Misc Stuff
Boston Duckling Walk
2011-08-04 Angela
Trace the steps of the ducklings in Robert McCloskey's classic book, Make Way for Ducklings.
Review of X-Men First Class
2011-07-01 Jason
In X-Men First Class we get the cool story behind
Charles Xavier's school for mutants and its most important
alumni.
Our Move to Cambridge
2006-08-01 Jason
In July 2006 I moved with my wife and daughter to
Cambridge, MA from Michigan. Here I share our various
mistakes and hurdles, as well as thoughts on how we could
have planned better with hindsight in our favor.
Classical Liberalism
The Advantage of Trading
2007-12-20 Jason
A story problem about how Homer and Apu can both achieve gains from trade even though Apu has an absolute advantage.
Individual Rights: Does Might Make Right?
2000-06-01 Jason
This essay raises questions about two fundamental
characteristics of rights: the philosophical principles that
make a right, and the method of securing the right. An NRA
hunter claims he has a right to bear arms. Should he have the
freedom to own a gun whether others want him to or not? Larry
Flynt, porno king extraordinaire, asserts that he has a right
to free speech. Does anyone have the right to censor him?
A Free Hand: The Political Philosophy of Economic and Personal Decision-making
2000-05-01 Angela
The purpose of this research paper is to define concepts
critical to the debate and to reflect on a few political
philosopher's viewpoints on the normative question of who
should make economic and personal decisions which effect
the lives of individuals in a civilized political society.
The debate will enlighten the reader on various viewpoints
worthy of consideration, questioning and critical thinking.
The normative thesis is biased in favor of a volitional
society, and as such, the arguments presented will direct
the reader towards the assertion that the highest value any
political institution can serve is to protect individual
volition and free choice. A volitional society does not
claim to satisfy other political/economic goals, such as
equality and security.
Computer Programming
Optimizing Search: The 8 Puzzle
2005-06-01 Jason
An 8-puzzle involves moving the puzzle from a starting
state to a solution state with many options in
between. This paper explores breadth-first search,
depth-first search, hill-climbing, and the optimization of
A* using the profiling tools provided with CMU Common
Lisp.
Open Domain Question Answering on the WWW
2001-08-01 Jason
Ideally, a question answering system that uses the WWW as
its knowledge base would be able to answer a broad range of
questions. Practically, the size and unstructured nature of
the WWW makes this a very difficult task. This paper
reviews three systems: FAQ Finder, START, and MULDER which
take different approaches to question answering. The FAQ
Finder System uses FAQ files and the WordNet lexicon as its
knowledge base. START uses sentence level natural language
processing to match questions with sentence representations
stored in its knowledge base derived from resources on the
WWW. MULDER attempts to find answers using search engines
that index the WWW.
A Cargo Planning, Analysis, and Configuration System for the International Space Station
2001-03-01 Jason
Flight 7A.1 was the first space station resupply flight to
be planned and integrated using a Common Lisp application
called the Cargo Planning and Analysis System (CPACS).
This paper describes my early experience with Common Lisp
and outlines some of the features of Allegro Common Lisp
that were utilized in the development of the CPACS.
Application of Sweeping Techniques to Reverse Engineering (PDF 670 KB)
This investigation of the reverse engineering process presents an approach for recovering three types of swept surfaces. These recovery techniques all depend on an approach presented for recovering curves by projecting a set of points onto a slicing plane for curve approximation. The approach is demonstrated on a number of examples that include data collected from parts scanned with a Minolta Vivid 900 3-D scanner.