This week in class I decided to start working on parsing relationship-based email text from different periods of time. This is a screen-capture of the initial program running through processing. This pulls and counts instances of words from the same week in April of 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008 respectively. As there are fewer instances of the words, the red gets darker. As there are more instances of the words, the red is lower in alpha value. The thinking was that it was the words that were typed less frequently that were actually more significant.
This is video of the applet in action:
Screen capture
I'd like to continue with it for the midterm week project, particularly getting more content together so the visualization can be more meaningful, and maybe having the program recognize specific words that could be pre-determined as either negative or positive, or both.. still working on the logistics of that.
posted by Amanda @ 10:24 AM,
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For the last two weeks in Rest Of You, we were supposed to be recording information about ourselves - tracking our body's behavior across time. I decided to pay attention to which foot I spend more time depending on more heavily. I suspect that I generally put my weight on my right foot while I am standing still (walking is largely irrelevant to this task).
I started by outfitting a pair of shoes with force sensors in the heels. I wired those up and connected them to analog pins 0 and 1 on my Arduino Diecimila. It was fairly easy to read values from these sensors through the Arduino serial window. I cut up a flip flop for padding the sensors, protecting them and making them slightly less sensitive to force. In Arduino, I subtracted 800 from the analog read values. I did this because my body weight automatically caused the values to shoot up to the maximum (1024). Subtracting the same amount from each value kept the value away from the maximum, while keeping the two sensors the same relative to one another. This all worked out well. Typically, force sensors read quite differently from one another and the values need to be calibrated, but that wasn't really the case with my sensors. Maybe it's because they were bought from the same place at the same time - not really sure. So that was really it for week1 of the process - it was mostly getting the wiring and physical stuff together. Week2 was slightly more complicated.
For week 2, we were to get the values reading in Processing through serial. Ideally we would get the values tracking over time, and run everything with code written in Eclipse. It took me quite a while to get used to the Eclipse interface and figure out which libraries to import for Processing and serial (core.jar, RXTX.jar and serial.jar respectively). Once I sorted that out, and learned how to use the CVS (to grab sample code) I was able to write some code of my own. I wrote a simple program to present two ellipses on screen on load. The diameter of the circles would vary depending on the analog values coming in from the shoes. The idea was to have the circle grow larger as more force is applied and smaller when the force is reduced. Though it was a simple program, getting it to be stable took me forever. From Arduino I sent out the two analog values and the value 255 in bytes in an array of [3]. In processing, the code received the three bytes, threw away the 255 and cycled through an array of [2] to place the values in an X variable and a Z variable (which could have ostensibly be used for anything). Initially, actually, the X and Z (or sensorValues [0] and [1], controlled the X and Y placement of the ellipses on screen). Every other time (at least) that I ran the code, though, the applet would crash. After bringing the code into Eclipse, the error messages became a little more specific and I realized I was overflowing my array on the processing side. Matt Parker helped me stick in a little conditional statement that would prevent that from happening. Here's the basic Eclipse code:
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import processing.core.PApplet;
import processing.serial.Serial;
public class RestOfYou2 extends PApplet{
int x;
int z;
Serial myPort;
int[] sensorValues = new int[2];
int i = 0;
boolean firstContact = false;
public void setup() {
size(1000,1000);
frameRate(30);
smooth();
println(Serial.list());
String portName = Serial.list()[2];
myPort = new Serial(this, portName, 9600);
myPort.write("A");
print("A");
}
public void serialEvent(Serial myPort) {
int inByte = myPort.read();
if ((inByte != 254) && (i<2)){
sensorValues[i] = inByte;
i++;
}
else {
i=0;
}
}
public void draw() {
background(255);
stroke(255,200,200);
fill(255,200,200);
ellipse (260, 500, 60, x);
x = ((sensorValues[0]) * -2);
ellipse (730, 500, 60, z);
z = ((sensorValues[1]) * -2);
println("left: " + sensorValues[0]);
println("right:" + sensorValues[1]);
}
}
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After that, I got my sensor values writing to a file with Dan O.'s file writing code. The txt file saved to my workspace with each value read timestamped.
posted by Amanda @ 5:56 PM,
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illusions of free will and illusions of control
This week we are to blog about illusion after reading one of the books from the class reading list. I chose to read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. I don't have a strong background in genetics (or biology in general), but most of Dawkins' text is fairly approachable by a lay person. I'm probably half way through the book at this point, but what has really popped out at me is the extent to which our behavior is guided largely by our genetic survival and propagation instinct. Dawkins argues that we need to approach survival of the fittest and evolution through the lens of looking at individual genes, rather than whole bodies. Overall, it's shocking to think of the behavior he discusses through the framework of genetics; the illusion being that we have free will and choose altruism or selfishness. Our bodies are making decisions for us, and not just our bodies, but our genes, some of the smallest components of the human being, and parts we are born with and can never change. It's not individual genes responsible for this decision making, but rather whole gene pools - illuminating all of humanity's (and other species') interdependence. The illusion of complete individuality and autonomous decision making is brought into question.
illusions of time and space
Recently I have been thinking about more temporal and spatial illusions though. I spend a lot of time with people who have various levels of cognitive impairment and dementia, and am always amazed at the ways in which they perceive time and their placement in the world. To me, of course, it is clear that they are not living in "reality", or at least not the reality of that current moment as perceived by others. It is a sunny spring afternoon and we are sitting in the garden. One man, I'll call him Sol, is thrilled to be at the MoMA for the day. We are not at the MoMA, but at a hospital. Somehow he is convinced that we are in the MoMA garden. (Does MoMA even have a garden?). There is no convincing him otherwise, and does it even matter? From time to time my father gets it in his head that he has borrowed his friend bobby's car and becomes agitated and impatient with the thought that he hasn't yet returned it. He's concerned that Bobby will need it so we need to go downstairs, get it and bring it back. I don't know his friend Bobby and he doesn't know him anymore either. I know his last name though and so one time I googled him (luckily he's fairly well known). They used to work together, this I know, but since I can find him online, I can piece together the chronology of Bobby's life. They worked together in 1954 and Bobby died three years ago in 200. And yet still, we have his car (a car my father probably borrowed one time in 1954 and gave back promptly). He insists that it's parked in the garage downstairs (there is no garage downstairs). Essentially, he is about 50 years behind and is reliving something that happened long ago if, in fact, it happened at all.
Our bodies often, if not always, respond to stimuli with some sort of reaction before we are even consciously aware of it. In a sense, one could argue that we are always sort of looking back and analyzing our own behavior, though we think we are making decisions and are under the illusion that we have made choices when in fact we haven't. We are clearly lead much more by our biology and neural networks than we recognize at any given moment.
project
I am interested in making us conscious of the autonomic [automatic] events happening in our bodies in hopes that we can, in fact, make better decisions for ourselves. One component of the autonomic nervous system, which functions with some input of our conscious self, is breath. I am interested in monitoring breath and the differences in our breathing patterns over a day. I am particularly interested in isolating sighing. I would like to be aware of when I sigh, either from frustration, or deep relaxation. I would like to isolate the causes of my sighing in the hopes that I can increase my awareness of when and how often I am frustrated.
posted by Amanda @ 6:06 PM,
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Class Syllabus
posted by Amanda @ 4:02 PM,
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