"In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world." –John 16:33

San Pedro Garza Garcia

Category: Education Page 2 of 18

Christian’s PhD graduation ceremony

Lorena and I flew to Tempe last week for Christian’s PhD graduation ceremony. It was nothing short of amazing. Several thousan graduated even though the ceremony we attended was just for the schools of engineering. There were bagpipes and speeches and lots of happy people–us included.

Since this is end of Christian’s educational journey, at least for the time being, I thought I would just put down a brief synopsis of his trajectory for posterity.

Age 13 – Homeschool

  • Duke University TIP (Talent Identification Program) medal
  • Passed first CLEP (college credit exam) test

Age 14 – Wake Technical Community College

  • Dean’s list all semesters for two years at

Age 18 – North Carolina State University

  • BS in Applied Mathematics
  • Dean’s list all semesters
  • Honors Mathematics
  • Graduated Summa Cum Laude (highest honors)

Age 23 – Arizona State University

  • PhD in Electrical Engineering
  • Fellow of the Fulton School of Engineering
  • MIT funded his fellowship that paid for school and a living stipend
  • Published 3 referred journal articles

Age 24 – Boston area

  • Accepted a position as a full-time researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Refereed articles for Christian

Christian is getting toward the end of his PhD program at Arizona State University. His first, first-author, refereed journal article, A Decentralized Receiver in Gaussian Interference, was published in Entropy in April of 2018. Just over the last week or so, he served as a reviewer for an article in that same journal and is now on the list and will review more articles there. He has two more articles in process that  will be submitted very soon that will form part of his dissertation. Hopefully, he will defend this thesis and be done sometime this summer or early fall. It has been a long, hard haul and his is looking forward to getting out of school and going to work.

Diego Velazquez one more time

Lorena is taking an Art Appreciation class online at Clackamas Community College this spring. It was a similar class Kelly and Christian took when they were at Wake Tech Community College in Raleigh that turned our family into big art museum fans. Long before that, we had read a book in our homeschool that turned us into Diego Velazquez fans.

So, when Lorena and Kelly were at the National Gallery in London, they were very excited to see their first real live painting by Velazquez. Now, Lorena is going to take a couple of the pictures she took of those paintings in a report in her Art Appreciation class.

Seattle Museum of Art

Lorena drove up to Seattle on Friday so she and Kelly could go to the Seattle Museum of Art on Saturday to complete an assignment for her Art Appreciation class at Clackamas Community College. They had a super time. The museum is really not the same level of quality or experience as the NC Museum of Art in Raleigh nor the top three art museums in Dallas, but they felt it really was not too bad. What is especially great about this is that our family got started going to art museums in general when Kelly and Christian had to take a required visit to the North Carolina Museum of Art for their Art Appreciation class at Wake Technical Community College. It seemed like a chore before we went, but every since, we have been big, big fans of art museums and go to them whenever we get the chance.

Lorena’s next visit assignment is to go to a gallery rather than a museum.

JHU-APL Data Scientist

A month or so ago, Kelly’s old boss from her college internship to ask her to return to work for him as a data scientist. It is quite a prestigious institution at the bleeding edge of lots of different technologies. Her job will be to work on a range of problems, improving her skills as she goes. The reality is this would not be a bad place for Christian either, if he can get hired there. She can either continue to work as a data scientist and/or get paid for getting a PhD in Statistics at Johns Hopkins University. She is really grateful for the opportunity, especially because she knows the people and the kind of work she would do.

Gingerbread house design

Kelly co-opted Christian in her big gingerbread house project yesterday and it brought back all kinds of good memories. Christian cannot help himself when it comes to this kind of thing. Christian wants the most artistically creative design possible, but adequate actualization of the design is not really possible without proper attention to even the most minute of details.  Kiwi cannot help herself either.  She is a people cat. Very social. A warm keyboard with people around is as good as it gets. This is precisely how Christian spent his college years–sitting at the bar with Rubix (Kiwi is the surviving twin cat sister and has filled in nicely now that Rubix is gone) laying on his arms or on the keyboard while Lorena and Kelly are cooking something in the kitchen. That purple and orange thing behind the computer is the bluetooth speaker with traditional Christmas music providing a nice background.

Christian worked on this quite a long time. The  stencils for the design, based on Kelly’s absolute requirement to make an English manor, are now ready for the cooking of the gingerbread which should happen sometime starting this afternoon. Some of the pieces are pretty small, so we will have to see how it goes–improvisation and Engineering Change Orders might be necessary depending on suitability of the materials and implementation methods to the design. All good engineers can improvise when needed. Here is a closeup of the design below. Some of Christian’s notebooks (this is typical) are pretty amazing. They are a lot more cryptic these days as he is doing things in the bowels of theoretical Information Theory that is beyond our understanding. It is nice to see this throwback to some of his earlier work in homeschool and his undergraduate degree.

Retirement PhD: Things inch forward

University of Nebraska Lincoln has all my transcripts and my recommendation letters. I have written my “Letter of Purpose” statement, but have not turned it in until my buddy Troy has a chance to look at it and tell me if I am going the right direction. After that, all I have left is to take the GRE, then it is out of my hands and in the hands of the people of UNL. I am still agnostic about whether I am going to do this, but I expect that if we can work out a way for me to do this does not cost a ton of money and allows me both to go fairly slowly and have a decent quality of life, I will pull the trigger.

Veterans Day is a holiday at my current employer, so I spent the day working on the reincarnation of the GaugeCam project. It will be either a base for my PhD research or a contribution to those who are interested in remote water height measurement in the wild or both. The image below is a screenshot from my phone as it accesses the new software that runs on a Raspberry Pi in the house. The yellow lines show the result of the automatic pixel to world coordinate calibration calculation. There is more to do on it, but the technical part is complete–the rest is just nuts and bolts (saving/loading calibrations from/to disk, associating calibrations with ranges of images to which they apply, adding motion detection to determine if the camera or target has moved, etc.

Thoughts on how to get ahead

This picture of Kiwi being miffed that Lorena was trying to sit on her chair does not have a whole lot to do with what I want to write about today, but it was pretty fun. Every time Lorena sat down, Kiwi pushed her away and then sat back with a look of irritation. I needed a picture for the post, this was available, and I wanted to have an excuse to put it up.

The whole family has been inspired to talk about some of the things we do to contribute and to get ahead. A lot of it has to do with the whole concept of life-long learning that Charles Murray talked about fairly frequently. In that context, I have almost always had a project on which I actively worked that contributed to something. I earned money on some of them, but a lot of the time I just worked because the project helped in some way and I was able to learn new stuff. The reality is that I did a lot of this work with now expectation of learning anything, but it happened anyway. Examples of these projects include work on the water level measurement camera (GaugeCam), sickle cell disease diagnostics, labor and delivery management, cataract surgery, water particle measurement in flowing water, and several others.

I think the things they all had in common were that they were hard projects (in the technical sense), they required a longitudinal effort of more than a year, a bunch of non-compensated (monetarily) work was required at the front end, and I had the ability to uniquely contribute because of my technical skills. Virtually every one of those kinds of projects turned into a significant amount of money–maybe not significant for some people, but surely significant for me. In addition, every one of them opened new opportunities. The work I am doing right now would not have been possible had I not learned a bunch of new stuff about embedded programming, web programming, machine learning, etc., etc. that I never would have gotten in my day job. More important than the money is the fact that I am doing invention daily. I know it is critical to have dedicated people to perform the mechanical tasks of daily life like farming, medicine, manufacturing, etc., but it is a gift to have spent a career at the bleeding edge of invention. There is always something new and interesting to learn and use that requires all the mental faculties to even understand, let alone exploit. I know that is not for everyone, but I am certainly grateful and humbled to have had this kind of work.

Christian has been thinking about what he wants to do next. His PhD adviser is a luminary in Christian’s research area and one of the best PhD advisers I have ever seen–he takes great care of his students, is inspirational, pushes them to do hard stuff, and demands quality in every aspect of their research. He gets the very best students because of that, so Christian rubs shoulders with a great group of fellow students every day. The get great jobs in a variety of places and one of them has an idea to start a business. That is a perfect setting to find the exact kind of projects that can lead to life-long learning. One buddy even wants them to start a business together–a highly technical business that requires the kind of preparation one can only receive in a math intensive PhD program. I say go for it!

Christian passes his PhD comprehensive exam

I wanted Lorena to take Christian to get a monster steak to celebrate because it is a very big deal.  They both had their heart set on a hamburger so they went to the Shake Shack instead. That he passed the exam means there is a lot of pressure off Christian now because his committee has acknowledged that he has the skill and understanding to perform PhD level work and that the dissertation he defined is worthy of a PhD on successful completion. He made his oral presentation, got beat up by his committee asking a gazillion relevant and irrelevant questions, got all his committee signatures turned into the department administration, sent off his report and presentation to his benefactors at MIT Lincoln Labs, and now he just needs to write and defend his dissertation.

This is particularly gratifying because a couple of months ago his adviser told him he better hurry up and get his comprehensives done because he was in danger of finishing his dissertation before he takes the exam. There is some chance he will be able complete his dissertation and walk the graduation this spring–a pretty aggressive goal, but a good one because he is chomping at the bit to finish and go on to extend his research into new areas or finds something similar. He (and we) are very grateful he really loves his research area in Information Theory.

It is difficult to explain what a seminal accomplishment this is in a discipline that demands mathematical rigor and also requires the work to be translated into a working field solution demonstrable on real hardware. Congratulations Christian! Again, I say this is a big deal and we WILL celebrate this with a very big steak when I am there at the end of the month whether you want to or not!

Christian’s PhD comprehensive exam is tomorrow

Tomorrow is Christian’s biggest day so for in the pursuit of a PhD in Electrical Engineering. He has been working like a mad man, often with not very much sleep to get everything ready. Lorena is in Tempe for the week to lend moral support. He is working more as a mathematician than an engineering in a particularly math intensive area of Electrical Engineering. We are confident it will all go fine, but however it comes out tomorrow, it will be a time to celebrate the passing of another milestone and for Christian and Lorena to go eat a really big steak.

Retirement PhD: GaugeCam web server

If you click on the image (or here), you can see a live version of the new GaugeCam web server. Right now, the program is running on a Raspberry Pi in our house. The reason it is live web page is so professors at University of Nebraska Lincoln and North Carolina State University can critique the design and view adjustments as new features are implemented. There is on-going scholarly work associated with this software. One refereed journal article has already been published (click here) and two more are in the works. Click here to see an article on the early phases of the work on the web site of a commercial camera company (full disclosure–I wrote the article). The goal is to accommodate a variety of sensors that produce 2d and 3d images as well as point measurements and hyper-spectral images. Hopefully, this effort will continue on into my retirement both as a way to contribute and maybe even earn a PhD for this and previous work on similar projects.

Retirement PhD: Progress on GaugeCam Web Server

First pass of GaugeCam Open Source Water Level Measurement Web Server

I am still not full convinced I can or should do this PhD thing, but all the pieces are still in motion. I expect I should be able to make a decision to move forward or not by late winter or sometime in the spring. In the meantime, I continue to make progress on the GaugeCam reboot as Open Source software (free as in liberty and free as in beer). The video speaks for itself. We hope to present a journal article and make the beta software available for download by spring. The video kind of speaks for itself

Telescopes and home cooking

When we lived in Raleigh and the kids were going to Wake Technical Community College and North Carolina State University, Christian did most of his studying at the bar in the kitchen while Lorena worked there. They loved that. It is really nice for both of them to get the chance to do that again. Lorena absolutely loves to cook and even more so when she can do it for the kids. Now, though, she has to study herself. The Astronomy class she is taking at Centralia College is a lot tougher than we imagined. One thing she has been trying to figure out is how to get the 10 extra credit points given for visiting a big telescope. There is one that qualifies not too far from our house in Olympia, but there is an amazing one–one of the best in the world in Arizona, the Lowell Observatory, not too far from Flagstaff. Christian went there and got the postcard to the right. On the back, it explains that Pluto, the ex-planet (we still like to think that it is),  was discovered with the aid of that telescope. The timing is not going to work for us to visit there in time for Lorena to get her credits, but we should enjoy the one at Olympia during Thanksgiving week. The Lowell Observatory is definitely on our radar now, too, and we plan to make a special trip there. The Astronomy class may not be an easy one, but it has been very, very interesting for all of us.

Waxed canvas book bag

Lorena is visiting Christian right now as he prepares for his comprehensive exams for his PhD two weeks from now. We always get some kind of a surprise when we go to visit him. This visit was no different. Christian’s friend, Beau, got him a leather strap and canvas book bag. Christian loved it. He wanted to make sure his books stayed dry so he treated the canvas with beeswax. Now, beside being very cool looking, it is now very functional. Lorena says he uses it all the time. He also started a collection of some other stuff I will write about tomorrow.

First read through the whole Bible in one year

This morning I finished a read through the Bible that I had started in November of 2017. I had never done that before. I have to admit it was very gratifying and possibly the most enjoyable since I started reading more systematically in 2006. I keep the list of my reading here. I do most of my reading the first thing in the morning at my computer using the Xiphos software package (it only runs on Linux and Windows–real computers, not Apple), but I do a little reading in an actual book. This read was of the ESV. I plan to continue my pattern of reading through the whole Bible (Old and New Testaments), then reading through the New Testament two additional times. So next, my plan is to read through the ESV New Testament a couple of times and then start over again with the NASB or NIV. I want to do both of them, but I am not sure of the order. After that, if I am brave enough, I will probably take a shot at the Reina Valera 1960 Version in Spanish. But that is two and a half years from now if I maintain my current reading enthusiasm.

Retirement PhD: Transcript submission (Wow I was bad)

I think it is a mercy that one tends to forget how lazy and irresponsible they were in their youth. That is certainly true for me. I took and odd trajectory to get to my Masters of Science degree. It started with a really bad undergraduate degree in Marketing–I do not have the transcript I ordered yet, but I am cringing just thinking about it. That was followed by a thoroughly mediocre (3.00 GPA from a pretty good tech school–the first transcript to arrive), but that should have been profoundly better had I been paying attention. I started out well, but then fell off the wagon for whatever reason. That I got was accepted into graduate school for a PhD and an MS, both in Engineering is almost miraculous. Well the PhD was less miraculous because by the time I did my MS, the blood had started flowing back to my brain and I did a good job. That will be a story for when my other transcripts arrive.

Retirement PhD: The GRE

Well, I thought I was going to waffle myself out of the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) because I am old, experienced, and should never have to suffer such indignities again because I have done it so many times in the past. My hopes were shattered earlier this week when I heard from my buddy who had talked to the bureaucratic high mucky-mucks at the UNL graduate admissions office. I indeed have to take the General Test (thankfully none of the specialized tests). So, in the next few months I will have to drive either to Portland or to Tacoma or take the train to Seattle to spend the night with Kelly so I can go to a test center and try to remember stuff I have not considered for over thirty years. I suppose I should not let such a small indignity prevent me from moving forward, but if I am not up to the task it will give me pause–not so much because it will prevent me from entering the program but because I was not up to the task of taking a general knowledge test.

GaugeCam spinup


One positive outcome of this new effort to get a PhD in my retirement years is the impetus it will give to the spinning back up of the GaugeCam project as a wholly open source project (free as in freedom and free as in beer, as they say). I will be doing the heavy lifting on the software end of the project, taking over the server part and maintaining and improving the client parts. I have started on a very basic web server to show the graphs of the water height and point to our blog and downloads and documentation. I have a bit of a learning curve on this, but am on my way (see above).

Now I just have to figure out a way to include the bean inspection in all this.

Christian’s first grade drawings: Sickness

No one suffered quite as much as Christian when he was a child.

Christian’s first grade drawings: Flying to San Diego

We pulled the kids out of school so they and Lorena could fly to San Diego with me for a business trip. The hung out at the hotel, swam in the pool, and visited the Rizo family in Chula Vista. A great time was had by all.

Page 2 of 18

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén