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Name:  Kevin Johnson

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Domino Sugar Refinery

Major(s)/Minor(s):  Mechanical Engineering

Expected Graduation Year: 2015

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service- learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

At Domino Sugar I am an intern in the Packaging Department. This is the department responsible for the actually packaging of the sugar after it has been refined. The refinery receives raw sugar from all over the world and then works to create many varieties of pure sugar (well 99.95% pure) that is then sold to consumers. The packaging department consists of over 20 lines that package sugar, with weights that range from the 2.8 gram packets people use for coffee and tea to 2,000 lb supersacks that are sold to large food companies. This summer I am working on many different projects. Some of the larger projects include an audit of the checkweighers on each line (checkweighers are machines that constantly check the weights of the bags or boxes of sugar as they run across the conveyors of the line) and implementing a system that sends this data to a screen that shows graphs and statistics in real time. Another project involves activating a melter tank that is out of operation and connecting it to a larger melter tank 2 floors down. I am also working on designing and implementing a system to reject bad bags of sugar before they reach the unitizers and palletizers provided that they happen to make it past the first set of quality checks. Finally, I am planning and carrying out a project to upgrade a motor in our soft sugar section that has the potential to save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. These are just some of the interesting projects I get to work on every day I come into work. In addition to all this work I get to learn about the world of manufacturing from my extremely knowledgeable coworkers and supervisors.

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

I have enjoyed the opportunity to get a glimpse into the world of manufacturing and how engineering is related to this field. I have interned at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center before, and this internship is very different in many ways so it has been a great way to broaden my engineering experience. Being able to work with experienced engineers and learn directly from them has been such a valuable experience. It really demonstrates how what you learn in class relates to real world problems and solutions. Everyone who works here has been extremely kind and helpful, which has made the learning experience even more valuable.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

Like I said before, I have interned at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center before and this internship at Domino Sugar has been very different. The manufacturing process of a privately owned company is much different than working at a government run agency. The knowledge I have gained here has been from a different view of engineering, which has been great for expanding my view of engineering as a whole. I would not say I have learned a lot of things here I could not have gained from another opportunity. I would say it is helpful to gain multiple views of what an engineering degree can lead to in the workforce. And I have definitely gained an appreciation of that from this internship in comparison to my other one.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

I would say do not give up and apply to everything you qualify for. It is not easy to get an internship, especially in this turbulent job market with so many experienced students applying from all over the country. I would also suggest branching out of their comfort zone to gain an appreciation for all there is to learn and experience. It is important to experience a variety of experiences before entering the job market as a new graduate. This will allow you to really narrow down your future plans to what you definitely know you're passionate about.

How do you see your experience as meaningful? This might involve skills you’ve gained, information you’ve learned, mentors you’ve connected with, or projects you’ve completed.

This internship has been great for gaining real world experience. It is a great indicator of how to relate what you learn in class to real world problems and solutions. The projects I work on really challenge me to think outside of the box to devise creative and effective solutions. I am able to work on something new every day, and I also have the unique opportunity to work with a wide array of people. This allows me to network with many different individuals who have given me valuable information and connections for the future.

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process / the Shriver Center:

I would like to wrap up by saying this internship has been a priceless experience that has really allowed me to branch out and learn more about different areas of engineering, especially manufacturing and industry. I would also like to thank the Shriver Center for helping me obtain this opportunity and my supervisor at Domino Sugar, Rush Yelverton (head of Packaging Department), for hiring me and teaching me more than I thought I could ever know about sugar and the manufacturing process.

Name:  Kevin Johnson

Internship, Co-op or Research Site: Domino Sugar Refinery

Major(s)/Minor(s):  Mechanical Engineering

Expected Graduation Year: 2015

Briefly describe your internship, co-op, research, or service- learning opportunity, including your day-to-day tasks, responsibilities, and assignments.

At Domino Sugar I am an intern in the Packaging Department. This is the department responsible for the actually packaging of the sugar after it has been refined. The refinery receives raw sugar from all over the world and then works to create many varieties of pure sugar (well 99.95% pure) that is then sold to consumers. The packaging department consists of over 20 lines that package sugar, with weights that range from the 2.8 gram packets people use for coffee and tea to 2,000 lb supersacks that are sold to large food companies. This summer I am working on many different projects. Some of the larger projects include an audit of the checkweighers on each line (checkweighers are machines that constantly check the weights of the bags or boxes of sugar as they run across the conveyors of the line) and implementing a system that sends this data to a screen that shows graphs and statistics in real time. Another project involves activating a melter tank that is out of operation and connecting it to a larger melter tank 2 floors down. I am also working on designing and implementing a system to reject bad bags of sugar before they reach the unitizers and palletizers provided that they happen to make it past the first set of quality checks. Finally, I am planning and carrying out a project to upgrade a motor in our soft sugar section that has the potential to save the company hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. These are just some of the interesting projects I get to work on every day I come into work. In addition to all this work I get to learn about the world of manufacturing from my extremely knowledgeable coworkers and supervisors.

What have you enjoyed the most about your position or organization/company?

I have enjoyed the opportunity to get a glimpse into the world of manufacturing and how engineering is related to this field. I have interned at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center before, and this internship is very different in many ways so it has been a great way to broaden my engineering experience. Being able to work with experienced engineers and learn directly from them has been such a valuable experience. It really demonstrates how what you learn in class relates to real world problems and solutions. Everyone who works here has been extremely kind and helpful, which has made the learning experience even more valuable.

What have you gained from your experience that you could not have gained from another opportunity?

Like I said before, I have interned at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center before and this internship at Domino Sugar has been very different. The manufacturing process of a privately owned company is much different than working at a government run agency. The knowledge I have gained here has been from a different view of engineering, which has been great for expanding my view of engineering as a whole. I would not say I have learned a lot of things here I could not have gained from another opportunity. I would say it is helpful to gain multiple views of what an engineering degree can lead to in the workforce. And I have definitely gained an appreciation of that from this internship in comparison to my other one.

What advice would you give to another student who is seeking an internship or similar experience?

I would say do not give up and apply to everything you qualify for. It is not easy to get an internship, especially in this turbulent job market with so many experienced students applying from all over the country. I would also suggest branching out of their comfort zone to gain an appreciation for all there is to learn and experience. It is important to experience a variety of experiences before entering the job market as a new graduate. This will allow you to really narrow down your future plans to what you definitely know you're passionate about.

How do you see your experience as meaningful? This might involve skills you’ve gained, information you’ve learned, mentors you’ve connected with, or projects you’ve completed.

This internship has been great for gaining real world experience. It is a great indicator of how to relate what you learn in class to real world problems and solutions. The projects I work on really challenge me to think outside of the box to devise creative and effective solutions. I am able to work on something new every day, and I also have the unique opportunity to work with a wide array of people. This allows me to network with many different individuals who have given me valuable information and connections for the future.

Please provide a short quote about what you liked most about your position / earning internship credit / the internship placement process / the Shriver Center:

I would like to wrap up by saying this internship has been a priceless experience that has really allowed me to branch out and learn more about different areas of engineering, especially manufacturing and industry. I would also like to thank the Shriver Center for helping me obtain this opportunity and my supervisor at Domino Sugar, Rush Yelverton (head of Packaging Department), for hiring me and teaching me more than I thought I could ever know about sugar and the manufacturing process.

Editor’s Note: The Ember.js team has shifted to an expedited release schedule and as of this publication date are on version 1.2.0. This tutorial was written pre-v1.0 but many of the concepts are still applicable. We do our best to commission timely content and these situations happen from time-to-time. We’ll work to update this in the future.

In part 3 of my Ember series, I showed you how you can interact with data using Ember's Ember.Object main base class to create objects that define the methods and properties that act as a wrapper for your data. Here's an example:

App.Item = Ember.Object.extend();
    
    App.Item.reopenClass({
      all: function() {
        return $.getJSON('http://api.ihackernews.com/page?format=jsonp&callback=?').then(function(response) {
          var items = [];
    
          response.items.forEach( function (item) {
        items.push( App.Item.create(item) );
      });
      return items;
    });
    

In this code, we subclass Ember.Object using the "extend()" and create a user-defined method called called "all()" that makes a request to Hacker News for JSON-formatted results of its news feed.

While this method definitely works and is even promoted by Ember-based Discourse as their way of doing it, it does require that you flesh out and expose the API that you'd like to reference the data with. Most MVC frameworks tend to include ORM-like capabilities so if you're used to Rails, for example, you'd be very familiar with the benefits of ActiveRecord which helps to manage and do the heavy lifting of interacting with data.

The Ember team has wanted to do the same thing but their main focus has been to get a stable v1 release of their core framework out first to ensure that complementary components could be built on a stable foundation. I actually applaud this and I actually made mention of the fact that you should hold off on using Ember Data because of this.

Now that Ember RC8 is out and v1 seems to be coming around the corner, I felt it was a good time to start exploring Ember Data and see what it offers.

Ember Data

The first thing I want to stress is that Ember Data is a work in progress and in much the same way as Ember started, will probably see a number of breaking API changes over the next several months. While that's not ideal, it's important to begin looking at how you would structure your apps using the library. To give you a good description of what Ember Data provides, I've copied in the well-written description from the GitHub page:

Ember Data is a library for loading data from a persistence layer (such as a JSON API), mapping this data to a set of models within your client application, updating those models, then saving the changes back to a persistence layer. It provides many of the facilities you'd find in server-side ORMs like ActiveRecord, but is designed specifically for the unique environment of JavaScript in the browser.

So as I mentioned, it's meant to abstract out a lot of the complexities of working with data.

Using Ember Data

If you've read my previous tutorials, you should be very familiar with how to set up a page to leverage Ember. If you haven't done so, you should go to the Ember.js home page and grab the Starter Kit. You can find it right in the middle of the page as it's displayed via a big button. This will give you the most up-to-date version of Ember which you'll need in order to work with Ember Data. The easiest way to get a downloadable version of Ember Data is to go to the API docs for models, scroll to the bottom and download the library. Additionally, you can go to the builds page to pull down the latest builds of any Ember-related library.

Adding Ember Data is as simple as adding another JavaScript file to the mix like this:

<script src="js/libs/jquery-1.9.1.js"></script>
    <script src="js/libs/handlebars-1.0.0.js"></script>
    <script src="js/libs/ember-1.0.0-rc.8.js"></script>
    <script src="js/libs/ember-data.js"></script>
    <script src="js/app.js"></script>
    

This now gives you access to Ember Data's objects, method and properties.

Without any configuration, Ember Data can load and save records and relationships served via a RESTful JSON API, provided it follows certain conventions.

Defining a Store

Ember uses a special object called a store to load models and retrieve data and is based off the Ember DS.Store class. This is how you'd define a new store:

App.Store = DS.Store.extend({
    ...
    });

If you remember from my previous articles, "App" is just a namespace created for the application level objects, methods and properties for the application. While it's not a reserved word in Ember, I would urge you to use the same name as almost every tutorial and demo I've seen uses it for consistency.

The store you create will hold the models you create and will serve as the interface with the server you define in your adapter. By default, Ember Data creates and associates to your store a REST adapter based off the DS.RestAdapter class. If you simply defined the code above, you would have an adapter associated to it by default. Ember magic at its finest. You can also use a Fixture adapter as well if you're working with in-memory-based data (for example, JSON you're loading from code) but since this is about making API calls, the REST adapter is more appropriate.

You can also define your own adapter for those situations where you need more custom control over interfacing with a server by using the adapter property within your store declaration:

App.Store = DS.Store.extend({
      adapter: 'App.MyCustomAdapter'
    });

Defining Models

The code I listed at the top of this tutorial was an example of how to use Ember.Object to create the models for your application. Things change a bit when you define models via Ember Data. Ember Data provides another object called DS.Model which you subclass for every model you want to create. For example, taking the code from above:

App.Item = Ember.Object.extend();

It would now look like this:

App.Item = DS.Model.Extend()

Not much of a difference in terms of appearance but a big difference in terms of functionality since you now have access to the capabilities of the REST adapter as well as Ember Data's built-in relationships like one-to-one, one-to-many and more. The main benefit, though, is that Ember Data provides the hooks for interacting with your data via your models as opposed to you having to roll your own. Referencing the code from above again:

App.Item.reopenClass({
      all: function() {
        return $.getJSON('http://api.ihackernews.com/page?format=jsonp&callback=?').then(function(response) {
          var items = [];</p>
    
         response.items.forEach( function (item) {
        items.push( App.Item.create(item) );
      });
      return items;
    });
    

While I had to create my own method to return all of the results from my JSON call, Ember Data provides a find() method which does exactly this and also serves to filter down the results. So in essence, all I have to do is make the following call to return all of my records:

App.Item.find();

The find() method will send an Ajax request to the URL.

This is exactly what attracts so many developers to Ember; the forethought given to making things easier.

One thing to keep in mind is that it's important to define within the model the attributes you plan on using later on (e.g. in your templates). This is easy to do:

App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
         title: DS.attr('string')
    });

In my demo app, I want to use the title property returned via JSON so using the attr() method, specify which attributes a model has at my disposal.

One thing I want to mention is that Ember Data is incredibly picky about the structure of the JSON returned. Because Ember leverages directory structures for identifying specific parts of your applications (remember the naming conventions we discussed in my first Ember article?), it makes certain assumptions about the way that the JSON data is structured. It requires that there be a named root which will be used to identify the data to be returned. Here's what I mean:

{
      'posts': [{
        'id': 1, 
        'title': 'A friend of mine just posted this.',
       'url': 'http://i.imgur.com/9pw20NY.jpg'
      }]
    }1
    
    <p>If you had defined it like this:</p>
    
    1{
    {
        'id': '1', 
        'title': 'A friend of mine just posted this.',
        'url': 'http://i.imgur.com/9pw20NY.jpg'
      },
    {
        'id': '2', 
        'title': 'A friend of mine just posted this.',
        'url': 'http://i.imgur.com/9pw20NY.jpg'
      },
    }

Ember Data would've totally balked and thrown the following error:

Your server returned a hash with the key id but you have no mapping for it.

The reason is that since the model is called "App.Post", Ember Data is expecting to find a URL called "posts" from which it will pull the data from. So if I defined my store as such:

App.Store = DS.Store.extend({
      url: 'http://emberdata.local' 
    });

and my model like this:

App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
         title: DS.attr('string')
    });

Ember Data would assume that the Ajax request made by the find() method would look like this:

http://emberdata.local/posts

And if you were making a request for a specific ID (like find(12)), it would look like this:

http://emberdata.local/posts/12

This issue drove me batty, but doing a search found plenty of discussions on it. If you can't set up your JSON results in this way, then you'll have to create a custom adapter to massage the results to properly serialize them before being able to use it. I'm not covering that here but plan to explore more of that soon.

The Demo App

I purposely wanted to keep this tutorial simple because I know Ember Data is changing and I wanted to give a brief overview of what it provided. So I whipped up a quick demo app that uses Ember Data to pull JSON data from my own local server. Let's look at the code.

First I create my application namespace (which you would do for any Ember app):

// Create our Application
    App = Ember.Application.create({});

Next, I define my data store and I declare the url from where the model will pull the data from:

App.Store = DS.Store.extend({
      url: 'http://emberdata.local'; 
    });

In the model, I specify the attribute: title, which I'll use in my template later on:

// Our model
    App.Post = DS.Model.extend({
         title: DS.attr('string')
    });

Lastly, I associate the model to the route via the model hook. Notice that I'm using the predefined Ember Data method find() to immediately pull back my JSON data as soon as the app is started:

// Our default route. 
    App.IndexRoute = Ember.Route.extend({
      model: function() {
        return App.Post.find();
      }
    });

In the template for the root page (index), I use the #each Handlebars directive to look through the results of my JSON data and render the title of each of my posts:

<script type="text/x-handlebars" data-template-name="index">
        <h2>My Posts</h2>
        <ul>
        {{#each post in model}}
            <li>{{post.title}}</li>
        {{/each}}
        </ul>
      </script></p>
    

That's it! No Ajax call to make or special methods to work with my data. Ember Data took care of making the XHR call and storing the data.

Fin

Now, this is incredibly simplistic and I don't want to lead you to believe it's all unicorns and puppy dogs. As I went through the process of working with Ember Data, I found myself wanting to go back to using Ember.Object where I had more control. But I also realize that a lot of work is going on to improve Ember Data, especially in the way it manages diverse data results. So it's important to at least kickstart the process of understanding how this thing works and even offering constructive feedback to the team.

So I urge you to jump in and begin tinkering with it, especially those that have a very strong ORM background and could help shape the direction of Ember Data. Now is the best time to do that.

The CSS Working Group and the SVG Working Group have published two Working Drafts today.

• A Working Draft of Filter Effects Module Level 1. Filter effects are a way of processing an element’s rendering before it is displayed in the document. Typically, rendering an element via CSS or SVG can be conceptually described as if the element, including its children, are drawn into a buffer (such as a raster image) and then that buffer is composited into the elements parent. Filters apply an effect before the compositing stage. Examples of such effects are blurring, changing color intensity and warping the image. Although originally designed for use in SVG, filter effects are a set a set of operations to apply on an image buffer and therefore can be applied to nearly any presentational environment, including CSS. They are triggered by a style instruction (the filter property). This specification describes filters in a manner that allows them to be used in content styled by CSS, such as HTML and SVG. It also defines a CSS property value function that produces a CSS <image> value. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc.
• A Working Draft of CSS Transforms Module Level 1. CSS transforms allows elements styled with CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space. This specification is the convergence of the CSS 2D transforms, CSS 3D transforms and SVG transforms specifications. CSS is a language for describing the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc.

Learn more about the Style Activity, and the Graphics Activity.

Meet Mabelle. She is a Theatre major and a current Undergraduate Research Award (URA) Scholar. Her current research investigates the techniques and processes that theaters for social change currently use to develop solutions to community problems.

How did you find your mentor for year or artistic research project?
Dr. Kreizenbeck had previously been my professor and director.

How did you know this was the project you wanted to do?
The research question was one that I really wanted to know about.

How did you hear about the Undergraduate Research Award (URA) program? Is this your first independent research project?
In previous years, I saw other people on the myumbc spotlight. This is my first research project.

Was the application difficult to do?
The greater clarity you have regarding what your research question, the easier it becomes to complete the application.

How much did your mentor help you with the application?
He wrote me a recommendation later and advised me on what I wrote on my application.

What has been the hardest part about your research?
The hardest part has to be crafting the research report, considering that it will be the longest academic report that I have written.

How does your research relate to your work in other classes?
My research provides me with information that I believe would be nice to include in the curriculum of my other classes.

What else are you involved in on campus?
I am part of the slam poetry team and I am also a desk staffer in Erickson Hall.

Read her abstract here...