Category: GENIUS

Worlds colliding

Kyle 1 Comment

So, my friend and colleague David Meerman Scott has a new book coming out. As you can see, he’s collecting pictures of the promotional poster hanging in people’s offices, etc. I sent him my contributions today and just had so share, such was the glory of the juxtaposition. The first is boring old me sitting in my boring old office, computer screens ablaze (surprisingly enough, it looks like I’m actually getting some work done). The second one is me in the lab that a bunch of my classmates work in. That’s the Inertial Electrostatic Confinement experiment behind me, a project of our department’s Fusion Technology Institute. The IEC group does not endorse the content of World Wide Rave; they were, however, nice enough to let me get a shot with their gear. Anyway, I can’t wait to see what David’s got up his sleeve. Should be exciting.

Office photo

Lab photo

If you’re surprised to see me in decent clothes, you’re not alone. The reason is that I had to give a talk earlier in the day to some visitors from the University of Tokyo. I haven’t talked much about my research here lately, so I posted the slides, IYI. Please note that although they should stand alone (legitimate thanks, Michael Alley and Co.), these slides do look a little mangled depending on what you’re viewing them with (sarcastic thanks, PowerPoint 2007). Rest assured that I’m not a total moron when it comes to font choice.

As a general PowerPoint PSA, I suggest you also check out Tufte‘s rant about it–mostly because it’s hilarious.

Update: Here’s the photo on David’s WWR page.

Go With The (Nework) Flow, Part I

Kyle

Some preliminaries:

(1) I couldn’t resist posting a link to this New York Times piece about eHarmony, et al. The “Algorithms of Love” in the headline alone made it worth it. (By the way, I love it when copy editors choose to force “EHarmony” and the like when these ridiculously capitalized words come up at the beginning of a sentence. It’s like a little “screw you and your trademark” from the folks for whom sloppy capitalization is almost an affront. Speaking of which, sorry for the up-style headlines on this blog. I abhor up style, but I somehow backed myself into this corner and am not about to back down now.)

(2) My friend Rachel just let me know that you can hear David Foster Wallace reading “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” from Consider the Lobster on “KCET Podcast: Hammer Conversations” (Episode 16), which is available on iTunes. I listened to it this evening, and it’s terrific. Copy snobs will love the little explanation about his use of em dashes, but anyone will almost certainly be moved by the story. Plus Wallace’s reading voice matches his “authorial voice” really well, in my opinion.

OK, on to the main event. I mentioned a couple posts ago that I hope to use this space as a sort of whiteboard for trying out ideas, and I’m expecting to need such a space in the coming weeks. I’m getting ready to start working on the algorithms for matching material offers and requests in GENIUS and as such am learning about solving network flows problems. Wanna learn a little bit about them with me? If so, read on.

We’ll start with the basic first lesson, which I sat through just the other day. The gist of flow networks is that you’ve got a collection of nodes with material traveling between them along directed connections called arcs. Nodes are either sources (supply nodes that create material), sinks (demand nodes that consume material), or transshipment nodes that simply send a material along.

What we try to solve for in these problems is an optimal flow vector, which is just a fancy name for a long list that says how much of the material flows along each arc. The vector is optimal in the sense that it represents the flow for which the problem constraints are met in the cheapest way possible (there’s a cost associated with moving a unit of material along each arc). The problem constraints are flow bounds (upper and lower limits on how much flow must move along an arc) and conservation of flow, which says that the outflow minus the inflow at each node must equal either zero (for transshipment nodes) or the supply or demand of the node (for sources and sinks, respectively). The second set of constraints are also called divergence equations.

Brief mathematical note for those who are interested: network flow problems are special cases of linear programs, albeit much easier to solve ones (via the network simplex method, rather than general linear programming’s modifier-less simplex method). There are also, apparently, special algorithms for solving various special-case problems that can be posed as network flow problems, including Euler’s famous Konigsberg Bridge Problem.

What does all this have to do with the nuclear fuel cycle? Stay tuned as I try to figure that out.

News Dump

Kyle 2 Comments

I’ve only sort of mentioned GENIUS (Global Evaluation of Nuclear Infrastructure Utilization Scenarios) in passing on this blog, but it’s a huge part of my life. I’m developing Version 2 of the code for my master’s degree work, which is supported by a fellowship from the Advanced Fuel Cycle Initiative/Global Nuclear Energy Partnership program. The “elevator talk” about my research work (at least the Gen X/Y version) is that we’re trying to build the nuclear fuel cycle version of SimCity. Once we get our “SimFuelCycle” up and running, we get to wreak havoc on it ala the SimCity 2000 monster. Except our monster manifests itself as uranium supply shortages and eroding political agreements.

Anyway, in order to do non-proliferation analysis, we’ve set the ambitious goal of tracking the isotopic histories of each nuclear reactor fuel assembly in this fuel cycle systems analysis code (after an assembly is taken out of a reactor, its composition has changed substantially; we want to track this isotopic inventory for each assembly). Why is that an ambitious goal? Because each reactor contains hundreds of such assemblies, reactor cores are reloaded every eighteen months, and we want to simulate thousands of reactors and other fuel cycle facilities over the 1200-month simulation. That means we need to store a TON of data, and I’ve spent the week getting the code to periodically dump this information, which is stored in memory as the code works, to an SQLite database.

[Here comes the segue.]

When I troll through various news sources each morning, my similarly ambitious goal is that I’ll email myself the articles I find interesting and then comment on them on my blog each night. As you can see, that seldom happens, and eventually I lose all hope of commenting extensively on each story and just have to get rid of them. Thus, I’ve stored the topic history of my week’s news reading in my inbox’s memory. Without further ado…

CSC.dumpNewsHist(& inbox) /* Dumps all the news items from my inbox to standard output via CSCout. */

/*For you data structures-savvy folks, I usually treat my inbox like a stack rather than a queue, so my order here will be LIFO (last in, first out).*/

SOURCE | STORY | COMMENT

New York Times | “With Third Title, Sharapova Shows She’s Back” | What a boring match. Ivanovic only looked sharp for like a four-game stretch in the first set. She’ll be back though; the three young Serbs (Ivanovic, Jankovic, Djokovic) are too good to not start winning some slams.

New York Times | “Beating Federer, Djokovic Has Look of a Champion” | Case in point. I’ve always thought Tsonga’s been underachieving, but I don’t give him much of a chance tomorrow against the Djokster. Also, I’m kind of irked by Scott Van Pelt’s comments on yesterday’s Mike Tirico Show about what a snooze this final will be because of who’s playing. I love Federer’s game as much as the next guy, but Djokovic is really something special and I was glad to see him pull off the upset.

Science News | “Big Foot: Eco-footprints of rich dwarf poor nations’ debt” | More from the haves and have-nots front. Kind of makes you nauseous. No surprise, though.

Science News | “Mercury, As Never Seen Before: MESSENGER visits innermost planet” | Special delivery: sweet planet pics.

Chicago Tribune | “Scientists posited to create life” | “I didn’t know we could do that.“

USA Today | “S.E. drought could idle nuke plants” | I’m blown away by a spokesman from the N.C. Waste Awareness and Reduction Network being critical of nuclear power. How about you raise awareness to the fact that we don’t indiscriminately dump our waste into the air?

PHD Comics | “Your Research Interests” | Hilarious, although I’m lucky enough to actually share many of my advisor’s research interests.

New Scientist | “Origami spaceplane aims for space station descent” | How badass is this?

New York Times | “Los Angeles Editor Ousted After Resisting Job Cuts” | Sad, but I’m glad to hear he took a stand. Made me sort of yearn for my high school days of wanting to be a journalist.

Education Week | “Lawmakers kill bill requiring students to apply to college” | How this ever made it to becoming a bill is beyond me.

Kansas City Star (“that’s what I are“) | “Missouri, Kansas engineers studying bridges with gusset plates after Minnesota disaster” | Paging Henry Petroski: your next book has arrived.

That’s all I’ve got time for, so I guess the rest of those stories are gone forever.

Balancing Act, Part I: Introduction

Kyle

If you’ve been following CSC, you’ve probably noticed that it’s been a little science-heavy for a blog that aspires to straddle the letters-and-science spectrum. Blame the lopsidedness of my life, in part, but also blame the NFL playoffs.

You see, my not-so-double life as a full-time engineering grad student and part-time freelance writer and editor (the latter more to preserve my sanity than to pay the bills) dictates that almost all of my freelance work gets done on weekends and semester breaks (the timing of this blog’s launch is no coincidence). Thus, the writing/editing/humanities-grab-bag aspect of this blog is (I believe) going to take shape on the weekends, which is when I try to temporarily forget about science (at least when GENIUS is behaving itself and the homework situation is favorable). But since I’m a good green-blooded Wisconsinite, that weekend shape-taking has been usurped of late by Packers playoff games–at least until yesterday’s frustrating loss (what happened to the run game, Mike?).

So, to even things up, I give you a trifecta of posts that don’t mention science any more than I already have (unless I just can’t help myself or it becomes genuinely necessary, which latter would only serve to reinforce this blog’s complementary M.O.).