To give a sense of whence I came academically and the breadth (if not depth) of my work prior to coming to Brown, here I offer an archive of old papers. Please keep in mind that I was in high school and undergrad when I wrote all these, and my attitudes and writing style may have changed, hopefully for the better.
| Date* | Title | Co-Authors | Professor | Course |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Description | ||||
| 20060430 U4S | Onion Routing | Matt Hooks | Astrachan | Internet and Society seminar |
| A report on packet routing anonymization. | ||||
| 20060428 U4S | 3-Dimensional Image Segmentation with Morse Complexes | - | Edelsbrunner | - |
| A summary of the theory behind using Morse complexes for 3D data segmentation and my final report on the work I did implementing Edelsbrunner's algorithm for this task. | ||||
| 20060327 U4S | Legislation: The Maximin Approach to Network Neutrality | - | Astrachan | Internet and Society seminar |
| A paper arguing for legislative assertion of neutrality on the Internet. | ||||
| 20050426 U3S | Automatic Vowel Classification in Speech | Peter Merkx | Mitchener | Math Modeling in Linguistics |
| We tried to teach a neural network to recognize spoken vowels as our final project. | ||||
| 20050301 U3S | Learning and Population | Peter Merkx | Mitchener | Math Modeling in Linguistics |
| We designed a model of grammar acquisition in mixed linguistic populations. | ||||
| 20040424 U2S | Numerical DE Techniques | Jonathan Perlstein and David Williams | Rose | Numerical Analysis |
| The final project involved numerically solving ill-conditioned high-dimensional differential equations. This work is a bit lacking in narrative structure, as it is not so much a paper as a really huge problem set, but it's possible to figure out what we're talking about. | ||||
| 20031204 U2F | Care Ethics and the Tao Te Ching | - | Wong | Chinese Philosophy |
| Here I compare feminist care ethics and the nascent Taoism presented in the Tao Te Ching. Some feminists might be bothered by my hamfisted description of care ethics and its cultural context, but hey, I'm just a bicycle doing my best. | ||||
| 20030930 U2F | Li and Magic in the Analects | - | Wong | Chinese Philosophy |
| Western readers tend to gloss over the mystical aspects of Confucius's Analects, but a careful and critical reading lends insight into the near-magical power of social conventions in ancient China. | ||||
| 20030410 U1S | Moral Luck | - | Wong | Systematic Ethics |
| Fitting chance into a systematic moral system is a tough job. In this paper I interpret Thomas Nagel's work and describe a taxonomy of interactions between chance and morality. | ||||
| 20030217 U1S | Mill's Modified Calculus of Happiness | - | Wong | Systematic Ethics |
| Wearing my mathematician hat, I freak out about computability issues in Utilitarianism. | ||||
| 20030212 U1F | Does Adoption Affect the Ericksonian Task of Identity Formation? | - | Gold | Psychosocial Development of Mind |
| Well, does it? A research paper about adopted kids. | ||||
| 20030121 U1F | The Place of Psychoanalysis in Cognitive Science | - | Immediata | Freudian Legacies |
| By the end of the course, I finally realized that Freud was a total quack, and his modern apologists even more so. | ||||
| 20021213 U1F | The Death and Resurrection of GOFAI | - | Smith | Minds and Computers |
| Here I reflect on differing approaches to AI, and whether the practical goals of the field, as I see them, are acheivable. | ||||
| 20021014 U1F | Pipes, Programs, and Flapping Jaws | - | Smith | Minds and Computers |
| I wrote both sides of a debate about John Searle's Chinese Room argument. | ||||
| 20020910 U1F | Can Computers Be Intelligent? | - | Smith | Minds and Computers |
| Before we delved too deeply into AI, B. C. Smith asked us to argue our position on the feasibility of the field. | ||||
| 20020508 H4S | n-Space Euler | Casey Amspacher | Teague | Numerical Analysis |
| We generalized Euler iteration and other 1-D numerical differential equation schemes to higher dimensions and tacked on a practical framework for error reduction in the 2-D case. | ||||
| 20020211 H4S | The Fountain that Math Built | Alex McCauley and Josh Michener | Teague | - |
| Our submission for the 2002 Mathematical Contest in Modeling won the top honor, Outstanding Submission, as well as an award from INFORMS. MCM is an undergraduate competition, but Teague didn't realize his students weren't actually supposed to participate when he started entering teams from NCSSM long before I got there. The school was on a winning streak for years afterward. | ||||
| 20011218 H4F | Why the Hill Does the Hot Water Always Run Out? | Alex Hornstein and Josh Michener | Teague | Mathematical Modeling |
| Every weekday morning, the hot water in my high school dorm would run out before everyone had gotten through the showers. My solution was always to wake up earlier than anyone else, but we decided for our final project to model the situation and figure out the cause. | ||||
* Date format is big-endian, followed by a code for the truly meaningful measure of time in my life, academic semesters. The first character indicates institutional level (U for undergrad, H for high school), the second is year, and the third is semester (F for fall, S for Spring).