be grown in the same manner.  So, like if we modeled it after growing corn you would have a similar plant that would produce a husk and instead of inside being corn you would have carrots and grapes etc.  This way the harvesting would be easier as it is more uniform.  It can be optimized for space so the crop density and yield would be high.  The other nice thing is that it would be able to grow in a variety of climates.  This would solve a lot of problems.

This of course brings with it very very big questions such as biodiversity, aesthetics.  This might be solved by creating new biodiversity by not having it grow exactly the same, but in the general pod like structure.

This also makes me wonder about growing meat and tissue in plants.  Both plants and animals are organic matter.  That is a bit weird, but why can’t we customize the bark or shell of a plant to produce more complex structures?  Essentially bioengineering is awesome and scary and will produce some really cool things hopefully.

These things seem like things we’d like to take with us to other planets.