I recently purchased a Monoprice Mini Delta 3D printer, and I was immediately impressed with how low the barrier to entry has become for high-quality home 3D printing. I plugged it in, and it instantly produced a flawless Baymax from Big Hero 6 that came preloaded on the SD card. However, after a few prints, I recognized one of its few downfalls: there was no build plate lighting, let alone an RGB light show. But that’s an easy fix. With a true maker spirit and a month to wait for eBay shipments, I added a light show to this lil’ machine. Described below are my process and parts list. Read more
Category: Tech
A recent venture finance funding that made a lot of VC news highlights was a 20M series B funding round for Quizlet. The series B round accounts for a large portion of Quizlet’s total funding, which is now approximately 32M. Essentially, Quizlet is an online flashcard service that allows users to read and test their study material and share their flashcards with other users on the platform. However, this most recent funding, along with a 12M series A, is allowing Quizlet to expand past a simple flashcard sharing platform. Essentially, Quizlet wants to develop a more advanced machine learning algorithm that tracks what users know, and what they should study repetitively so they can improve long-term retention. Read more
Venture capital is often lightheartedly referred to as an art, not a science. It is extremely hard to quantify the ideal investment because startups operate in emerging markets with very few concrete and calculable insights. Oftentimes this difficulty leads venture capitalists to work on gut-instinct, not data-driven insights. However, to succeed in an ever-competitive market, it is necessary for businesses to find meaningful and data-driven insights, thus giving them a competitive advantage. This intersection is where business intelligence can play a key role in venture finance.
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Above are sample images of prints of physical representations of economic indicators. One day in spring of 2017 after macroeconomics class with Dr. Bots, I researched 3D printing a map of varying height – I found color-coordinated images that were representative of 2 categories: unemployment and GDP per capita. Read more
In the summer of 2016, I traveled to Flagstaff, Arizona with fellow William Jewell College Pillsbury Scholars for one week. During the trip, we collected data on the period of various binary stars on the 29″ NURO telescope. Read more