User:Kaypal

About me

Hello, I am Kay. I am very excited to be at Duke! I am from Rome, Italy but I have family in northern Kentucky. I would like to major in BME. I really enjoy hot yoga - Bikram and Moksha.

Name Pronunciation

My first name is rather easy to pronounce: what is the 11th letter of the alphabet? My last name is rhymes with "monopoly." The phonetic pronunciation of my name is "K Pah-l-o-poh-lee."

Homework 1

The article I chose is on the Reverse-engineer the brain challenge. This particular challenge caught my attention because it expands upon the relevance and applications of the Human Connectome Project, which we discussed in one of my What if? Focus classes (the Brain Maps one).

Neuroscience: Making Connections, Jon Bardin, Nature, updated 22 March 2012, accessed 14 September 2013 (Grand Challenge)

Homework 2

My favorite MATLAB demonstration is the Loma Prieta Earthquake because it analyzes real-life data and creates a visual representation which assists interpretation. In my physics class I analyzed similar but simplified earthquake data manually in order to solve a problem, therefore I find this demonstration very useful because it not only computes data that would be needed to answer specific questions, but also produces a comprehensive visual representation that allows a qualitative interpretation of the earthquake. The demonstration effectively illustrated the multiple steps required to analyze the data: plotting the gravitational acceleration, selecting a time interval and zooming in on it, finding the horizontal acceleration by focusing on 1 second only, integrating the acceleration twice to find the position in 3D space, and lastly using the plot function to display the earthquake's trajectory both in 2D and 3D views.