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My Ethics Presentation

   I was tasked to give a 5 minute presentation about an ethical issue. For the assignment I was tasked to create a presentation that would I then had to present to my classmates. Though which topic I choose was up to me, it was recommended that we do it on the topic that we researched for our contemporary issue memo.

   Indeed I chose to present on an ethical issue in regards to the topic I researched for my memo, cloud computing. During the presentation I presented the ideas of various people who are affected due to the rising in popularity of computing. The primary stake holders that I covered in the presentation were service providers, engineers, users, justice system, and computer hardware retailers. During the presentation I covered how each stake holder was affected and finally I gave my view and recommendation on the subject.

  I felt the presentation as a whole was quite successful, I was able to fairly clearly present my topic and at a good pace. The overall gathering of information and formation of the presentation was also quite easy. The topic being the one I covered in my memo, I already had a lot of information on the topic and more or less knew what I wanted to talk about in my presentation.

   I think the largest aspect in which I could improve on is practicing more so that when I present it would be even smoother and if possible I would like to be able to present without the need for the slides. Indeed the slides provide a good aid to convey my message the audience, for that reason I believe the slides are necessary, but personally I want to be able to get to the point where I could present fluidly and confidently even if the slides were not there.

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My Contemporary Issue memo

   In this assignment I was tasked to find a contemporary issue in engineering and write a memo about the issue. The memo is meant to inform the reader, in this case my instructor, about what the topic is, and describe what the product is and how it is used. In the end I was tasked to give an opinion as to how I think this product will change the field of engineering in the future, what impact and implications does it have on the current and future field of engineering.

   The topic I chose to do my memo on was cloud computing. Cloud computing is an idea that is recently gaining popularity in the market and gaining more and more functionality as well as accessibility to the common consumer. In my memo I explained the benefits of this product and how it is currently used and what type of cloud computing services are already available. I also wrote about the dangers and possible problems that cloud computing has or can have. Lastly, I explained how cloud computing will change the future of engineering due to its wide range of possible uses.

   I thought the overall writing process for constructing this memo went well, because once I got started I spent fairly a fairly little amount of time writing up the memo. The thoughts I had on the subject were numerous and I more or less knew about the topic as well as had my own opinions on it. However, the actual researching part of the memo took my quite a bit of time.

  The materials I found lacked variety, most of my references came from the same source. Not only that, when reading through the sources I found I had a hard time deciding exactly which issues I wanted to talk about exactly. Fortunately, the writing process was easy once I knew what I wanted to write about.

   If I were to improve my current memo, I would probably probably try to find more reference materials, and ones from different sources, to do more research into the topic. By doing this I may be able to increase the believability and credibility of my memo.

[lilimagination-blog]

My Toy Instructions

   A few weeks back I was tasked to write a set of instructions for constructing a toy that I designed. The instructions had to be precise enough to allow the reader to be able to build my toy, but also concise enough for him/her to be able to build it within a 30 minute period. Nonetheless, I was able to complete the task.

   For my instructions I created a toy robot, that I named “Destroyer Robot”, out of Lego pieces. Due to the time constraint I consolidated the instructions to building the robot quite a bit. First off, instead of building the robot from each individual Lego piece I had some pre-made parts that were used in the building process. There were some parts that were single Lego pieces, but parts were pre-built parts.

   To accomplish the task I started by simply building whatever I could think up on the spot, and the end result was the robot. Then after that I worked on figuring out how to take it apart into certain parts such that it would not take too long to rebuild. This process I felt didn’t take too long and was a fairly relaxed process, so I would say this process went quite well. After that, writing the manual to be supplied to the user didn’t take all too long either. All in all I felt like the project as a whole went fairly well, nothing took too long or too much difficult thinking.

   If I were to rework this project and improve on the instructions that I created. I think the areas that I would have liked to improve on are the instructions. More specifically, I would like to make the pictures that accompanied the written instructions to be even more clear. In addition to adjusting lighting, I would like to change them such that they had arrows or lines to indicate how one piece would be set on the other. However, due to lack of interest and time to do those things at the time I chose to abandon those additions.

   Overall I felt that the project went well, it was interesting and quite enjoying to create my robot as well as write instructions to building it. Though, I wouldn’t consider the instructions perfect to my definition of the word, it definitely isn’t something I would regard as a disappointment. I thought the task instructions as a whole was also very precise and concise at conveying to us the expectations and procedure to go about accomplish the task.

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A little Intro. to Me

   Hello my name is David Zhu. I am currently a student at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. I am an Electrical Engineer major with plans to double degree in Computer Science. I am from Grants Pass a small town in southern Oregon. I began my studies at the university during Autumn of 2009 and am currently a third year student. Outside of my studies I enjoy playing video games and sports, with my favorite being soccer.

   The purpose of this site is to display who I am and what I do, and what I have done in the past. That being said this site hosts numerous pages of the things I have done in the past and also the things I am currently working on. Each page may contain explanations, pictures, videos, and my thoughts on the topic.

   My hope in the future is to work in the video gaming industry as a video game designer. However, I hope to be able to use both my knowledge from computer science as well as my electrical engineering knowledge in unison to help me achieve the goals I set for myself and create truly fantastic products that everyone can enjoy.