Archive for February, 2008

Touchies! Send me your warm touch, honey!

Published
by
Sinan
on February 26, 2008
in Telepresence
. 0 Comments

E.T. Touch

Touchies is my experimental project for Telepresence Class. Touchies, (two cubicles with a soft section to finger) (soft section is made out of toilet paper) (how lame!), allow you to send your touch of finger real time to another touchy. You can send your warm touch to your lovely who is far away from you. Or even E.T. doesn’t need to travel million light years to touch your finger anymore! Touchies are here!

Touchies from Sinan Ascioglu on Vimeo.

Sample datasets for OpenVisuals.org

Published
by
Sinan
on February 21, 2008
in Thesis
. 0 Comments

I am trying to collect sample datasets to use in my thesis project OpenVisuals.org. As of that, these sample datasets should:

  • sample a generic type of datasets.
  • should have different but generic formats, which would be a format outcome of copying/pasting, exporting from excel, etc.. (right now, I can think of differences in comma separated values (sometimes comma, sometime tab, sometimes space).
  • should imply comparison among its data.

I will use these datasets to make sure that the website (hence the applets) will be able to work fine with them. I currently fetched couple of datasets that would be suitable:

MDF (wood type) Production for Continents per years (gathered from FAO United Nations website)

years	subject	commodity	America +	Asia +	Europe +	Oceania +	

1995	Production Quantity	MDF	2398000.00	1582000.00	3363300.00	540000.00

1996	Production Quantity	MDF	2725000.00	2190000.00	3604300.00	786000.00

1997	Production Quantity	MDF	3285036.00	3737000.00	4587300.00	853000.00

1998	Production Quantity	MDF	3899694.00	3484000.00	6557913.00	899000.00

1999	Production Quantity	MDF	4635000.00	3854000.00	7288500.00	1025000.00

2000	Production Quantity	MDF	4773000.00	4652000.00	8380493.00	1241000.00

2001	Production Quantity	MDF	5101472.00	8002300.00	9163590.00	1350000.00

2002	Production Quantity	MDF	5601924.00	10135100.00	10386690.00	1419000.00

2003	Production Quantity	MDF	6327229.00	13970200.00	11110990.00	1627000.00

2004	Production Quantity	MDF	7729545.00	18658026.00	11846105.00	1639000.00

2005	Production Quantity	MDF	7751384.00	24133523.00	12704400.00	1622000.00

2006	Production Quantity	MDF	8467770.00	27017523.00	13383800.00	1635000.00


In the table above, the generated dataset set is not delimited with comma, but tab spaces (although the file is .csv). This also happens when you copy paste from Excel.


Also below, is a very typical example of a dataset with empty cells (unknown data), though the content is one of the most popular ones lately.


"State","Barack Obama","Hillary Rodham Clinton  ","John Edwards","John McCain ","Mike Huckabee","Mitt Romney","Ron Paul"
"Alabama",10,19,0,16,21,0,0
"Arizona",21,25,0,50,0,0,0
"Arkansas",3,10,0,1,29,1,0
"California",155,195,0,146,0,3,0
"Connecticut",26,22,0,27,0,0,0
"Delaware",9,6,0,18,0,0,0
"Georgia",22,12,0,3,45,0,0
"Illinois",68,35,0,54,0,3,0
"Kansas",15,6,0,,,,0
"Massachusetts",38,55,0,18,0,22,0
"Missouri",36,36,0,58,0,0,0
"Montana",,,,0,0,25,0
"New Jersey",46,54,0,52,0,0,0
"New Mexico",12,14,0,,,,0
"New York",80,121,0,101,0,0,0
"North Dakota",,,,5,5,8,5
"Oklahoma",14,24,0,32,6,0,0
"Tennessee",14,24,0,19,25,8,0
"Utah",14,9,0,0,0,36,0
"West Virginia",,,,,18,0,0
"Florida",,,,57,0,0,0
"South Carolina",25,12,8,19,5,0,0
"Michigan",,,,6,1,23,0
"New Hampshire",9,9,4,7,1,4,0


Here is also the imported version of this dataset in OpenVisuals.org .


							
 

		
 

	
		
		

			

				
Thesis Statement, and related changes


				

					Published 
by 
Sinan
 
on February 2, 2008
 
in Thesis
.
					0 Comments
					
									
 
			
 

			

				
My initial thesis statement was:


Open Source Visualization Framework.


I have a dataset -> pie charts is not enough to visualize it..

I go to openVisualz.org -> pick a suitable visualization -> submit my data -> customize the view -> put the result to my blog…


I am a programmer and produce data in my application in realtime (eg. I read sensor input from Arduino) -> I want realtime visualization -> I import the openVisualz.org library -> submit the data real time to the openVisualz.org -> it is visualized on the website in real time.


I am a visualization artist -> I create and share a visualization of (eg. movie dialogs) using the openVisualz library -> I share it at openVisualz.org -> some media company is interest in using it, but needs to customize it for their own purpose -> they hire me to improve the visualization for this specific purpose.


After giving a second though, I started to think a revision is necessary. First comes first, I would take out the realtime part, since the other parts are complicated enough to work on within 4 month’s time.  And project needs more focus.


This user scenerio is not exactly a statement, so here I should devise a statement. So, new version is:


Open Source Visualization Framework. A website which provides dataset users various open source visualizations which are created and submitted to the website by visualization artists. Framework provides various APIs, to let visualization artists to tweak their visualizations to make them ‘OpenVisualz’ compatible; compatible datasets can be imported and applied to the visualization in the website.