User:Kfk4
Contents
About Me
My name is Kevin Keppel and I'm a student at Duke University. I intend to major in Biomedical Engineering and to take Pre-Med courses.
Name Pronunciation
My real name is Kevin Keppel, and I go by "Kevin." My name is pronounced just as you would think: "KEV-in KEP-ull."
Interests and Hobbies
In high school (in Sarver, PA), I played three sports: cross country, basketball, and track. Now, I still like to play basketball, along with football and soccer, on the side, and I still keep up with running. I have also played the piano since third grade, and I still try to play every once in a while here.
Grand Challenges for Engineering
There is a list of 14 grand challenges for the engineers of today to accomplish, and one item on this list is to "make solar energy economical." The following is an article related to this challenge, as it describes the advantages of efficient, economical solar energy: Solar Energy, The New York Times, updated 14 September 2011, accessed 19 September 2011 (Make Solar Energy Economical).
MATLAB Demonstrations
MATLAB has many demonstrations to show some of the many unique tasks you can accomplish with this program. Overall, my favorite was Traveling Salesman, which used an animation to display a closed circuit of a number of cities with the shortest total traveling distance in between them. It does this by allowing the user to select the number of random cities that will be displayed as dots on a map of the U.S., with random lines connecting them all in a closed circuit. The program then slowly redraws the lines to connect them in the way that the total length of the lines is the shortest (meaning the shortest distance total). This was my favorite because it is very practical, and cool, and more than that: I could actually picture how such a program might work (in a general sense) and how I might go about making it.
