A busy quarter

So, NOW WHAT?  We've been experimenting all year with different presentation styles, a set of other 'settings' instead of just the Museum 'walk'

We call the museum walk, "An Exposition" or "Moments in Time" or "A Gallery".  You can imagine a number of screens celebrating historic athletes (high school, college  or Pro).  It's equally easy to imagine featuring prominent donors to a college--for example, for Named Chairs.  The one here honors Computer Scientists who have won ACM Awards.

Here's a different use of the Museum metaphor.   Here we are portray 20 Screens, each  representing work or an activity that is part of a career--we call this one the "Chuck House Virtual 3D Exposition"

We call another one a Diorama.  You may think of Dioramas from Natural History Museums where they would try to simulate a forest setting or a savanna with appropriate flora and fauna.  We think of it as a curvilinear expanse of screens clustered around a topic, such as this one around COVID analyses.  Here's one with 22 screens that feature stories around the past three years of the worldwide COVID pandemic.

And here's another one, intended to portray a person's career and achievements.

Here is yet a third one, built around a Mission Control Center idea, symbolic of NASA's Mission Control headquarters or the AT&T Network Management Center

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We can also model a Lecture Hall, as found at many universities

As these pictures illustrate, many different scenes / settings can be created in Virtual 3D space.

Maybe we have something novel here, novel enough that we ought to think about . . .                 A. Figuring out how to build a product                                                                                            B. Figuring out if any of this is novel enough to worry about, or decide to, try patents

In that connection, we met with a semi-retired patent attorney who had been a kind 'friend of the court' for the Dashboard work in early 2020.  And, as things have a way of happening sometimes (not often, but hey, enjoy it if it does) . . . 

We together concluded that there were several elements of the adaption of "real environments" that we have been playing with, that merit filing some patent claims.  So, anon, we had to learn the jargon of lawyers.  Eventually, we filed a bevy of claims--numbing in some ways, gratifying in many.   Now we can truthfully and with pride say "Patents pending"

Doesn't that sound wonderful?  Wacky?  Improbable?

So, who knows--or as the old radio show had it, "Only the Shadow Knows"

As they say, "Stay Tuned"

A couple of Prototypes

The ACM HC workshop wound up featuring my work on video interviews, but I did include one slide from the possible Award prototype as a discussion primer.    Several attendees at the workshop offered names of historic Computer Graphics folk who might be able to offer suggestions.

Spent most of the rest of October trying to put together the "Chuck House 3D Virtual Exposition Center.

By October 23, we felt we had enough storyboards put together to make a YouTube film version, and I taped the first Voice-Over via a Zoom session, that Scott merged into the video.  after several tries, we had a version that we kinda liked, on October 27.  Lengthy, 17:43 minutes.

By November 5, we had a 'finished' version, 21:49 minutes.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkarQkMpmiE

I put together a note something like this:  

Here’s some ideas along the lines we talked in the late spring

The metaphor is.’walking through a museum’ and viewing various exhibits, screen by screen

Each screen can be “live” with a deep PowerPoint deck, a YouTube video, any web call, etc. 

The whole thing is dynamically compiled,.

What I am showing you here is “a film” rather than actively dynamic, but we can do the latter at your discretion.

The video is a tour of InnovaScapes Institute and Chuck House projects over the years

I’d be interested in your thoughts

I am including Scott Futryk on this email.  He actually is the ‘developer’ of all of this.

Best,

Chuck

Who got this missive, and how did we 'cast it'?

Sent  to carefully selected friends, family, and colleagues who 'might know the field'.  Those gave us some very nice comments.

Within five days, we had received phrases like:

1. Format lends itself nicely to “moments in history.”

2. WOW!  those are great videos. I like the idea of a virtual museum
3. "I think the tool is phenomenal"

4. This clearly is a great and very flexible platform 

5. it is very cool!   this gives a far more pleasing viewer experience. 

6.wow, what a fun and interesting way to look at data; it’s captivating, with drill downs, etc.

Meanwhile, we have been considering patent coverage or trademarks?

Which will have to wait for the next post.

In Just 3 Months . . .

 3 MONTHS -- not all that long, measured in career terms.

From September 16, 2022 to December 16, 2022, it was kind of a whirlwind with the discussions described in the previous post.

Scott Futryk with his Dashboard company and I with InnovaScapes decided to construct a prototype Museum not to exhibit Art, but to extol Award winners for an international computer society, the Association for Computing Machinery (yeah, well, the name is certainly anachronistic now).  It is the largest Computer Society for computing professionals in the world, and they give many prestigious awards annually.   And InnovaScapes Institute has had the privilege of interviewing many of the winners over the past few years.

And I shared the link in the last pose, but here it is again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RINmCtL6-K4

This prototype is very capable of some extraordinary things.   Every Screen--20 of them--is individually selectable, and able to be interactive.  So we can select any individual, or any award, or any year, or any country, just as an example.  And then, for every person with an oral/video interview on file, those can be accessed as well.   So snippets from their life, whether challenges they faced, school choices they made, help and support they received from their parents or friends. .... you get the idea.

So, we designed it so that if we "walked" linearly down the hall, we'd come upon each Award, with its description on the first page, along with the names of all of the winners of that Award.  If you switched to Interactive Mode, you could click on any name in that Screen, and it would transport you to the information on file for that person.   So, for example, if we are on the screen for Past Presidents (yes, I was one once), the top screen looks like this

And clicking on that gives pictures of some (this is a rough prototype, so not fully loaded)

So, for an ACM HC workshop scheduled for Sept 30, I showed a page illustrating the idea.  

So, it'd be fun to claim "success" at this point, but a lot of work remains, especially in terms of how the video interviews we've been collecting get incorporated smoothly.

More in the next post . . . .

Happy Anniversary

 A late-life romance?  Does Jenny know?  (before you get worried, yes she does, and she approves)

Scott called yesterday (December 16) to say, "This is our 3 month anniversary!"

Indeed, it was three months ago that I asked, "Could we use that 3D Art Gallery simulation for a project that I am working on, for ACM?"   And yesterday, we 'delivered' an updated edited version of what we call a prototype ACM Award Archive Museum.   

See it here at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RINmCtL6-K4

As Scott said on the phone, "We had a great solution for a problem no one had, just sitting there.  And you said, 'Hey, what about . . . . "   And the succeeding three months have been a bit of a whirlwind.

It was way back in April when we first discussed gaming engines and super computers.   Scott had just bought a new Nvidea machine, and was cross-eyed from how blinding fast it was.  From the days when I was Chancellor at Cogswell College, this resonated. 

I was already embarked with Scott on the COVID-19 Dashboard work, started 2 years earlier.  It had been used by a number of friends and colleagues, and we were still modifying it, adding capability, and also performing some significant analyses (many reported in this blog).

But that work was mostly static, not obvious how this might or would be beneficial.

A week later, we'd animated the North and South Dakota data around the Sturgis motorcycle rally, and Scott had expressed his excitement for the AT&T control center.  "Couldn't we do this?"  

By May 1, Scott had embedded a scene similar to this, and we were exploring ideas.  The first was to construct a webinar using such a setting around Situational Awareness (SA).   This led to some time designing a couple of modules for that topic, which we modeled during May.   

We also did some exploratory work with Lee Blackstone (old HP colleague for both of us), and the Evans Control Systems products (derived from the old Evans & Sutherland Computer Graphics corp)

By May 20, we were able to mock up a Virtual Classroom, with COVID, SA, and DDDM (my old acronym for Data-Driven Decision Making.

And then, I took six weeks 'off' to move into a new home in Portland, Oregon.  Yes, work went on, but it was sporadic.  Scott and his London friend concentrated on building 'true' overlays for the COVID maps that could show roads and towns, not just county outlines.   And I 'chased' the questions of who made what decisions when (and why) in the early days when so much was uncertain, and folk were scared.

By mid-July, we'd examined the Cave 2 work, had expanded the COVID material, and we'd gone deeper into the bicycle company data.  In short, we were examining all of the Dashboard work that Scott had done for possible applicability.   Scott wanted to show my 'career'

I was not in love with this idea--it seemed (and truthfully still seems) boastful, and "who cares?"

So I changed the focus to trying to build a Dashboard for the HP Bilzer data, which is a lot of detail.

This was operational for the Instrument Group from 1980-1986 by July 20 (my birthday)

A month later, we'd populated the Chuck House Exposition a little more (August 15)

By August 30, this had progressed

And, to demonstrate that these could be 'live' as in a Sketchpad sense

So, lots of work, lots of promise, but in reality, not much clarity of any singular focus.   A little frustration even, creeping in around the edges on September 12, 2022

And then, a fateful question, on Sept 15, that drew this response

So, THE ANNIVERSARY, yesterday, December 16, is from this statement--"will BEGIN"

Within two days, solid progress

And, AS THEY SAY, THE REST IS HISTORY

We'll trace that 3 months of history in the next post

Hope this hasn't been too boring for you

Chuck

1,024 Days of COVID-19 Dashboard

 

Wednesday April 29, 2020.  Two and a half years ago, I posted my first blog post at http://innovascapes.blogspot.com/ about COVID-19, describing  my personal experience with this pandemic that had, in truth, just begun.  That struggle caused my to create the "InnovaScapes Institute Dashboard" with help from an old HP colleague, Scott Futryk.

For 2020, as the pandemic raged, I was religious about keeping the posts going--some 44 posts in 9 months.  Many friends got a bit tired of the incessantly poor news, and as the vaccines began working in early 2021, I backed off--only posting five notes from January thru May.  It has been quiescent since then, although I have created some analyses posted elsewhere.

You might recall that the early months were traumatizing.   The outbreaks in Seattle nursing homes caused a panic that went nationwide about oldsters.   Fully half the Confirmed Cases for folk over 80 resulted in death; meanwhile no one under 40 was more than a little sick.  Quipsters in Texas (like the stupid Lt. Governor) said that the oldsters ought to "die for the Dow" rather than force lockdowns on "the rest of us."   Soon we found that some clusters--e.g. prisons, nursing homes, meat packing houses, ski resorts, Las Vegas and Mardi Gras, and cruise ships--served as natural petri-dishes.   College students elected to have "COVID parties" -- until some of those turned deadly.   

As the lock-downs spread, so did anxiety, followed soon enough by backlash, and in our polarized society at the moment, by anti-vaxxers and 'end the lock-downs' rallies.  Lest you think these were emblematic of a uniquely American bizarreness, these scenes played out in Western Europe, and are just now causing major unrest in China even.

The surprises kept coming.   The first spike, noticed primarily on the Eastern Seaboard in terms of deaths (averaging 7 to 10 percent for infected folk in NYC, CT and parts of NJ), hardly registered anywhere else in America, except Los Angeles, the Bay Area and Seattle.

The second spike spared the East, but spread on a per capita basis all across the Midwest (PA, OH, MI, IL, for example).   The third spike, by far the highest in terms of total cases, engulfed the whole country, surprising those rural areas that hitherto had ignored it (MT, SD, ND, ID, WY).    Tracing how this all happened has been educational, to say the least.

Meanwhile, we kept collecting data:

So how about that--100 Million official US cases, two-thirds of a Billion cases worldwide.   And thankfully, deaths are down by anywhere from 3 to 10x the rates at the beginning.  So, we're 'sort of' out of the woods.   Tell that to the families of the 1 Million dead Americans, though!

Today, Monday December 12, 2022, is to serve notice that we are suspending new updates for the dashboard.  It will be active at https://anywhereanytime.us/covid19c, hopefully for years to come.   It contains an immense amount of material.  The daily updates were nearly 4,000,000 data elements, covering confirmed cases, deaths, both in absolute numbers and per capita for 3,143 US counties, 50 US States and D.C., and 196 nations.

It has several key features that are very difficult to find in other sources.  A key feature is the date-range selector, which can be done for any county, state, or nation, or any collection of those.  Another key feature is the geospatial choropleth map, giving incredible insight for otherwise obscure data in a table. https://datavizcatalogue.com/methods/choropleth.html

Three changes have reduced the desire for continuation of the accumulated data.  First, USA Facts (our primary source for the three years) has become intermittent with some unfortunate data errors.  Our back-up source, Johns Hopkins, has been great on States and Nations, but weak on history and on local counties and other county-like jurisdictions.   Second, with vaccines now more prevalent, the initial fearsome death-rates have been reduced to the point that public interest has waned.  Third, and maybe most important, the primary driver--confirmed cases--has become vastly under-stated with the advent of home test-kits.    Finally, of course, our own time, effort and costs seem better placed elsewhere.

In some subsequent posts, I will provide some analysis of various key points that we've been able to recognize through this work.  For example, the curious case of NO DEATHS in either Nebraska or Florida after mid-year 2021.   Nebraska outlawed such deaths on May 8, 2021, and Florida's asinine governor agreed with such an idea on June 2, 2021.   Nebraska stopped with 2,030 deaths, and Florida with 36, 973.   USA Facts put up with this absurdity, but Johns Hopkins has persisted, and today lists Nebraska with an unofficial 4,672 and Florida with 83,201.   

This is not to say that every death listed as COVID during the three years was correct, nor that all of the COVID-impacted deaths were included in other venues, but it is symbolic of our politically crazed times that these kinds of actions have taken place.

I don't want to disappoint those of you who have used this dashboard periodically--it will still be available, and maybe even to stimulate you a bit, I promise to complete the COVID-19 Diorama illustrated below in our AstroVirtual 'Control Center' in the near future.