This search:shape coding - ResearchIndex document query at CiteSeer brings up a healthy page of citations of a paper I wrote back in 1990. It was published in the Proceedings of the first Conference on Scientific Visualization sponsored by the IEEE, NSF, and NASA.
Shape coding of multidimensional data on a microcomputer displayis the link to the actual article on the ACM site. It declares that there are 16 other papers that cite it in their primary bibliography or text.
The abstract from the publication:
"The visual representation of data from complex systems, whether databases, measured scientific data, or simulation output, holds the promise of discovering patterns in the data that will increase its management efficiency while revealing relationships invisible to numeric methods. In this paper we present a simple and flexible method of shape coding for higher dimensional data sets that allows the database operator or discipline scientist quick access to promising patterns within and among records or samples. The example used is a thirteen parameter set of solar wind, magnetosphere, and ground observation data collected hourly for twenty-one days in 1976. "
The story in a nutshell:
In the late 1970's I was doing design studies based on quilt patterns as a graphical design exercise, and it jogged a memory. A few years earlier I had worked on a statistical research project tracking population movement in Rhode Island during the 1890s, and the quantity of data was overwhelming. The primary investigator on the project commented that I had an unusual knack for looking at pages of data and "seeing" patterns in the numbers without actually going through them item by item. At the time it occurred to me that a computer program that translated the numbers into visual patterns as I used them would be a good invention. The quilt patterns seemed a good vehicle for organizing this complex data.
I started thinking about this and doing some research. It seemed like a good enough idea that I actually went to night school for 13 months to get certified as a computer programmer by 1982. I immediately started writing software to develop graphic patterns from data. This had nothing to do with my actual graphic design job, as I was still working with press-on type and sable lettering brushes at the county.
A local engineer was interested in my work and offered me access to one of the first microcomputers with decent graphic display...an 8 color, 300x600 Texas Instruments pc. I spent evenings and weekends building a program for design and pattern management. I even spun it off as a graphics program and sold it through TI's third party support system as Micropix. But my real interest wasn't pretty designs, it was data-driven displays of complex, multivariate and multidimensional data.
While I was doing this, I was thinking of the use for it within organizations like county governments. In a democracy, governance was decisions made by citizens, who were rarely informed of the organizations they were making decisions about. At the time it seemed as though governments took a protective stance of hiding data in order to deflect citizen inquiry, by and large. An automated reporting system that depicted the status of all government functions according to commonly agreed upon criteria seemed like a good idea, and a good fit with the ideal of democracy.
As I made progress in feeding data into the display, I had several interesting experiences. At one point I arranged a demo to the head of the county IT department. He took a quick look and turned away, saying no manager in the county could understand what they were looking at in a pure visual display.
On the other hand, the McGraw Hill corporation flew me out to NY shortly after the Challenger shuttle disaster, and I was able to explain, with the aid of my software, how the actual votes of all 5000 of the NASA engineers could have been taken into account on the day of the launch, instead of the disasterous summary report which resulted in the deaths of American astronauts. This resulted in an invitation to work with California Testing Bureau, which was responsible for standardized student testing at over half the school districts in the nation. I worked to their specifications for over a year, as usual in my spare time on evenings and weekends, and delivered several example reports using my technology on their data. The outcome of that experience was experience, not cash, as they continued to express interest in my ideas but didn't feel the market was ready for a product based on them yet.
By this time, around 1988, I had contacted NASA, specifically the Godard Space Science Data Center. Dr. Lloyd Treinish, the head of the Data Center, invited me to attend the first Scientific Visualization conference at JPL in 1988. I scraped together some cash and flew out there. The encounter resulted in me standing up in a room full of scientists asserting that there were ways to visualize multidimensional data effectively that had not surfaced in the literature for various reasons. While many of the younger scientists argued that it would be in the literature if it could be done, a senior researcher from NASA Ames who was tapped to chair the next conference invited me to organize and chair a workshop at his conference. The topic was to be the visualization of multidimensional data.
Val Watson, the senior Ames researcher, endured my countless questions and enthusiasms with great forebearance. I called most of the major corporate research centers, universities, and supercomputing centers around the country tracking down leads to people who might be doing research in this area. I ended up inviting about a dozen presenters, all of whom accepted the invitation. The Conference was held at Stanford University in February of 1990. One of the presenters I had invited, Larry xxxxx, was head of the Naval Resarch Labs computer facilities, and took me somewhat under his wing. He grilled me on my approach, and talked me up to his peers. In the meantime I chaired the two day workshop, and we had presentations from Bell Labs, the Santa Fe Institute, IBM, Godard, and numerous other institutions.
This resulted in an invitation to put my work into a paper and submit it to the follow on Visualization conference to be held in San Francisco that June. The paper was accepted, and I was invited to create a workshop on Multi Dimensional visualization for that conference, too. Eventually I chaired workshops at the 90, 91, and 92 conferences, delivered a tutorial at the 92 conference, and was on the steering committee for the series of conferences.
In 91 the conference was in San Diego, and I was approached by the head of the Lawrence Livermore Labs computing facility and asked if I wanted to participate in a research project. The project was the International Thermonuclear Energy Reactor project, ITER, which was the first international research project involving Russia, the US and Japan after Glasnost. My role was to devise visualizations of the engineering design points for the proposed reactor under the direction of the head of Information Sciences for the project, a Dr. John Perkins, from England.
Following the wearying pattern of doing this all in evenings and weekends, I worked part time for Livermore for about 8 months, producing a series of visualizations and co-authoring two papers for the project staff meetings.
ITER was not a priority for the US after the first Iraq war, and my sponsor on the project pulled back from outside contracts. Eventually the US involvement in the project ground to a halt. I have heard recently that it might be starting to gain some momentum again.
By late '92 it was clear that my marriage was headed for dissolution, I had run out of energy and support for my work.
While maintaining interest, and co-chairing the panels committee for the 93 conference with Dr. Treinish, I opted out of attending the Conference, and dropped my involvement in the research. Technology had outpaced me, my limited macintosh and pc access at home was complicated by advances in programming and operating system technology that rendered my skills somewhat obsolete.
Things sat dormant for a long time, with occasional contact with the people I had met through my Conference activities.
By 2002 I had upgraded my home computer equipment and invested in a development system. I wanted to program a simple graphics utility for home use that I could sell and help meet my oldest son's college expenses. As I acquired proficiency in the new environment, I began to see ways that I could recode the old visualization routines into an even more powerful tool.
In spring and summer of 2003 I spent an intensive few months bringing the old technology to life in a new platform. I got it to the point where I could depict all 3000+ counties in the US in one display, with point detail for 40 census parameters for each county depicted simultaneously: some 120000 data points color and shape coded for visual inspection. A subordinate display on the same screen depicted the individual county under the cursor on the main display, with detailed info on that county, and a browsable surface that showed the distribution of values for the entire data set for any given parameter.
At that point I decided I needed a support system for this kind of work. My efforts to bring this to the county's attention again met with no interest. Recently this might have changed.
10.6.04
7.6.04
Dung Beetles of the Enlightenment
I imagined that we are the last generation of the Enlightenment. It came to me while driving past interminable traffic tie ups on the freeway, and coming across two affable guys with drink cups in their hands sitting off to the left of the freeway, near thier smacked up rides, conversing in a laid-back manner. They were late twenties professionals by the looks of their outfits and the status of their vehicles...a Previa and an Expedition. The Expedition had whacked the right rear bumper of the Previa and shattered it, without ploughing further into the body or frame. There was debris on the road but no apparent injury or major damage. The two guys chatted, sipped from their drink cups, waiting for the orange pickup truck that will get them going again or help them get towed to safety.
I grasped this in the three seconds I flew past, and for the rest of the twenty minute commute mused on the idea that we are the last generation of the Enlightenment. You know the Enlightenment, right? It started in the late 16th century or so, and was given voice by Bacon, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mill, and others. They were not Atheists, but they spurned the Church, High and Low, as a source of wisdom for humanity. The movement spawned the writings and actions of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and eventually the Russian Revolution. Rooted in a practical if not entirely materialistic posture, the Enlightenment has stood for man's highest intellectual achievements for a few centuries. Unfortunately, it also has come to stand for the supremacy of the White European Male attitude toward the world.
Though not necessarily entailed, the precepts of the Enlightenment and the Colonial and rational, Imperial viewpoints of the protestant western leaders of the last few centuries have become entwined. With the jettison of White Male Privelege from the ranks of LifeBoat Earth, we have also seen the discarding of Enlightenment principles.
Our generation, the Boom Babies, are like dung beetles rolling little balls of Enlightenment shit around. It serves us individually, and is proof of excremental processes on a much grander order than we know, but it no longer constitutes an integrating principle or set of rules by which society at large can guide their lives.
What does this have to do with two guys musing over the inconvenience of their car accident on the side of a morning rush hour traffic lane?
Simply this. The Enlightenment was the philosophy of unlimited competition, of the war of all against all, of the striving thrum which utters discontent in every Capitalist and Protestant heart. The Enlightenment informed Sex in the City, Survivor, and all the Reality shows. They are the swan song of the individual pitted against the world, nature and other individuals.
Emerging from the wreckage of that whole divisive and fear-sotted world view, is a gentle blur of post-Enlightenment society. In this new reality, people who have accidents don't reach for their cell phones to call their lawyers before having an amicable chat with their accidental correspondant. They indulge the moment, and let their Prozac or Zen Buddhism or Iced Half Caf Soy Latte do the worrying and striving for them at a molecular or subconscious level.
On the surface, we will become sweeter. Down in the machinery, tools will be dropped, deadlines missed, deliveries mislaid, and the machines will gradually grind to a halt.
Who knows where we go from here? If you do, please enlighten me.
I grasped this in the three seconds I flew past, and for the rest of the twenty minute commute mused on the idea that we are the last generation of the Enlightenment. You know the Enlightenment, right? It started in the late 16th century or so, and was given voice by Bacon, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Voltaire, Rousseau, Mill, and others. They were not Atheists, but they spurned the Church, High and Low, as a source of wisdom for humanity. The movement spawned the writings and actions of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and eventually the Russian Revolution. Rooted in a practical if not entirely materialistic posture, the Enlightenment has stood for man's highest intellectual achievements for a few centuries. Unfortunately, it also has come to stand for the supremacy of the White European Male attitude toward the world.
Though not necessarily entailed, the precepts of the Enlightenment and the Colonial and rational, Imperial viewpoints of the protestant western leaders of the last few centuries have become entwined. With the jettison of White Male Privelege from the ranks of LifeBoat Earth, we have also seen the discarding of Enlightenment principles.
Our generation, the Boom Babies, are like dung beetles rolling little balls of Enlightenment shit around. It serves us individually, and is proof of excremental processes on a much grander order than we know, but it no longer constitutes an integrating principle or set of rules by which society at large can guide their lives.
What does this have to do with two guys musing over the inconvenience of their car accident on the side of a morning rush hour traffic lane?
Simply this. The Enlightenment was the philosophy of unlimited competition, of the war of all against all, of the striving thrum which utters discontent in every Capitalist and Protestant heart. The Enlightenment informed Sex in the City, Survivor, and all the Reality shows. They are the swan song of the individual pitted against the world, nature and other individuals.
Emerging from the wreckage of that whole divisive and fear-sotted world view, is a gentle blur of post-Enlightenment society. In this new reality, people who have accidents don't reach for their cell phones to call their lawyers before having an amicable chat with their accidental correspondant. They indulge the moment, and let their Prozac or Zen Buddhism or Iced Half Caf Soy Latte do the worrying and striving for them at a molecular or subconscious level.
On the surface, we will become sweeter. Down in the machinery, tools will be dropped, deadlines missed, deliveries mislaid, and the machines will gradually grind to a halt.
Who knows where we go from here? If you do, please enlighten me.
3.6.04
Notes to self: math
Over the last six months I took an intensive pre-calculus course at the U. It means I learned a year's worth of precalculus in one semester. As I look back over the blog I am surprised that I never mentioned it here. My time on Howard's Brainstorm's probably used up any commentariat urges I felt about this topic at the time.
But now I am thinking about what, exactly, happened to me.
Note 1. Patience with the left brain.
I have always been smart technically. It has always been easy for me to grasp extremely difficult notions and relate them correctly to similar ideas. But my handicap has been an impatience that becomes a kind of wild feeling after any prolonged exposure to hard ideas. After 20 minutes of studying semiology or genetics or hyperdimensional space, I am in a zone and happy. After 40 minutes I am manic and ready to tear through the room rearranging the furniture, making noise, unable to sit still. You can't build a career on 30 minutes of attention twice a day.
The math class forced me to learn to sit with hard stuff for hours. I had to detune my adrenaline. At first this resulted in increased naps of increased intensity and satisfaction. Eventually I found I could study for 4 hours at a stretch, that I had acquired a kind of pace, but it precluded a deep intellectual excitement. A kind of yoga. I find this extremely useful in several areas of my life, including my real job which has recently changed from mastering lots of new technology intermittantly, to mastering one really big, extensive technology over a fairly long arc.
Note 2. Humility.
I am much more interested in other people's ideas these days, and concurrently less interested in my own, or even coming up with new ideas. When I began to surrender to trigonometric exercises (Hey! I GET this stuff, lets move on, oKAY!??) and did them over and over, it began to sink in that the simplicity and elegance of sines and cosines was one of the underlying mysteries of modern western technology, and I had always taken them for granted. The Great Love of My Life intellectually has been hyperspace: multidimensional reality. I have been stuck in a geometric and visual relationship with these wonderous issues, however. The class imposed a painful apprenticeship to some brutally hard but eventually very rewarding Algebra. It was a true breakthrough for me to realize that these concepts which I flung carelessly around in my thinking were much more powerful, basic and interesting than I had allowed for decades. And for the real humility kicker, there are tens of thousands of 19 year olds getting this stuff every day, every year, year after year. Okay!
Note 3. A new love on the horizon.
When my math teacher found out that I had actually published in the field of multidimensional data display and organized international workshops on the topic, he asked me what the hell I was doing in precalculus. I told him truthfully I needed the prerequisite to take the more interesting classes in modelling that I wanted to add to my major in Urban Studies. I also allowed as I had some kind of weird intuition about multidimensional applications of cosine transform methods as was used in the JPEG compression algorithm. It sounds like science fiction, but the depiction of complex higher dimensional data sets is hopelessly mired in a few tired methods that haven't seen any progress in 15 years or more, and that is reason enough to try something of a gamble. He happened to be knowledgable enough about these things to at least know what I was talking about, but not enough to form a solid opinion about my chances. He gave me a B- in the class and invited me to talk to him this summer and see if the U had a place for the kind of research I envisioned.
Note 4. The first break in 20 some years.
Ever since I got my first programming certificate in 1982, I have been pushing myself to develop a multidimensional data visualization package that incorporates what are considered "aesthetic" perceptual skills but will someday be recognized as essential intelligence. I have been perhaps unlucky enough to actually get some results without ever getting backing, and it has consumed more than its share of my faith, energy, and youth. The work I did in the math class was hard enough that I felt I deserved a break, and I have spent the two weeks since finals assembling a very inexpensive collection of used midi gear to add to my modest home studio, where I intend to make noises for the summer. I feel I am getting some intellectual rest for a change, and not being "on" all the time about dimensionality and representation and cognition and perceptual physiology etc etc etc. I have found time to play, with my toys, and with Kelsey, and with Sam and Sara, too. It feels good.
But now I am thinking about what, exactly, happened to me.
Note 1. Patience with the left brain.
I have always been smart technically. It has always been easy for me to grasp extremely difficult notions and relate them correctly to similar ideas. But my handicap has been an impatience that becomes a kind of wild feeling after any prolonged exposure to hard ideas. After 20 minutes of studying semiology or genetics or hyperdimensional space, I am in a zone and happy. After 40 minutes I am manic and ready to tear through the room rearranging the furniture, making noise, unable to sit still. You can't build a career on 30 minutes of attention twice a day.
The math class forced me to learn to sit with hard stuff for hours. I had to detune my adrenaline. At first this resulted in increased naps of increased intensity and satisfaction. Eventually I found I could study for 4 hours at a stretch, that I had acquired a kind of pace, but it precluded a deep intellectual excitement. A kind of yoga. I find this extremely useful in several areas of my life, including my real job which has recently changed from mastering lots of new technology intermittantly, to mastering one really big, extensive technology over a fairly long arc.
Note 2. Humility.
I am much more interested in other people's ideas these days, and concurrently less interested in my own, or even coming up with new ideas. When I began to surrender to trigonometric exercises (Hey! I GET this stuff, lets move on, oKAY!??) and did them over and over, it began to sink in that the simplicity and elegance of sines and cosines was one of the underlying mysteries of modern western technology, and I had always taken them for granted. The Great Love of My Life intellectually has been hyperspace: multidimensional reality. I have been stuck in a geometric and visual relationship with these wonderous issues, however. The class imposed a painful apprenticeship to some brutally hard but eventually very rewarding Algebra. It was a true breakthrough for me to realize that these concepts which I flung carelessly around in my thinking were much more powerful, basic and interesting than I had allowed for decades. And for the real humility kicker, there are tens of thousands of 19 year olds getting this stuff every day, every year, year after year. Okay!
Note 3. A new love on the horizon.
When my math teacher found out that I had actually published in the field of multidimensional data display and organized international workshops on the topic, he asked me what the hell I was doing in precalculus. I told him truthfully I needed the prerequisite to take the more interesting classes in modelling that I wanted to add to my major in Urban Studies. I also allowed as I had some kind of weird intuition about multidimensional applications of cosine transform methods as was used in the JPEG compression algorithm. It sounds like science fiction, but the depiction of complex higher dimensional data sets is hopelessly mired in a few tired methods that haven't seen any progress in 15 years or more, and that is reason enough to try something of a gamble. He happened to be knowledgable enough about these things to at least know what I was talking about, but not enough to form a solid opinion about my chances. He gave me a B- in the class and invited me to talk to him this summer and see if the U had a place for the kind of research I envisioned.
Note 4. The first break in 20 some years.
Ever since I got my first programming certificate in 1982, I have been pushing myself to develop a multidimensional data visualization package that incorporates what are considered "aesthetic" perceptual skills but will someday be recognized as essential intelligence. I have been perhaps unlucky enough to actually get some results without ever getting backing, and it has consumed more than its share of my faith, energy, and youth. The work I did in the math class was hard enough that I felt I deserved a break, and I have spent the two weeks since finals assembling a very inexpensive collection of used midi gear to add to my modest home studio, where I intend to make noises for the summer. I feel I am getting some intellectual rest for a change, and not being "on" all the time about dimensionality and representation and cognition and perceptual physiology etc etc etc. I have found time to play, with my toys, and with Kelsey, and with Sam and Sara, too. It feels good.
1.6.04
happiness and Kelsey
We had a 10-month-old goddess visit us over Memorial Day. She had secrets that couldn't hurt us and surprises that would change us, and was generous with her time. One by one we fell into her little songs, and became smaller and better for it. She forgave everything, touched the brightest colors and made quick notes on the rest, and dropped off to sleep without apology. She woke up with the smile of an awards judge bringing you the first place ribbon in the show of your life, and she knew us. We sat around and talked about all the ways we didn't know ourselves, and it dawned on us that what she knew about us was all that we needed known. She knew we loved her, and we were imperfect, and the darkness on the horizon was just one more night among a myriad of nights, it wasn't the end of the world. She knew the divinity of the cat and listened to the spirits of the house, remembering fiercely what we could not be trusted with in our old, panic-littered states. The colors of the geranium and the odor of the rainstorm were masterpieces in her fresh mind. For all her newness, she spilled an ancient fountain of life and the love of life upon us. We wept when she left, because we had not even in the grace of her moment with us known who she was, and we knew ourselves as never before, framed by the small perfect frame of her knowing us. Oh, we knew we would be known like that some day. Touched like that some day. And indeed we were.
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