All information provided here is without warranty, express or implied! Otherwise, hope its useful. Also see the separate RPI page for a few other "hacks" that used to be here.
SU Alternative Music Downloads
This document addresses the issue of music piracy on the Syracuse University campus and provides a compilation of tools and resources for empowering students and faculty as content creators (while keeping them on the right side of the law and SU policy).
Building The Imperfect PC
This documents my first custom build (in 2008) of an Intel-based PC running Linux (specifically Fedora 8), tying the project in with some of my insights culled from teaching iPod Politics: Technological Design and Everyday Life.
Heart-Shaped Black Box: An STS Grad Student Conference
In February of 2004 I co-chaired (along with Selma Sabanovic) Heart-Shaped Black Box, the sixth annual STS graduate student conference, hosted alternately by the STS departments of MIT, RPI, and Cornell. The ninth iteration of this conference was hosted again at RPI in 2007 (though I unfortunately was unable to attend).
There's also a final report on the 2004 conference available, with some interesting bits of lore about the conference, but I'd prefer to limit the report's distribution so contact me directly if you're interested in getting a copy.
The Planetarium: A Poster
In spring of 2003 the RPI School of Humanities and Social Sciences (of which the STS Department is a part) held a poster competition in parallel with the Institute-wide competition for posters to display at an open house for prospective graduate students. I put together a poster on planetaria and won $500 as a result. The poster is presented here as separate JPEG images, one of the left side, one of the right side.
NOTE: These are fairly high resolution images (so the actual text can be read), and as a result each is about 730 kb in size. Get your scrollbars ready.
The Virtual Beadloom
From the fall of 2000 until the spring of 2001, I contributed to a project originally dubbed SimShoBan, a web-based suite of design tools for K-12 students intended to showcase "culturally-situated" mathematics pedagogy. While my contributions included background cultural research and programming, my principal role (under an NSF research assistantship) was the reimplementation of Dr. Ron Eglash's prototype Virtual Beadloom or VBL, a module written in Java and intended to teach the Cartesian coordinate system via a simulation of Native American (Shoshone) beading.
This implementation of the VBL became the centerpiece of a proposal that was ultimately awarded a 3-year, $560,000 NSF award (#0119880, "Culturally Situated Design Tools"), a 3-year, $359,000 award from the U.S. Dept. of Education (#P116B010224, "Learning Ethnomathematics: A Software Environment for Teacher Professional Development and Students' Classroom Use"), and a number of lesser grants and awards. The latest running version of the VBL is available via Ron Eglash's Culturally Situated Design Tools page; for related theoretical articulation see Eglash, R. (2007) "Ethnocomputing with Native American Design" in Dyson, L., Hendriks, M., and Grant, S. (eds.) Information Techology and Indigenous People. Information Science Publishing.
The Basic Shop
In early 2003 I finished a rudimentary, portable shop for woodworking, built on a pattern from a 1991 issue of Popular Mechanics. This document showcases the final product, which actually consists of a custom-built toolbox and sawhorses, a Black & Decker Workmate, and a number of small tools both manual and powered.
Pre-Grad School Projects
Immediately after completing a B.S. in physics and computer science I was employed for about six years. I worked first at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory as an electro-optics lab technician, then at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory as an image analyst and simulation designer, and finally at the Center for Space Research at MIT as a programmer. Over that time I completed or contributed to a significant number of development projects, both individually and in collaboration with others.
