VisualWiki

Upgraded to codex to MediaWiki version 1.10.1, not without some gnashing of teeth.

Also added a CAPTCHA check to hopefully reduce the amount of wiki spam.

Basically, write good quality stuff all the time, and people will pay attention.  So, basically the opposite of the post I am writing now. 

Write Articles, Not Blog Postings (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Although, I might argue that there is some value in small posts.  This post, for example, is essentially a vote that I found Nielsen’s article worthwhile, or valuable.  I could also vote on a site like digg or del.ico.us, but my own blog is a viable platform as well. 

The GROK Codex may have some downtime today as I upgrade versions of MediaWiki.  Hopefully keep out some of these spammers.  

An innovative use of html layout…a scale model of a hydrogen atom.

http://www.phrenopolis.com/perspective/atom/

JPL Robotics: News

CLARAty is the Coupled Layer Architecture for Robotic Autonomy. The first release of its software, version 0.10-beta, is now available publicly at http://claraty.jpl.nasa.gov.

CLARAty is an integrated framework for reusable robotic software. It defines interfaces for common robotic functionality and integrates multiple implementations of any given functionality. Examples of such capabilities include pose estimation, navigation, locomotion and planning. In addition to supporting multiple algorithms, it provides adaptations to multiple robotic platforms. CLARAty development was primarily funded by the Mars Technology Program and it serves as the integration environment for the program’s rover technology developments.

With this release, a total of 44 CLARAty modules (~100K lines of code) are now available under the JPL Open Source License. This release is intended to share with the robotics community some of the core robotic modules which were jointly developed with NASA Ames Research Center, Carnegie Mellon, and University of Minnesota. This first release represents about 10% of all CLARAty modules and 30% of the generic modules planned for future release.

Primary functionality in these modules includes math infrastructure, rotation matrices with Euler angles, quaternions, and coordinate transformations (interoperable homogeneous and quaternion transforms). It also includes the coordinate frame infrastructure that connect transformations and mechanisms with moving parts. Additionally, you will find mechanism models for wheeled, legged and hybrid vehicles. Other modules include device and device group infrastructure with support for generic digital and analog I/O, cameras, and motors. Several modules in this release provide vision infrastructure for images, color images, camera models, 3D point cloud, and surface normal image representations.

Technorati Tags: NASA, robotics, autonomy, software

Visualizing the ‘Power Struggle′ in Wikipedia : A Beautiful WWW\Visualization Flash Perl Python Php Processing Data Mining Recommendation IR

Much like my visualization of the netflix prize competition data, we began this piece by representing the data as a network. In this case the nodes in the network are wikipedia articles and the edges are the links between articles. We then (with some help from our friends at Sandia) used an algorithm to lay out all 650,000 nodes (wikipedia articles) that had at least one link in such a way that similar articles are near one another. These are the yellow dots, which when viewed at low res give a yellow tint to the whole picture.

The sizes of the nodes (circles, dots, whatever you want to call them), are based on a model of revision activity. So large circles indicate that an article might be controversial, or the subject of lots of vandalism, or just a topic whose content frequently changes. We labeled only the largest nodes, to keep it readable. There is an interactive version of this in the works based on the google maps platform which will change the labels and pictures used as the user ‘zooms′ in or out. Stay tuned for that.

The image used for each tile was selected automatically, simply by using the first image in the most linked to article among all the articles in that tile. We were pleasantly surprised by the quality of the images that appeared.

Technorati Tags: wikipedia, information visualization

The means which can be used to assess concept maps depends in part on how the map was generated (Turns, et. al 2000). If the user freely identifies concepts they feel are related to the subject, then assessment may be either structural or relational (West, et al. 2002). A structural assessment assigns weighted scores to physical graph characteristics. Typical structure assessment metrics include:

• number of concepts
• number of links
• number of hierarchical levels
• number of cross-links
• number of examples/information resources linked

Structural assessment is attractive because it can be objectively calculated; however, structural assessment does not attempt to quantify the quality of concepts or links. The quality of the concepts, links, and propositions is measured using relational assessment. Often this is done by comparing the map to an expert-generated map. Relational assessment is more subjective than the structural method. However, relational assessment may advantage over structural methods for complex maps because it has greater emphasis on map correctness and overall quality. In terms of assessing user-generated concept maps, both quantitative and qualitative assessments can reveal valuable information about understanding, as well as the ability to reveal changes in understanding over time (Edmonson, 2000; Kinchin, Hay, & Adams, 2000).

Concept maps can also be generated using a template, scaffold, or guide (Dansereau 2005; Rye & Rubba 2002). Users are given some initial information such as a list of concepts, or an initial arrangement of concepts. This is often the case in classroom examples, where concept maps are used to assess student learning about a particular subject (Ruiz-Primo & Shavelson, 1996; Goldsmith & Davenport, 1990; Rye & Rubba, 1998; Jonassen 2000). Ruiz-Primo and Shavelson (1996), in reviewing 21 research students in which concept maps were used to assess learning, found that most used relational methods for scoring maps, including using an expert map as a basis for comparison, or expert examination of student maps for quality of concepts and propositions. They concluded that relational assessment methods, which “focus more on the adequacy of the propositions over tose that focus simply on counting the number of map components (i.e, nodes and links)(p 595) are preferred over structural methods. McClure, et al. (1999), tested six methods of scoring student maps, and found the “relational with master map” method achieved the highest score reliability. Confidence in the relational assessment methods can be improved by using multiple raters, and testing for high interrater reliability or interscorer agreement (Ruiz-Primo & Shavelson, 1996; Moore 1983)

(more…)

Sigmar-Olaf Tergan (2005)   has written an excellent literature review of concept mapping.   I’m working on taking his article an making a concept map of the concept mapping literature.   I think this exercise will help me in several ways:

1. I’ll get to know the literature quite well through building the map.
2. I’ll get practice at building maps, so I’ll know what’s good, and what needs to be improved.
3. I think whatever I build will be similar to how I envision VisualWiki working, so its a   good way to build a prototype
4. I should be able to send my dissertation committe to the map so they can see how much of the literature I’ve viewed and organized.

It turns out its quite a bit of work to produce one of these maps.   Takes a lot of thinking about how to say   things, how to make the linking words work with each other, create links to the appropriate online resources, etc.   It took me a couple hours to do the first 2 1/2 pages of the paper, although I think I will get faster as it as I get more practice.   Still, its like going through the article with a fine-toothed comb.   It’ll be important to do a good job of limiting the number of concepts I put in my map — just pick out the most important, key concepts.

Tergan, S.O. (2005). Digital concept maps for managing knowledge and information. Knowledge and Information Visualization: Searching for Synergies. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science: Heidelberg/NY, 185-204. Retrieved from http://www.springerlink.com/index/TLYPFPV975KG8XBC.pdf.

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I’ve enjoyed using the Zotero Citation Management software recently.  I really like that it is open source, and that it has a relatively easy to use API to access citation and bibliography data[1]. 
As an example of how useful Zotero can be, I’ve created a Firefox
Extension, ZoteroToGROKCodex, to export references directly into the
GROK Codex.  It should really speed the process of adding items to the GROK Lab wiki

Zotero To GROK Codex

[1] It will be nice when they have more documentation available.  Right now, it requires examining the Zotero soruce code to see how the reference items can be manipulated.

Technorati Tags: zotero, bibliography, citation management, firefox, firefox extension, programming

Maybe some of the Javascript/Mozilla extension experts out there can help me understand why this does not work.  I’m creating a Mozilla Extension that opens a new browser window to a particular URL on a wiki.  It is pointing to the edit page, so all we need to do is change the value of the entry textarea using some DOM magic.

Opening the page to a new window and getting access to its DOM should be simple enough, but its not.  I first tried:

codexWin = window.open(url,’codexWin’);
codexWin.addEventListener(’load’,updateCodexPage, false);

That should call updateCodexPage when codexWin opens and sends the onload event when the page is done loading (I also tried the DOMContentLoaded event which would alert me when the DOM is done loading.  However, that code does not work.  I get the new window, which opens to site url.  However, the updateCodexPage call back never seems to get fired, so the page never updated.  Why is this?  Maybe I don’t fully understand the security model.  Or maybe there’s some javascript variable scope thing I don’t quite get.

I solve the problem by  using the setInterval method.  Basically, instead of waitng for an event, the application checks the page regularly to see if its done loading. 

Technorati Tags: mozilla, firefox, javascript, zotero, programming, extension