Agile Visualization with Pharo: Normalizers

 INDIVIDUAL

|

 INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

shapes?	normalization SHAPES
shapes? normalization	shapes?

Agile Visualization
with Pharo

"Normalizers: Shapes may be shaped and colored in a meaningful way to represent attributes and properties of the objects represented by the shapes." p.49.

Bergel, A. (2022). Overview of Roassal. In: Agile Visualization with Pharo. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7161-2_5

Book: Making of Byrne’s Euclid

individual

|

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

	Scans of first eight propositions from Byrne’s Euclid

My source: Twitter @dr_tj @defilippovale @rougeux

https://twitter.com/defilippovale/status/1074436950663278592

Drupalcon Barcelona: Researching code contributions, Mental health and SVG

Winding the calendar back to 2008 and Szeged, Hungary I doubted I would see it: 'depression', 'anxiety' and other mental health - related concepts writ-large in a Drupalcon presentation. And not just any presentation, but a community keynote.

Drupalcon Barcelona 2015 Mike Bell 24 Sept keynote

Mike Bell has repeatedly shown great courage as he has refined his presentation and delivered in full last Thursday in Barcelona:

Mental Health and Open Source

Mike's a key personality within the NW (UK) Drupal User Group also helping to make local Drupalcamps a reality.

As a sign of several things:

• 2008 is a long time ago;
• Drupalcon has travelled far and wide around Europe;
• I've still no new website;
• Drupal itself has evolved from 4.7 to Dries Buytaert's announcement in his keynote that Drupal 8 release candidate will follow on October 7;

- this conjunction of mental health and the world of code is quite significant at this point in time. If I can pass the remaining assignments I'm due to move from part 1 to part 2 of studies at Lancaster University in February. Sooner in terms of formulating a research question. This is where Drupal, Hodges' model and Technology Enhanced Learning will (must) be fused.

David Rozas (left)

Of course there were many other sessions and another keynote of particular interest as Mike shared the community keynote session with David Rozas:

Talk is silver, code is gold? Contribution beyond source code in Drupal

Computer science is about as academic as you can get, but how refreshing to find research methodologies, methods, data... and mental health sharing a keynote session. It was brilliant to see open source - Drupal embracing research, seeking an evidence base not just for what makes the machines tick but the contributors too.

Drupalcon David Corbacho Román

For quite a few years I've followed the rise, waning and what seems a rebirth for SVG.

Next generation graphics: SVG

David Corbacho Román's session is a great source for tips and resources and also demonstrated just how dynamic the web can be. You can follow the sessions through the links.

I'll post on Drupal and Drupalcon again soon.

Thanks to all the sponsors of Drupalcon Barcelona.

Update papers, Drupal and future April 2012

You might have noticed a slight hiatus in posts recently, in fact over the past six weeks or so. During that time I was working on a paper following the November's CARDI conference when two others popped up again out of the academic ether.

I've probably whined on before about how I write, but don't benefit from like-minded people to read stuff and bounce ideas off. It's not that my nursing and multidisciplinary colleagues are not academically inclined: far from it. There's people taking time to travel to Lancaster, Preston and Manchester to pursue good stuff. It is about mindset though for the many (and having a cussed question). That means being in the groove, finding your rubric, whatever you want to call it. The other week I was trying to encourage a colleague to do the Master's thing; because if you (we!) don't soon then it ain't going to happen.

One paper a co-written effort has been ongoing for quite sometime (must be years). Another paper highlights my idiosyncratic style when working solo (I bet my two current co-authors might agree to that) quite a few referees have. The latest co-authored effort 6,000+ words has actually come together quite quickly over the past six weeks. There was an abortive start when extending a poster was abandoned for a forthcoming journal special topic issue. Once a target publication was identified  things took shape rapidly. Nothing like a deadline to charge the batteries. No doubt there will be changes to follow, but it's a fitter piece of work on submission than I could have produced alone. I'm sparing you the specifics for obvious reasons, but when there's progress you'll have the details here. In the meantime thanks George and thanks for staying the course Mike! Extending the h2cm bibliography is never easy, but then academic writing is not intended to be.

Of course I need to leave Open Office and pick up Drupal in earnest. With the matrimonial home now a matter of many happy memories - one thing I miss is a key in the door to a place of my own.

Since summer 2008 I would have been lost without family support - thanks mum! I'd also be lost without Sue where I spend most of my time*: thanks to you too Sue!

Space to work in a consistent way though just isn't there presently. Yes, I know what this means. "You're NO genius!" If Drupal was going to happen, you'd make it happen: whatever!

The laser treatment last month worked fine: brilliant ;-) in fact. My poor left eye, is now my best. They didn't do the right, it wasn't as bad as they thought (suddenly though I notice the problem there too).

I'm really looking f/w to Sweden next month and Conceptual Spaces at Work. That trip's not about presenting - going to learn.

I've been watching SVG for many years and notice that the SVG Open series of conferences is changing its name to The Graphical Web.

Now if an investor needed a sign....

In between there's Drupalcon Munich.

 Wondering if I can justify going to Zurich in September?

*Drafted and posted in Tom and Jerry's!

The Science Collaboration Framework (SCF)

My attention was drawn today (by Robert Douglas) to The Science Collaboration Framework (SCF) that is based on Drupal.

Here are some details from the SCF website:

About:

Interdisciplinary research programs at Harvard and elsewhere naturally tend to be distributed geographically, across campuses and departments. Effective collaboration for these programs requires the ability to bridge distance, which in turn implies digital collaboration, and therefore abilities to publish and discuss on-line content such as articles, news, and perspectives; to provide semantic context to on-line content for more powerful interactions within multiple sub-disciplines and to integrate as well as distinguish the individual contributions of many scientific workers.

The Scientific Collaboration Framework (SCF) is reusable software that can be used to develop web-based, collaborative, scientific communities. The framework is designed to support interdisciplinary scientists in publishing, annotating, sharing and discussing content such as articles, perspectives, interviews and news items, as well as assert personal biographies and research interests – the basics of any online community. These web materials can then be linked to external, heterogeneous knowledge repositories of life science resources such as genes, antibodies, cell-lines or model organisms. SCF, thus supports structured “Web 2.0” style community discourse amongst researchers, makes various data resources available to the collaborating scientist and captures the semantics of the relationship among the discourse and resources.

Our framework is based on Drupal – a popular content management system that is highly extensible and has a thriving ecosystem of contributed modules. SCF includes new modules for managing publications, interviews, member information, news items, announcements, and biological entities (e.g., genes). The framework is freely available as a Drupal distribution; however the modules can be used a la carte as well.

SCF is a project of the Initiative in Innovative Computing at Harvard University in collaboration with the Harvard Stem Cell Institute. The first instance of SCF is being adopted by StemBook (stembook.org) – a comprehensive, open-access collection of original, peer-reviewed chapters covering topics related to Stem Cell Biology. A joint project with Michael J Fox Foundation (MJFF) to develop a community site for Parkinson's researchers is under development. SCF is also being evaluated by several other communities.

Publications:
Sudeshna Das, Tom Green, Louis Weitzman, Alister Lewis-Bowen & Tim Clark. Linked Data in a Scientific Collaboration Framework. 17th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2008), Beijing, China.

I am particularly interested in SCF since as noted above "the modules can be used a la carte as well." The potential of putting this together with the Drupal Education distribution is really exciting. I still believe that SVG (or similar) has a role to play for my plans. In the meantime though back to Drupal version 6.9....

Additional links:

Alzforum

Ruby, Eclipse AND Rails

Last February I mentioned here that I was going to try to learn Ruby. Regardless of the name, it really seems to be a gem of a programming language. Finding Eclipse -

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. A large and vibrant ecosystem of major technology vendors, innovative start-ups, universities, research institutions and individuals extend, complement and support the Eclipse platform.

- also made me hungry again (after some 12-15 years) to tinker with code. After installing and trying Eclipse and Ruby in the spring - time got the better of me.

Then last week I read an item from October's PC PRO - 'A total Eclipse'.

I removed Ruby, who am I trying to kid!

It was time to check out Ruby AND Rails -

Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern. From the Ajax in the view, to the request and response in the controller, to the domain model wrapping the database, Rails gives you a pure-Ruby development environment. To go live, all you need to add is a database and a web server.

I installed INSTANT RAILS and it's awe inspiring; so much to learn, but it really feels like the motor's running. I've had the Rails book since the spring with one reading and now the mini library (Ajax, PHP, Drupal, DOM Scripting) I managed to put together is paying dividends (I think!).

So now Aptana is plugged into Eclipse and I'm up to Part II - Building an Application (just to put things into perspective that's p. 51/719 actually!).
If you follow this blog, you may be thinking he has dropped Drupal! Far from it. I can't wait for this Wednesday night and the meeting at Manchester Digital Development Agency. Books aren't the whole story: I have to add that installing Drupal, screwing up, deleting, installing again and finding some stability at last... such that I can check out the innards of Drupal (play!) has helped me enormously in starting with Ruby, Rails and Eclipse. Hope I can maintain this momentum.

I've also noticed the ads for Ruby and Rails hosting too - wish I could find a sponsor or two...

Spreading the cognitive and temporal jam yet further - I've downloaded Inkscape's Vector Graphics editor. Still need a decent banner (and finish the socio-tech paper - must contact the editors!).