Sarah Allen's Weblog

remembering Claiborne Pell

Sarah — 2009-01-01T19:19:54-08:00

Claiborne Pell died today at the age of 90. Serving in the U.S. Senate from Rhode Island for 36 years, his most famous contribution was the creation of Pell Grants. He was also the main sponsor of the bill that created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Oft praised for his non-controversial style, he was known to have said "I always try to let the other guy have my way." As a Newport blueblood, he nonetheless had broad support of RI blue-collar workers. I also enjoyed reading another quote from him (via bluebirdsinging and CNN) today: "The strength of the United States is not the gold at Fort Knox or the weapons of mass destruction that we have, but the sum total of the education and the character of our people."...

not all data is interesting

Sarah — 2008-12-31T11:43:19-08:00

Mathematician Martin Wattenberg interview by boston.com about his exhibit at the Boston Museum of Modern art. (via ACM TechNews) "The traditional approach to visualization in science and business is to create something transparent and neutral - a telescope with clear glass," he said as he roamed through the ICA exhibit. "But for an emotional approach, or an artistic approach, you want to bring a point of view. Not all data is interesting. The art is pointing the telescope at the right set of data." You can see his work online at bewitched.com. I had seen Market Map, Name Voyager, and others before, but History Flow was new to me which visualized the editing history of wikipedia articles:...

history of the Santa tracker

Sarah — 2008-12-29T18:24:10-08:00

Many of you may already know that every year Santa's famous sleigh ride complete with flying reindeer is tracked by NORAD (yes, that the North American Aerospace Defense Command). Every year for the past few years we've been watching Santa as his location is reported via the Web. This year we explored world geography as Santa was tracked with the help of Google Earth. AP Writer, Ivan Moreno, reports on the origins of the tradition: NORAD's holiday tradition can by traced to 1955, when a Colorado Springs newspaper printed a Sears, Roebuck & Co. ad telling children of a phone number to talk to Santa. The number was one digit off, and the first child to get through reached the Continental Air Defense Command, NORAD's predecessor. Col. Harry W. Shoup answered. Shoup's daughter, Terri Van Keuren, said her dad, now 91, was surprised to hear that the little voice on the other end thought he was Santa. "Dad thought, `What the heck? This must be some kind of code,'" said Van Keuren, 59. Shoup, described by his daughter as "just a nut about Christmas," didn't want to break the boy's heart, so he sounded a booming "Ho, ho, ho!" and...

situated learning through open source

Sarah — 2008-12-26T07:31:25-08:00

I just read Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, which I put on my wish list since I am a total geek about theories of how people learn, particularly with regard to social learning. It's a challenging read with lots of big words, but it short, fun and well-worth it. The approach to thinking about learning resonated with me. Naturally, I saw applications for human interface design (perhaps a subject for another post), but unexpectedly, I found that I recognized this concept of learning in my own experiences of open source development. The stereotype of software engineering is that it is a solitary profession. The alpha geek hovers over his keyboard mind-melded to the machine applying his gifts for computation unhindered by his near autistic lack of social skills. While I've heard that such lone coders do exist, I more often see programmers interact in the virtual social setting of mailing list, forum or blog where the masters and the newbies interact with mutual respect and shared enthusiasm. It strikes me that open source projects provide a mechanism for what Lave and Wenger call "legitimate peripheral participation" which describes a specific and effective learning style....

ABCD book

Sarah — 2008-12-25T18:26:48-08:00

[Update: so excited to have gotten this for Xmas! Even cooler to experience live.] Lovely video of this upcoming pop-up book... via information aesthetics...

test- and behavior-driven development

Sarah — 2008-12-21T09:36:41-08:00

blockquote { width: 500px; background-color: #eee; padding: 10px; border:1px solid #ccc;} li {width: 500px} I did a bit of reading about test-driven development (TDD), which led me to behavior-driven development (BDD). I started out by looking at some slides on TDD by Andrzej Krzywda which provide a nice overview: TDD (at a high level) is about visualizing goals Software developers are responsible for the visualization of other people's goals Guidelines: write tests BEFORE writing production code have many tests 3D rule = Defense (Tests), Design, and Documentation there is always exactly one test failing Definitions Acceptance test: a test from the user's perspective Unit test: a test of a class Andrej argues that Rails focuses on acceptance tests because it is a mature community (from a TDD perspective) and because of the available tools. I'm not sure why REST makes it so controllers don't need testing, but it makes sense to me that the focus is on tests of the model. Andrej goes on to introduce behavior-driven development (BDD). He recommends that you start with user stories. RSpec is a tool that helps with that. With BDD, you create executable specifications, not tests. You want to look at what...

language changes the way you think

Sarah — 2008-12-20T10:23:16-08:00

"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing." - A. Perlis Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (aka linguistic relativity hypothesis) asserts lanugage influences how you think, that "different language patterns yield different patterns of thought." It seems like the Heisenberg uncertainty principal, where measuring a particle also affects it. Dave Astels refers to the Sapir-Whorf theory in his talk on behavior driven development. He describes that Sapir-Whorf "challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community." Dave argues that the use of the word "test" in test-driven development (TDD) causes programmers to focus on validating the inner state of their code rather than in verifying the expected result, as in behavior-driven development (BDD). In large part changing the language we use to describe how we validate out code leads us to develop a more effective and resilient form of code validation. While wikipedia cites some arguments against this theory, it seems intuitive to me. In fact whether learning a spoken language or a programming language I have found that the language I am thinking in does in fact change...

the decline of women in CS from 1940-1982

Sarah — 2008-12-16T08:00:45-08:00

Jennifer Taylor provides fresh insight on the minority of women in computer science by looking at causes of The Decline of Women in Computer Science from 1940-1982. From the pioneering work of Ada Lovelace as the first programmer for the difference engine in the 1800s to those who worked as human computers in the early 20th century to the group who programmed the first computing machine to support the war effort In the 1940s, women played a significant role in the nascent field of computer science. "The rationale for selecting female programmers was partly due to the scarcity of qualified male labor during the war, but another significant factor was the expectation that women would be uniquely suited to this position, which demanded great 'patience, persistence, and a capacity for detail' - qualities that many employers attributed to the feminine sex." (Taylor references Denise W. Gruer, "Pioneering Women in Computer Science," 1, from the Adele Mildred Koss papers, 1993-1998, 1 folder, Schlesinger Library) Despite this auspicious beginning, the participation of women in computer science declined steadily from the 1940s to the early 1980s. One factor that Taylor identifies is the association of computer science with engineering schools. Unlike the hard...

geeking out

Sarah — 2008-12-14T09:01:43-08:00

I've been learning Ruby on Rails over the past couple of days and have decided to chronicle my adventures in code in a separate spot. I've found that my regular readers tend to be a diverse crowd and some of their eyes tend to glaze over when I've delved into the nitty details of code. Feel free to join me over at ultrasaurus.com/code if you like to write (or at least read about) code, although I will continue my still geeky, but less code-filled reflections here....

i always thought i was destined for great things...

Sarah — 2008-12-08T20:14:34-08:00

I saw this in the SF Chronicle the other day. "i always thought i was destined for great things. But then one day I realized... I'm a potato." I gotta say I have days when I leap too high and fall down, and I feel just like that....

eggs that advertise their shelf life

Sarah — 2008-12-08T06:59:30-08:00

"Each egg's display glows through its shell indicating the number of days remaining before the egg goes bad." Of course, sawing the egg in half to implant the LED has gotta affect its shelf life. I sure hope this never happens in real life. (Best before... via infosthetics)...

when coding is like the ephemeral art of rock balancing

Sarah — 2008-12-07T10:36:11-08:00

not so random "timeout" link in a blog comment by Tony Hirst He relates balancing rocks to mashups: "When I play with mashups - when I play with ideas - I'm balancing logic rocks. Sometimes they fall over, but that's okay; if I wanted to build something a little longer lasting, I'd use concrete.... we need to find ways of exploring how to doodle with new technology."...

snaptell identifies media from captured images

Sarah — 2008-12-01T21:07:24-08:00

Ok, I haven't raved about my iPhone yet, because, aside from the awesome cinematic interface, my favorite feature has been that I can listen to my voice mail in any order with a graphical UI, which is, frankly, not so remarkable.... but today I read about a remarkable app from SnapTell which made me feel like I'm living in the future.... Alan Levine has detailed the SnapTell experience (via blog comment). With my iPhone I took a photo of 3 random books on my side table and they were quickly cataloged with wikipedia references and google searches. This seems way cooler than QR tagging which seems to be popular in Japan. Why create a weird looking block code? Why not just snap a photo of a company logo or storefront to find a webpage?...

augmented reality: a new kind of VR

Sarah — 2008-12-01T08:18:00-08:00

Papervision Augmented Reality (via OUseful) By printing a little square pattern, using my webcam, I got this little creature to appear on my desk: It was a little fragile -- I couldn't get it to appear reliably and it disappeared when I moved it. I can't wait to try out the native code apps for the iPhone (lots of cool links at OUseful)... reminds me of the VR-GPS art installations in Spook Country by William Gibson which I just started reading....

data visualization with cartograms

Sarah — 2008-11-30T11:50:57-08:00

Jon Udell writes about visual numeracy, introducing a new graph to continue the conversation about where the US gets its oil. Here's his original map of US oil imports by region: Here's his latest graph about where the global oil reserves are: Comments on Udell's latest post point out that this kind of graph is called a cartogram, which is a map where areas are scaled to indicate the scalar value of the statistic that is being displayed on the map. My favorite (via Tony Hirst) is from a series on 2008 election results: Popular vote results displayed on a map of the US. Update: further reading in the comments reveals an interesting insight by Tim: "The thing that irritates me about the first visualization is that by visualizing some data you imply that the data is important. But visualizations, like statistics can lie. 'In fact, where the US gets its oil is almost completely irrelevant. The oil market is a world market. The transportation costs are startlingly small but-all things being equal-it's easier to get oil from countries that are near you (and hard to get it from countries you don't trade with). "The 'dangerous disconnect' between American perception--the...