Saket Vora

As 2007 draws to a close, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve experienced these past twelve months. The thought that immediately comes to mind is that 2007 was a big year. It’s hard for me to recall a year that had the dynamic range of 2007. Dynamic range, in this context, being the variety and significance of experiences both high and low.

January

I threw myself into the 3rd annual Krispy Kreme Challenge, working with my best friends and a great team. We were flying by the seat of our pants and pushing the envelope everywhere. The event took place on January 27th and completely exceeded our expectations. 1500 people showed up, we raised $10,300 for the North Carolina Children’s Hospital, and everyone heaped praise on the event organization. I never thought I would be part of something like this, but I’m proud of the what I was able to contribute to this new NC State tradition.

February

The week after the KKC, I was hard at work on the Darfur Awareness Week event sponsored by the Political Science department and Park Scholarships Speaker Series. The keynote was a visit we secured by Nicholas Kristof, two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the NY Times. We offered a week of activities, a panel discussion, and the Kristof visit itself was a success. I was fortunate to join him for dinner with a few PSSS students and professors; a truly remarkable human being.

A week after the Kristof event, I took off for the west coast in my first trip to the Bay Area. I received a grant from the Park program to attend the IEEE Int’l Solid State Circuits conference for 4 days. I crashed at Nader’s studio apartment on Stanford’s campus, toured the city of San Francisco, and enjoyed my first conference.

In late February I learned that I was accepted into Georgia Tech, and was offered a graduate stipend too. I was invited to come down to visit campus — my first trip to Atlanta. I actually cannot recall when I visited Atlanta, but I got to hang out with my friend Mike Lee. I came away really impressed with the ECE department there.

March

For spring break in mid-March, I went with fellow Engineering Entrepreneur Program students in a Silicon Valley trip. Sure, it wasn’t Cancun or Acapulco, but I had an absolutely incredible time. How could I not? It was my third semester involved with the EEP, we were visiting NC State alums at companies like Apple (including a VP’s home in Half-Moon Bay), Google, Cisco, and startups like Danger and Tesla Motors. We stayed in a nice hotel right at the edge of Stanford’s campus. And the people! The ARI crew included Greg, Win, Jared, Jordan Price, and Jessie Jeppsson. We all piled into a white Kia van driven by none other than Tara Britt. We saw a totally different side of our professors, went to bars, etc. I had more fun that one could imagine possible for a trip like this.

More importantly, it was this Silicon Valley trip that settled my desire to do whatever it takes to come out here and go to Stanford University. During the trip, I got an rejection letter from Berkeley. I was convinced I wasn’t going to get into Stanford. I did a total evaluation of my life on the plane ride back. Then, a week later, I found out I got into Stanford.

April

April was the month of senior design. Since January, Greg and I continued our Advanced Rowing Instruments but now was rolling with our whole team. And what a team! Our good friend Win Bassett, a fellow Park, joined us and Jared Everett really impressed me — we had both gone to Lund and became good friends over the course of the semester. We were blessed with the best group of underclassmen I’ve seen in the EEP: Jordan and I still talk often, Hersh and Andy made real contributions, and Gordon brought a lot of experience and generosity to the group. We also got to work Sam and Mike, two industrial designers and was exposed to the College of Design. We pulled out all the stops and had the best senior design booth ever, and did a great job with our business plan and presentation. I think we all had a great time working together and really did a tremendous job. I was also surprised with an EEP award from Dr. Walsh and Dr. Miller.

May

In May I graduated from NC State. Quite a bittersweet moment. I finally felt I was hitting my groove in my senior year, and enjoyed where I was and the people I knew, both students and faculty. Part of me wanted to stay one more year because I knew I could do a lot of things. But at the same time, I was going to Stanford and had secured a cool internship at RTI. Worse than that, I was going to miss my friends. I feel so tremendously fortunate to have the friends that I have. I used to tell my dad when I was little how amazed I was that he would still meet up with friends he made over 30 years ago. It seemed like such a long time to me. He said those are the kinds of friends you make in college, and I’ve learned he’s absolutely right.

My uncle, aunt, and their two young children (Samir Mama, Malan Mami, Adit and Aditi) visited America for the first time in May. They went to NYC and Disneyworld. We joined them for a trip out west to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. Even better, my cousin Anup, came up and joined us. He was studying mechanical engineering at UT-Dallas. We had a great time — I hadn’t seen the Grand Canyon since 1992. Just spending time with them and my two little cousins was great.

June

A few days after my uncle’s family went back to India, I piled up our van with camping gear and embarked on a month-long cross-country roadtrip with my sisters and Naman Shah, one of my best friends from high school. We did 7500 miles, camping in national parks, passing through quaint towns, scoring $200 at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas, spending a week in San Jose exploring the Bay Area with Naman’s uncle and family, meeting a friend in Milwaukee, staying a few days in Chicago with a close friend at Northwestern, etc. We saw Yosemite, Pacific Coast Highway, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Crater Lake, Badlands, etc. I also got my first ever speeding ticket while in Oregon (a bad one too). Still sorting that mess out. While hiking around the Grand Tetons, Naman and I discussed a water purification device using UV LEDs (more on this later). I have to thank my parents for this: they let us take our new van, and I feel bad cause we missed my dad’s birthday. But it was a really amazing trip.

July

I spent July working at RTI in their commercialization department. I had a wonderful time. Greg and I shared an office, I got to work with other students from UNC and Duke, and was fortunate to work on a wide variety of projects from engineering to social sciences. I learned a tremendous amount from our mentors, Brent Ward and Abhi Gupta on marketing, analyzing markets, strategic partnerships, etc. It was a lot of fun.

Then, near the end of July, disaster struck. I went to my Raleigh apartment to finally move out my things. I was going to catch up with my roommate Deanna Babcock, a grad student at NC State in soil science. A current roommate said she was at the gym. We waited, but then a police officer came, asking if someone could come identify a body. What?! While Deanna was swimming at the NC State pool, her heart stopped and she physically drowned. The lifeguards hauled her out and shocked her back to life twice. The paramedics had to do it two or three times more en route to the hospital. They tried an experimental rapid hypothermia treatment. I went to the hospital that evening but she was still in the ICU. What sucked was that the next day, I was leaving for Alaska (see below). I’ve never had anything like this happen to someone I knew. One of the most awful experiences I’ve ever had.

While I was away in Alaska, Sachi left for a four month stint in India.

August

PARS took up the last week of July and first week of August. The Polar Aeronomy and Radio Science school was something that Nader told me about and told me to apply for. He helped me create an application (I had one day) and was accepted. What an awesome experience: I got to spend two weeks in Alaska, learn some science, do a lot of sightseeing around Alaska, feed a bear, get inches away from an adorable sea otter, take a day-cruise to a glacier, meet two of Nader’s lab colleagues from Stanford, help them setup field experiments, stay in gorgeous bed and breakfasts and eat great food — all without paying a dime. I felt so guilty…it didn’t seem fair. After coming from Alaska, I continued working at RTI.

I also went up one weekend with Greg and Kelly to Virginia Beach, where Greg’s family lives. What a fantastic weekend. His family is so generous and caring — I felt right at home. We chilled at the beach, had an amazing dinner at home, got to see Norfolk Academy, and went to downtown Norfolk. It was great.

It turned out Deanna was in a comatose state for nearly two weeks. The doctors hadn’t given her family much hope, but Deanna surprised everyone. She is the most physically active person I know, and that is what saved her. Slowly, each of her organs came back online. What was absolutely devastating to me was that they had to amputate her left leg above the knee. That simply isn’t fair for someone like her. Most amazing of all is how Deanna has responded. Her first post by herself from the hospital caused tears to form. How could anyone go through an experience like that and have her kind of positive, game-on attitude. She’s the bravest person I know.

And a shot of great news — Greg and Kelly become engaged!

September

In early September, I took another trip up to Chicago to help Sapana move into her apartment at the University of Chicago. Got to take a trip to Devon street and see Kevin again too. Then, I packed my car, made a round of difficult good-byes around the Triangle, and then with my mom headed out (again!) to California. We took our time going out there, and made a nice stop in Albuquerque and Meteor Crater. We made it to Stanford, and moved in to my apartment. Had a mix-up with my roommate situation (one went really bad, but got resolved in a good way), but overall things went smoothly. There was a week of welcome events, but then my career at Stanford began.

Greg was starting a Master’s program in Cambridge, Win was starting law school at UNC, Donny was heading over to Bangaldesh for his Fulbright, Ben was starting at the USPTO.

October

Stanford goes well — start going to seminars, meeting new people everyday, getting some good friends. Enjoying some classes, not liking others.

Naman approached me about revisiting the UV LED water purification idea. We got a team together (including Joel Thomas and Win Bassett) and created a five page executive summary to enter into several social entrepreneurship business plan competitions. The advanced in three different competitions, and even won some money at the Duke Startup Challenge for best social innovation and Naman and Joel took home the Best Elevator Pitch award.

Also got to have dinner with President Hennessy with some other graduate students. That was a really great of him.

November

Stanford continues to be an experience. Went to two football games, heard from Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), went to a roundtable talk with General Abizaid, Justice Stephen Breyer, journalist Tom Friedman, and President Hennessy. Spent most of Thanksgiving break working feverishly on my EE 214 project, but I did take a trip around the Bay with Lei to Muir Woods and Berkeley.

Also started attending some meetings about the possibility of Stanford forming a team to compete for the Google Lunar X-Prize. Nader was a big fan of it, and it was neat to be there for the first few meetings. It’s something I’ll continue to spend too much time on though.

December

Final exams were so awful. Barely survived them and was very happy to be back home in Raleigh. Sachi got back home from India. The Oregon speeding ticket came crashing back home to NC. Greg and Kelly surprised me at the airport! I went over to NC State and met up with Tara, the ARI crew, see some professors. That was nice. Spent a lot of time with Mike, Nader, and Naman, and friends. Dad came back from India, birthday went great.

So yeah. Quite a memorable year, 2007. What will next year bring?

My sister has a copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma that was lying around the house so I picked it up on a whim. What caught my eye was that the entire first part is spent on corn. It is written by Michael Pollan, an award-winning journalist and professor at UC Berkeley, who uses an easy to read conversational writing style as he invites you to follow him on a journey that explores where our food comes from and what it means for us and the environment.

I am currently near the end of his ‘expose’ on corn. And I’m glad I read it. People will tell you that I’m a subscriber to the ‘corn conspiracy’, which I suppose isn’t really a conspiracy if you ask the right people. Corn plays a staggeringly enormous role in America; from the food we eat to our politics. Ask how many ears of corn the presidential candidates in Iowa have been forced to eat with a smile. Check up on how many billion dollars are spent annually on farm subsidies, a practice that is anti-capitalistic and instead often gives wealthy landowners government checks in the millions of dollars. (My facts are loose on this, I admit. But you get the gist). The Coca-Cola I drank while in Sweden was made with real sugar, instead of the high-fructose corn syrup used in America. That’s because there are tariffs placed on imported cane sugar (remember Cuba?), which makes homegrown corn syrup cheaper, despite it being more harmful to produce and less healthy. Pollan’s book greatly helped me understand why corn is so prized: it is the most efficient way to produce the most number of calories per plant. Pollan visits a farmer growing corn, buys a steer and follows it as it goes from its grazing farm to a crowded feedlot where it is forced to eat corn feed (which, as it turns out, cows aren’t evolved to digest well at all causing the cows to get invariably sick) and beef tallow for protein (creepy, huh), and visits a university where they show him how they take commodity corn and squeeze every possible substance from it until its just dirty water steeped in a tiny bit of corn residue (this is fed back to the steers in their feed).

Pollan also shows the role that our friend petroleum plays in all this. The only way our farmers can squeeze enough food from the land is to supercharge it with fertilizer. Gone are the days where diversified farms could use their livestock’s manure to fertilize their crops. The soil needs nitrogen. It gets this from ammonium nitrate, an incredibly energy-intensive product of the Haber process. Energy? You guessed it. Petroleum. It drives our food chain.

So anyway. Pollan’s book has a lot of really eyebrow raising facts and is an easy read. I don’t have any subversive goal to changing people’s diet (this isn’t just about meat, its about all the industrialized food we all eat). I just think we’d all be better citizens if we become more knowledgeable about what we eat.

Strange post I know, but Merry Christmas!

I can’t believe it! Peter Berg leaked to MTV that he will be directing a remake of DUNE.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=40383

YES!! Please for the love of God give him all the money it wants and don’t mess this up!!!

During the summer I made a post concerning CFLs - compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and how they are an easy way for people to reduce electricity consumption. I did a spot check around my house and created a spreadsheet that tries to analyze the cost savings of switching to CFLs.

I’ve cataloged just over 100 lightbulbs in my house in Cary. So far, about 50 have been replaced with CFLs. Estimating daily hourly usage (weighting the winter months more due to reduced sunlight), I predict a cost savings of about 80%. The CFLs save about $46 annually. I spent about $130 for all the CFLs, so I’m expecting a break-even point in just under 3 years. This fits decently enough in the average lifespan of CFL (about 6-7 years).

This raises several questions though. What percentage of the total electricity bill is due to lighting? This informs how much can CFLs reduce a total energy bill? I don’t have all the data, but I’m estimating that those 51 CFLs are reducing the annual electricity bill by about 7% — not that high of a number. There are secondary factors too. CFLs give off much less heat, which should make cooling less demanding during the summer months, but it is difficult for me to analyze that. Additionally, my house in Cary is likely unique in that we enjoy a large amount of natural lighting. Until dusk, overhead lights are not needed at all in the family room or kitchen. This is advantageous, because most of the daylight hours are spent downstairs. I remember that my house in Austin had terrible natural lighting — thus we had to spend more money on lighting.

My next step  is to catalog the major appliances and hunt down the significant sources of electricity consumption. Refrigerator, washing/drying machine, dishwasher, A/C unit, water heater (this might be gas though), and the A/V setup downstairs. (Our stove and oven is gas). I acknowledge we very wasteful with refrigeration. We never junked our old fridge, so we have 3 plugged in right now.

Download CFL Savings Estimator

I expect that lifestyle changes do more to immediately lower electricity bills. This is pretty obvious. However, we cannot expect society to adopt drastic changes. What are some reasonable changes though?

• Washing dishes without a dishwasher. i do this at my apartment, sure it takes a bit more time but isn’t a really big deal. families can have kids do it once they get older. I do not believe that the ‘improved sanitation’ that a dishwasher might provide is significant enough either. Our bodies are tough enough.
•  Washing clothes in cold water, with warm water washes used sparingly. I think this is reasonable. I’ll be the first to admit I’m not as fastidious about clothes as others, but I’ve been washing my clothes in cold water for the past 2 years and have not noticed any ill effects.
• Eliminating a clothes dryer is not a viable option. While it takes a big bite of electricity, the convenience is too high for society to stop using.
• Large families are an exception, but is it reasonable to expect a family of 4 use a single refrigerator? What do you use?
• Keeping the thermostat warmer in the summer, cooler in the winter. At both extremes, most units use electricity to achieve desired temperatures. I think this is a reasonable change too, especially if its 2 to 4 degrees.
• Choosing power efficient appliances that are often on standby (computers, a/v equipment).

What do you think?

Landed at RDU at around 12am last night — flights were slightly delayed at ended up getting routed through O’Hare. No big deal. Flight from O’Hare was half empty, and a college girl from Smithfield who is studying graphic design at Spring Harbor in Michigan ended up in my row too. I’m noticing this kind of thing happens quite often when I fly.

But anyway, I’m walking out to the baggage claim at RDU when Greg and Kelly surprise me! They even had balloons! It immediately put a huge smile on my face. Sachi and Sapana got there later and we headed back to our house and sat and talked and caught up. I got to hear more about how Greg is doing and what Cambridge is like, we talked about Kelly’s plans for the spring semester, about the horrible state of biomedical engineering education, etc. Sachi, Greg, and Sapana broke out the Wii near the end.

Ended up going to bed at 6am and waking up really late today.

Anyway. Going back a week, I think my medical electronics exams went well. He grades on a bell curve, and I’m pretty sure I did better than the average. The statistics exam was simply awful. First, they double-booked the room, so there was some confusion. Ultimately the EE professor forced the freshman chemistry class out of the lecture hall. Owned. The statistics exam was really hard.  No amount of studying would have helped. Nader and I studied a lot the two days before the circuits final, but even that final was so incredibly difficult. The circuits shown to us, and the analysis he asked for weren’t like the kinds of topics we covered in depth in class. I bombed it. Honestly, I’m praying for a B and just move on. No word yet on the project grades.

Update: A- in medical electronics.

So funny story. My dad had booked me a flight home like 2 months ago with some frequent flyer miles that were going to expire soon.  I had thought I was leaving on Saturday. I decided to check my email on Thursday night, and discovered that I was actually flying out Friday at 12:15pm! I booked a shuttle, packed in like 10 minutes. But really, I spent the evening watching SuperTroopers with Luke. Hehe. If I realized it earlier, I would have gone to the campus bookstore and get some gifts. Oh well.

Other than that, it’s good to be home. There is actually a lot I want to accomplish. I wrote about 5 pages in a notebook about my energy idea, then there is the WaterPLUS business plan to develop, I want to contribute some content to the LunarX wiki and Wikipedia (the centennial campus article is woefully lacking), etc.

Gotta give a shout out to a sweet data visualization tool for your Facebook social network: Nexus.  I came across it while browsing visualcomplexity.com, a wonderful site for looking at data visualization projects and techniques. Here is a Nexus graph of my Facebook network: [click on the picture for a larger and interactive view]

Enjoy!

Hope everyone’s finals went better than mine, and have a wonderful break.

We turned in the final report today for our fully differential 2-stage telescopic OTA.  I’ll expand on this more later. This week has been very hard. Won’t be posting until after Monday, the day that I’ve got two hard exams.

EE 214 Final Project  [pdf]

We won the Big Game!  After five years of losing to Cal, our seniors played a great game and reclaimed the Stanford Axe. The experience ranks among my top 3 sports experiences.

I met up with Nader and a friend of his in the VLF group, Morris Cohen. Morris has been at Stanford since 2000; he did his B.S. here, started doing research in the VLF group when he was a junior, and then stayed on for his Master’s and Ph.D in the same group. He has traveled to all 7 continents for VLF group field research, and Nader says he’s got more street cred in the VLF group that even some new professors. He’ll be getting his Ph.D this spring.

We headed to the stadium  early, getting there about 1.5 hours before gametime. Morris found some good seats in the Red Zone, which is our student section. We were ~40 yard line. Later, Praj (another VLF group member) joined us. Each band did a mini pre-game show. The Cal band dressed in their trim fancy uniforms formed a perfect line at one endzone, then expertly started to march across the field, the line morphing into a triangle as they got farther down. The Stanford’s band response? A ragged line with many players trying to jump the gun, until finally the drum major (dressed in a full body alligator costume with a  teddy bear between its teeth) raised his baton and the band stormed across the field. The trombones wrapped foil around their slides to form swords, and were dressed only in boxers with a red cape and silver helmets — a 300 homage. The trumpets were dressed in Islamic Jihad black outfits with a red headband, while the flute section was dressed in full body burqas. We also randomly had a two-person camel costume. One drummer was walking around carrying a yellow “Slippery When Wet’ sign and hitting it with drumsticks, while the other hoisted an empty keg. Anything goes in the Stanford Band!

Anyway. The stadium was packed and the Red Zone was loud.  We played very well, except for letting the Cal rushing game tear us up. Our secondary was outstanding, and we had several excellent blitzes — clearly rattling the Cal QB by the third and fourth quarter. Cal played a dirty game — 120 some penalty yards compared to just 30 on Stanford. They had multiple dead-ball personal fouls and defensive pass interference calls. We had an awesome stop at around the 4 minute mark in the 4th, leading 20-13. As we marched down the field, with about 2:30 left we fumbled and Cal recovered. They ended up taking two good shots at the endzone, but the same receiver missed both catches. Another good first down for Stanford we had it in the bag. The student section was going nuts, screaming “We’ve got the Axe! We’ve got the Axe!” We started crowding the stairways with 1:30 left, and laughed at the signs being displayed “Please do not run onto the field.”  We rushed down onto the field and cheered with the band and the players. Stanford’s President John Hennessy was down there too, and Morris and I gave him a high-five. The players led the charge and reclaimed the Axe, which is mounted on a plaque with all the Big Game scores on it. For the seniors, this was the first time they had held the Axe.

After the game I joined Morris, Nader, and five other VLF group lab mates and a couple of their friends for dinner on California Avenue. We then went to Praj and Daniel’s house (close to California Ave) to hang out and watch a movie. They’ve got a sweet house.

Mike was giving me updates throughout the night — and what a night for college football! #1 and #2 both lost, throwing the BCS into complete disarray.  Both of us grimace at the fact that Ohio State is just assumed a #1 pick: their conference was a joke this year, they never played anyone ranked in the top 20, and they haven’t played football for like 3 weeks. Both Oklahoma and LSU played yesterday, and LSU has played seven teams in the top 20, losing to only one of them in OT. Oklahoma has played 3 ranked teams, including beating the #1 team by 21 points yesterday. I’m not trying to hate on OSU (sorry Lei), but if we’re trying to pick the #1 and #2 best teams in the country, it’s simply inexplicable that OSU is still in consideration. Sure, they are the only one-loss team in the country. But Hawaii is the only team that is undefeated, and yet they get no respect cause of their weak strength of schedule. Hypocrisy? My dream final would be LSU vs Hawaii, but more realistically LSU-Oklahoma.

During the Big Game, the intense rivalry between Stanford and Cal is clearly seen. Stanford has special cheers for when they play Cal (”SAFETY SCHOOL! SAFETY SCHOOL!”), and the vitriol is biting. I’d say the audience was 1/3rd Cal fans.

Anyway, awesome day and great experience.  Go Cardinal!