Archive for the ‘Visualization’ Category

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Mapping of diseases

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

New York Times recently published an article about the work of Dr Butt from Stanford University. He and an increasing number of doctors are starting to group diseases not by their symptoms as in classical medicine, but by their genetic underpinnings.

While I can’t say much about the medical relevance, this work gives rise to an interesting visualisation. Shown is a set of diseases which are related to each other by there genetic similarity. Each disease is represented by a circle with a size proportional to the number of genes involved.

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Elastic vertical Simile Timeline

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

Today there was a post on the Simile mailing list on elastic timelines. In his post Joao Severino refers to a change in the timeline code by Liming Xu which is described in more detail on his blog.

The general idea is to identify overlapping events and then redefine the height of the timeline accordingly. Though I don’t think it’s very useful as it leads to very high timelines, I wonder to what extent this idea could be used to resolve a big issue with the vertical timeline which I use for the blog archive on this blog. If there are two events very close to each other in a vertical timeline, they will automatically overlap.

Potentially this could be resolved by combining hot zones (which currently need to be defined explicitly) with his idea of automatically adjusting the height of the timeline. The Timeline code would check whether two events overlap and add a hot zone for the area of the events.

Two problems would remain:

  1. Events which occur at the same time or so close that the hot zone would cover a very short time (minutes or so).
    This could be handled by a kind of summary event that basically says: here are two (or more events) at the same time, click for details. 
  2. Duration events.

I don’t know yet how to get this resolved in detail, but I’ll try it sometime.

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Ideas for analysing legacy code

Saturday, May 31st, 2008

Basildon Coder wrote about the P.G.Wodehouse method of Refactoring, which reminded me of a graphic I have seen at the Museum of Modern Art in ‘Design and the elastic mind’: Code Profiles by W. Bradford Paley. A demo how the graphic evolved can be seen on the site of the Whitney Museum.

The basic idea is to have a program on one single page / in one single graphic, which shows the overall structure and density of the program part you are looking at. Bradford Pailey adds an overlay that shows the actual execution path on top of the code.

I wonder whether this idea, which is currently art rather than a programming tool,  can actually be implemented as part of an IDE plugin (I’m thinking of Eclipse as I’m working with Eclipse 99% of my time).

The code is of course already available in any IDE and profiling data could be obtained from the Eclipse Test and Performance Platform or other profiling tools.

However, it’s not yet clear to me how the interaction between the different classes and packages can be covered. The graphic by Bradford Pailey shows a program that consists of one file only – at least that’s what it looks like.

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