timfitzzz

A pretty good week

Or: ...no, yeah it was good, I awno

Last week at TLC we spent a lot of time talking about my MongoJS implementation for twinput, which is of course the Twitter-centric OWS archive tool that I've been working on. This was very helpful! At the end, though, Guillaume reminded me to consult the user stories that I we had previously developed -- which I hadn't really even looked at in a week or so -- and pointed out, to my surprised surprise, that integrating Mongo really isn't even a pre-requisite for the main story I need to be working on. Lesson: I need to always check the user stories! I had been mis-remembering them in a way that helped me to justify chasing rabbits down wrong holes.

However, perhaps because I am nothing if not great at doggedly pursuing the wrong rabbits down the wrong holes, I decided I would fix my Mongo implementation before turning back to the main user story for the week. This turned out to take quite a bit longer than I thought it would, but it led t

timfitzzz

Reading about React.js

— Here's a walkthrough of the Getting Started, basically:

This was dope because I went from "what the hell is React" to "here is a list of things that I now know about React.js:

1. "React is the 'view' in the application."
2. React "gets you to think in components." The writer of this walkthrough compares it to Legos, which is intriguing. Components is an interesting term; how does it relate to layers of abstraction already in use in JS, like modules? Ahh, a new term: component-driven development.
3. React has "this virtual DOM thing", which "makes the rendering super fast but still keeps it easily understandable and controllable at the same time". This strikes me as a ridiculous sentence on a number of levels. But interesting concept I suppose!
4. React is "mainly a concept". It is more a concept than it is a library! OK cool I like concepts. What's the concept?

timfitzzz

Constructing Chill Graphics

Models facilitate two fundamental acts of science: description and comparison.

Models: ideas and explanations that do two things: describe past observations and predict future outcomes.

Unlike models of hard scientific law, which describe deterministic behavior, statistical models help to understand sources of variation. "What is causing the differences in outcomes that I see?"

So, understanding distributions is the center of statistical or probabilistic thinking. Distributions have two components: 1. a support set (what outcomes are possible) and 2. a mass (probability) function which tells how likely the outcomes are. Variation is something that will be encountered in the process of describing and comparing -- in the process of doing science. It helps us replace noise with explanation.

timfitzzz

Fundamental Statistical Concepts in Presenting Data

Notes, Part 2 (Part 1)

Starting from Page 24, we now examine a plot created by the author. This graphic is a line plot with a linear y axis, a logarithmic x axis, and a variable 'range' that sweeps along with the curved lines that are being plotted. Within the graphic itself there appear three significant paragraphs of very small text.

We learn from the commentary that this chart pertains to "the buildup of fatty deposits in artery walls", known as "peripheral artery disease." Patients have one of three classifications: no disease, claudication (pain in legs), or critical limb ischemia (dangerously restricted blood supply legs). The study being charted considered the overall health of the patients' arteries, the degree of tibial artery calcification scored as "TAC", and other covariates: age, race, smoking status, etc.

The examination of the data that produced this plot was meant to unde

timfitzzz

Thoughts on Twinput design

OK so after having gone through a good chunk of this book I think I'm ready to start thinking about how this visualization shit might work out.

So first of all, though the data is largely the same, there are two scopes that we're interested in visualizing and I think it's important to think about the two data displays separately. We've sort of been doing that, but just to put a line under it. The first one is in-story scope....

Wait, no. There are three scopes. I think. From broadest, to most narrow:

• The epic scope; the story of the data represented by all the stories together.
• The story scope; understanding what that particular day contains.

timfitzzz

Life Amidst The Datums

It's been awhile since my last check-in, but my thoughts never stray far from the work, nor from this group. At the macro level, my life is an almost-balanced exchange between uncommon freedom -- which has enabled me to put longer stretches of time into my learning here -- and an overwhelming stress, which sometimes keeps me away. One hopes that this balances out over a long period of time, though at times like now it can feel like it definitely doesn't.

I'm interested in any thoughts about how to fix this. I'm considering any option, because it sucks to get pulled away from what I really want to be doing in order to handle repetitive technological tasks in support of work that I understand to lack meaning.

But, tonight (Friday night, when I started putting this together) I have a window of a few hours. I sat down to begin to work, and decided that perhaps the best way to start is to catch up with you all, and put some time into documenting what I've learned recently in the time

timfitzzz

I think it's going to be tough to sketch out the slider in a way that tells us much, but I also suspect that this isn't going to be the easiest thing to develop.

There's a demo slider in react here:

https://cell303.github.io/react-slider/

A lot of what we need is in rough form there:

• draggable handle
• sliding changes value based on location of handle

timfitzzz

Towards a digital progressive stack

I first encountered “Progressive stack” during Occupy Wall Street, where nearly all meetings ran by some version of formal consensus process. Progressive stack modifies the deliberative parts of a process by empowering the ‘stack taker’ - the member of the facilitation team tasked with ordering speakers - to shuffle the order such that members of traditionally disempowered groups recieve priority. It is intended as an instrument against the internalized forms of oppression, superiority, and bias that we all carry around, and its adoption by Occupy is a good example of how central the concept of intersectionality was to that movement's form and intended function.

I am a fan of progressive stack, because I am a superfan of fucking up the normative power dynamics that left unchecked (or simply unacknowledged) will inevitably limit, fracture and deplete movements for justice. I’m also someone who happens to be trying to build instruments of collective decision-making online

timfitzzz

Re-Discovering Cybernetics

@dicey__'s notes about Cybernetics. Probably mostly just paraphrased, quoted, or jacked as a mnemonic exercise. It's not plagiarism because I'm not writing a paper or an article. These are my notes, this is how I actively read, and they're on the Internet for your potential (but by no means guaranteed) benefit.

Source one: "Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics", Francis Heylighen, Free University of Brussels

Provided Glossary:

Variety: a measure of the number of possible states or actions
Entropy: a probabilistic measure of variety