My project is a web scraping tool useful in gathering and aggregating demographic
information. This useful information is left of separate pages for each city, county, and state
with no simple way of collecting the information for thousands of cities. Additionally each
Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) is an important geographic area in the real estate
industry, but there is no information about each collective MSA. My project gathers all these
points, and can also aggregate the information by MSA.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Conversation Theory - Improving Knowledge Structures
The central purpose of this application is prototype an interface to build a dynamic model of knowledge of any topic. Traditional architectures of intelligent tutoring systems employ a model of student knowledge and a model of expert knowledge. The difference between these models is what the student has yet to learn. Since the 1970s, these models have become more and more complex resulting in a wide range of research related to how to improve the student model and the expert model, and how to compare them for differences. Artificial Intelligence has a strong hold in this arena because of the similarities between model-generation and the definition of artificial intelligence espoused by scientists for decades.
The purpose of this project within this context is to take a small step toward applying technology to improve teaching and learning. Specifically, this project takes the ideas from Conversation Theory and applies them to the design and development of an interface to build an entailment mesh. An entailment mesh is an instructional design mechanism for instructors, instructional designers, and educational technology developers. It is a way to organize knowledge that is different from current knowledge representation systems. This application helps the user participate in a knowledge generating activity either by oneself or with other users. Instructors, students, instructional designers, and educational technology developers will all find value through this tool. Instructors will find benefit in TW by building a more coherent (tight) curriculum including aligning the curriculum with course objectives and skills. Students will find value in TW by challenging what they think they know on a topic and learning from themselves and others what they did not know they did not know. Instructional designers can find value in TW by comparing the knowledge structures they have embedded in instructional products and services with the dynamic knowledge structures afford by TW. Finally, educational technology developers will discover value in TW by learning how dynamic knowledge structures will lead to improving the design of adaptive learning technologies.
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/jsc44/Final_Project_Write-up.pdf
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/jsc44/Building_Entailment_Meshes.xlsm
The purpose of this project within this context is to take a small step toward applying technology to improve teaching and learning. Specifically, this project takes the ideas from Conversation Theory and applies them to the design and development of an interface to build an entailment mesh. An entailment mesh is an instructional design mechanism for instructors, instructional designers, and educational technology developers. It is a way to organize knowledge that is different from current knowledge representation systems. This application helps the user participate in a knowledge generating activity either by oneself or with other users. Instructors, students, instructional designers, and educational technology developers will all find value through this tool. Instructors will find benefit in TW by building a more coherent (tight) curriculum including aligning the curriculum with course objectives and skills. Students will find value in TW by challenging what they think they know on a topic and learning from themselves and others what they did not know they did not know. Instructional designers can find value in TW by comparing the knowledge structures they have embedded in instructional products and services with the dynamic knowledge structures afford by TW. Finally, educational technology developers will discover value in TW by learning how dynamic knowledge structures will lead to improving the design of adaptive learning technologies.
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/jsc44/Final_Project_Write-up.pdf
http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/jsc44/Building_Entailment_Meshes.xlsm
Friday, April 17, 2015
Automating Circulation Data Records
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
I have been a student worker in the Harold B. Lee Library’s
Office of Digital Content Management for close to three years. Among other
things, my office is in charge of generating and recording the library’s
circulation reports. Circulation data is collected as follows: At the beginning
of each month, a text file is generated using a program called WorkFlows,
which, among other things, stores and records information about library
circulation. This text file shows 1) the number of items checked out, 2) the number
of individual patrons who check out items, and 3) the ratio of items checked
out per patron for each hour of each day that the library’s circulation desks
are in operation during the last full month. The output from these text files
is then read into an Excel spreadsheet, where it can be used for analysis. Up
until recently, data from these text files was entered manually into the
spreadsheet. For my project, I made the decision to write a program which would
automate this process, saving on average half an hour to 45 minutes of
worktime.
The program that I have written includes a File Dialog,
which allows the user updating the spreadsheet to open the text file containing
the data for the month that they wish to import into the spreadsheet. The
program then uses arrays to find and paste in the data, as well as the date
heading for the data. After the program has run, the user is asked whether they
would like to import more text files containing circulation into the
spreadsheet, continuing in a loop if the user selects the “Yes” option and
exiting the program if the user selects the “No” option.
Files:
Files:
Thursday, April 16, 2015
What am I Eating?
Eating healthy has been a struggle for many people
nationwide. We always think we should be eating healthier, and we make New
Year’s resolutions to do so, but usually no changes are actually made to our
diets. We at Health-Tracker are committed to helping America improve their diet
through our eating programs.
Health-Tracker is a non-profit organization that offers
programs including meal plans, health evaluation, personal trainers, and much
more in order to help people improve their health. In our work to help people
improve their health we have found that the most important step to any
successful diet is to track the foods you eat. The tracking process helps us
see clearly what we eat, how much we eat, trends in diets, and the nutritional
value of what we eat. This is essential to identify how your diet is lacking,
and to keep you accountable to the goals you have set. With a clear record of
what you eat, you can’t “forget” about the cake you ate, and you can clearly
see just how few vegetables you are probably eating.
The Health-Tracker food tracking program will help you to
quickly and easily create a log of the foods you eat and their nutritional
value. To begin using our program you input your profile including your height,
weight, age, and gender. The system will then pull your nutritional needs from
the internet to give you an estimate of what you need in your diet including
calories, amount of fat, amount of carbs, amount of protein, vitamin a, vitamin
c, vitamin d, calcium, iron, and fiber. Next, foods are entered to the Food Log
sheet of the program. On the food log you open an internet browser to get URLs
for the foods you ate so the program can get the nutritional information from
the internet and input it to the log. As you enter the foods you eat into the
food log our program will track this nutrition info to give you continuous
updates on how you are doing to meet your nutrition goals. You can see all-time,
weekly, and monthly reports to show your results over time and to help identify
trends.
By tracking the foods you eat, you will be able to get a
clear picture of your current nutrition needs. By taking a little time to input
the foods you eat you will get a useful report to show which nutrients you are
lacking, how many calories you are eating in a day, and how you can improve. We
at Health-Tracker hope this information will be useful to help bring in a
healthier, happier America.
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Elder’s Quorum Contact tools / HT Reporting Tool
In my ward’s Elder’s Quorum we use
a Google Form to collect home teaching reports. However, the task of organizing
the results from the form to a simple percentage is a manual task. For this
reason I have built a tool whose purpose is to gather the data from the Google
Form and automatically compile it into a report on home teaching (a final
percentage). In addition to this several other functions were built into the
program. First, the spreadsheet stores the names, emails, and phone numbers of
the quorum members. With the click of a button I can send a mass-text or a mass-email
to all the elders. Second, once the numbers are compiled an email can be sent
to the need-to-know parties.
Database Consolidation Report Generator
American Greetings Corporation, LLC is the world’s largest greeting card company. Based in Brooklyn, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, the company sells paper greeting cards, electronic greeting cards, party products, and electronic expressive content. (Wiki) I will be interning with American Greetings (AG) this summer and got a jump start on some potential projects for this summer.
When there is an issue at one of 90,000 locations that carry AG’s products, management has to manually pull data from multiple databases to compile a snapshot of that stores current situation. My project automates the process of gathering all necessary information into an easy to understand dashboard. The data in this project has been falsified for the protection of AG. The user simply enters the chain number and store number for the store of interest then at the click of a button, my macro reaches out to the necessary databases (dummy databases on websql.byu.edu were used in place of AG’s actual data), establishes a connection, then gives the user options for which data to include in the dashboard. The user can choose to get a store summary, order tables, recent shipping info, whether or not to generate a PDF report, and to send an email with the report. Following the users selection, the macro takes over to generate the dashboard and report if chosen. The user will input a name for the report as well as email credentials and info.
Social Media Auto Grader
My project is designed to automate the grading process for a
MBA 693R class for which I was enrolled in this semester. Currently there are
weekly assignments for each student to do the following:
·
Tweet 15 times
·
Follow 10 new people
·
Write a blog post
·
Comment on 3 class members blog posts
Each week the TA must examine each of the students’ social
media sites to determine if they met the requirements for the assignments. With
one button click, my program executes web queries using the Twitter API and
html scraping to find the relevant information and makes a report sheet
summarizing the fulfillment of the assignments per student.
What's In My Kitchen?
PROBLEM
AND PURPOSE
I often forget which food I have in my
refrigerator and pantry. I sometimes will forget for long enough that some
foods will expire and spoil. Other times, I will run out of something and
forget about it. Then I return home, only to discover that I need that one item
that I ran out of a couple of weeks ago and had since forgotten about it. This
problem extends to food storage. As a student, I don’t have much food storage.
However, my parents do have a food storage and while I was growing up I was
able to see the pain point of not remembering everything that is in food
storage, or if it may expire soon. What’s In My Kitchen will track all food items,
including their quantity and expiration date, so that food is not wasted, and
shopping trips are efficient. There is another feature included within this
program that will allow the management of recipes. I can create a recipe,
complete with the instructions and the foods required. The foods required can
be selected from a list of foods that have been added to the Inventory
spreadsheet database. Both the recipe and items lists can be printed out with
the click of a button. This is a program that can eventually be ported to a
mobile application, and it is targeted towards anyone with a kitchen with a
stronger focus on stay-at-home moms.
- http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/bcasp4/Whats_In_My_Kitchen_-_Final_Project.xlsm
- http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/bcasp4/Final_Project_Write-up.pdf
University Writing Email Generator
Executive Summary
I currently work on campus as a research assistant for the BYU Writing Department. As an extension of the English department, our focus is to help teachers across all curriculums learn how to improve their students’ writing, and how to be a better writing teacher. Our department hosts several luncheons and clinics that various professors across campus choose to participate in. Over the years, University Writing has composed a matrix of teacher names, department information, and email addresses of those teachers who have previously expressed interested in being a part of the University Writing curriculum. As a department, we send out multiple emails every week to different departments about different events that we are hosting. There are often errors produced in these emails with incorrect dates and times of events, or they are sent to the wrong people. I created a system that takes the list and cleans up the data, and then I also created a form that the department can use to send mass emails to people in different departments to ensure that all of the event information is entered correctly.
*Note: The code only works for Outlook, and all email address have been changed for confidentiality.
Automating Technology Transfer Processes
The Technology Transfer office focuses on taking
professors’ disclosed inventions and patenting them in the U.S. and other
countries. Furthermore, once the process has begun to patent these
technologies, the Technology Transfer Office seeks out companies who would be
interested in licensing the technology, and enters into license agreements with
these companies.
Because
of the nature of the work (patenting), the Technology Transfer does a lot of
work with law firms outside of BYU. Currently, the process to approve and pay
the law firms’ invoices, as well as subsequently billing the licensees to
reimburse for the invoices paid is an arduous, manual task. This VBA project
eliminates most of the manual effort (excluding data entry) involved in this
accounts payable/receivable process by downloading the necessary tables of
information from an access database, creating approval summaries for the
director and his associates, creating summaries pages for each law firm that is
getting paid, and finally creating an invoice for each licensee that has
licensed a technology that was paid on.
Portfolio Tracker
This project allows you to track your exchange traded securities. Allows buying and selling, and will update with current prices, character and amount of gain / loss, and portfolio allocation percentages.
- http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/aaron2/PalmerStockPortfolio.xlsm
- http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/aaron2/Palmer_MBA614_WriteUp.pdf
Battle Ship
Executive Summary
Files
This is a fully functioning human vs computer version of the
popular game battleship. The computer has been programmed to guess intelligently
based on previous successful hits. The program recognizes when ships are sunk
and declares a winner win a player has sunk all of the opponent’s ships.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Ethan Kitzmiller VBA Project
Executive summary:
Bluehost is an internets hosting
business that specializes in helping customers have their own website. As a
data analyst for Blue Host, I have to pull various amounts of employee
performance data, on a daily basis. This often takes about an hour to pull data
for any given project. The task was to automate the data collection process in
order to reduce time and eliminate human errors. This project will save an
estimate 1 hour of time every business day.
- http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/ekitz/GetData_Final.xlsm
- http://files.gove.net/shares/files/15w/ekitz/VBA_Final_Project.pdf
Lacey Woodfield's Grocery Manager
Executive Summary
The Grocery Manager is a
system that helps to organize the general consumer’s shopping list. Not only does this tool allow shoppers to put
together shopping lists with their recipes, but it also provides a compiled
record of their recipes by allowing them to input and save recipes in the
system. Then, when they wish to create a
grocery list, they can chose from this list of recipes to put together a
shopping list. Further, before printing
the list, the user can add other items he or she might need in an “Other Items”
section, and these other items will also be added to his or her grocery
list. Finally, when the user has all the
recipes and other ingredients that he or she wishes to shop for, he or she can “print”
the list and the tool will add together like ingredients, organize them into
categories, and prepare the list to be printed out. This way the user can remove items that he or
she already has by looking through each category. The categories are also useful when shopping
at the Grocery Store as items in the store are generally grouped by these same
categories.
By using this shopping tool,
the user can expect to be able to shop with convenience and not miss
ingredients they need for the recipes they wish to make in any given week.
Complete Final Report
http://files.gove.net/shares/
Excel file that contains the Grocery Manager
http://files.gove.net/shares/
Complete Final Report
http://files.gove.net/shares/
Excel file that contains the Grocery Manager
http://files.gove.net/shares/
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