CSCI 100 Final Exam Entry: Ebay

The item being listed on Ebay is A.I. Artificial Intelligence, directed by Steven Speilberg, released in 2002. The item is being sold on its own with a current bid of $0.99 with the 5 day auction closing in 11 hours 31 minutes. The sellers handle is crusher66666 who has an overall feedback score of 99.6% with 264 transactions since he creatd an account on March 3, 2006. The terms of the sale include a $3.99 flat rate shipping to the United States only. Ebay allows customers to list items for sale on a consumer-2-consumer basis and in this case had a stock photo of the item. The length of the auction is left to the discretion of the individual with a maximum length of 7 days. This auction has no buy it now option, which allows purchasers to forego the act of competitively bidding and buying the item at predetermined listing. The feedback score available on ebay allows bidders to have a better idea of who they are buying from, with a higher score usually being indivative of a transaction being completed in agreement to the terms listed and the item being in the described condition. This item has the potential to continue to recieve bids up until the action expires and will then sell for the highest bid listed.

http://http://cgi.ebay.com/Artificial-Intelligence-DVD_W0QQitemZ330234725677QQcmdZViewItem?hash=item330234725677&_trksid=p4295

Hannibal

Hannibal

Hannibal was built in the Mobot Lab during the 1990’s as an experimental design for planetary exploration. The robot was designed with 6 legs as opposed to tank treads, or wheels, due to the fact that this allows the robot to traverse difficult terrain more effectively. This also allows them to have the potential of loosing a leg and still being able to move. The robot was built with 19 degrees of freedom, 8 microprocessors, and over 60 sensory inputs. The sensors are used by Hannibal to decide how to move its legs when it encounters difficult terrain.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Urban Challenge

The former George Air Force Base in Victorville, Ca. was home to the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge on November 3. DARPA is a competition between 11 finalists to created an autonomous vehicle able to drive in traffic amongst other challenges to claim a one million dollar prize. Mesa State College was invited to the final with a XTerra created by Team Mojavaton. DARPA was the result of a Congressional decision stating that by 2015, 1/3 of all military vehicles are to be capable of “autonomous driving.”

Animation

This is a still of the animation from my homework page of the animation

created using the Gimp software. I opened the image and selected the wave animation from the drop down menu. I decreased the rate of animation so as not to obscure the image completely. I chose this animation due to the water references from the book.

Here is the link to my website to view the Stranger In A Strange Land Animation, http://home.mesastate.edu/~jmccammo/Homework.html

5 Effects

These 5 images were altered using The Gimp photo editing program. The styles I chose were Lens, Mosaic, Fractal, Jigsaw, and Page Turn. For each I opened the image in Gimp, selected the effect from the Filters drop down menu and saved the file as a .GIF file.

This is the link to the flickr account, http://www.flickr.com/photos/25282790@N06/

Transparent Photo

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25282790@N06/

The transparency was created using The Gimp photo editing program, after opening the image in the program selected the image using the rectangle icon from the editing pallete, then selected animation from the Layers drop down menu. At this point I chose the eraser icon from the palette and the add alpha channel and erased the background from the image leaving only the book itself then saved the changes as a .GIF.

The above hyperlink takes you to my flickr account.

I was unable to post this photo and have the transparency translate onto this blog but it can be viewed on the homework page of my website.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a great page dedicated to RAH. In the discussion section of the page a I recommended that page with all of his published works be listed with a simply 1-2 sentence review for each be posted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Robert_A._Heinlein#Book_overviews.3F