Category: making things

Bridging the Great Stagnation: Why Taking an Extra Decade to Master the Fundamentals Matters

Posted onAuthorCorbett3 Comments

In the 1800s, educated elites were expected to be proficient in Latin, Greek, classical literature, religious knowledge, moral philosophy, public speaking, writing, basic arithmetic, geometry, natural philosophy (covering fundamental physics, astronomy, and biology), music, art, poetry, classical and national history, geography, French, and social graces. Physical activities like horseback riding, rowing, and fencing were also Read More …

Machine Learning and Satellite Imagery

Posted onAuthorChristine Corbett MoranLeave a comment

Back in the spring, I had some fun doing experimentation around machine learning models for labelling satellite imagery with atmospheric conditions and various classes of land cover/land. You can check out my work in an open source Kaggle notebook. For this I trained on the data provided in the Planet Kaggle competition, Understanding the Amazon Read More …

Happy Academic New Year, 2015

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June 1, 2015 I was thrilled to start my 3 year tenure as an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow (NSF AAPF) at Caltech. I am therefore declaring June 1 as my official academic New Year. I’m treating this fellowship period as my shot to make a scientific difference, and here’s to the next 3 years. I have an structured routine scheduled, Read More …

#OCCUPYMARS: my experience as a SpaceX intern

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I spent my Fall as an intern in propulsion analysis at SpaceX. I had unparalleled mentors in rocketry, computational physics and software engineering. The intern program is top-notch, and to me represented the most effective “in” to the notoriously selective and demanding company. Moreover, the internship duration was a perfect interlude in my academic career. Read More …

Axolotl Protocol for Cryptographically Secure Messaging: An Illustrated Primer

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Whisper At Open WhisperSystems Winter Break of Code, I had the privilege to announce our integrated RedPhone/TextSecure roadmap for iOS and Android.  Code named Whisper, it offers a cross platform one stop solution for secure messaging and phone calls. This is a big deal! Close to a billion people are using data channel messaging and phone Read More …

Hacking Philips Hue, wireless controlled multicolored LED lightbulbs

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Philips makes a series of wireless controlled, multicolored light bulbs which I purchased. In the month or two I’ve had the bulbs I’ve fallen in love with them! Best of all, they have a great API integrated. After plugging in the bridge, connecting it to my wireless router, and plugging in the bulbs I can control them fully with Philips’ native iOS client from my iPhone or iPad, where I renamed the bulbs. The app works via a REST API, and there’s an iOS SDK you can use to interact with this easily via Objective C. The future of really is made of JSON! They also have an easy way to get started learning the API and controlling your bulbs from web browser. Read More …

Extreme Email Management via GMail Filters

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To follow up on my old blogpost http://cosmicrays.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/gmail-workflow/ I now have a refined method-much the same as in the original blog post only more of it: more filters, labels, and inboxes. I was reminded of this is a post TEDxZurich 2012 conversation about my email management techniques and as part of that conversation I did a few quick analytics on my Filter system and was inspired to create an infographic of the result. Read More …