First Try with Anki Cozmo Robot’s SDK

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Last night, I had my first look into the Anki Cozmo robot’s SDK that uses Python. It was a little nerdy to install and set up, but the videos were well put together. Now, the real fun begins!

My strategy for learning these programs is to alter them in some way, to be creative but also to get some hands on coding done, and maybe to do some independent things rather than just following instructions without having to think much. It’s one thing to repeat words and phrases to learn a language. It’s another to make your own, or at least tweak, the words and phrases you got taught. I learn much better the latter way.

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My New Anime/Manga Characters Birthday Interactive Dashboard

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One of the more popular posts on my site is a list of 1850+ anime and manga characters’ birthdays. However, it is a static list. You just read through it and remember what you can if you want to analyze it beyond looking up information for reference or curiosity.

Today, I just turned that list into an interactive dashboard (building off a database) where you can SEE the information in so many more ways! It shows distributions by months, days, groups of characters in series, etc. It also makes it easier for people to see what I’m missing, and also have wrong, to help me improve it! I’m sure I can crack 2000 characters one day soon… and cover for the 5 days during the year without a character birthday when some have over 30 characters sharing birthdays!

Unfortunately, I had to put it on another blogging platform, as I will have to with all my Tableau Public “viz” creations because WordPress doesn’t allow for JavaScript. I understand why they do it, but it’s a limitation I can’t work with in blogging about these creations directly. I hope you’ll have a look and see it, maybe even give suggestions for improvements!

Of course, with this set, I can now create something similar for any large set of birthdays for any group with something in common. I’m seeking superhero birthday sets, for example, but I can do famous athletes, actors & actresses, or anything you can think of with birthdays… or even death days!

Know of some such data sets? Please let me know in a comment! Thank you!

If I Taught my Robots to Draw, Will Its Art Be More Valuable than Mine?

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Theoretical question worth pondering before testing later, cause you know it’ll only be time before robots can produce art as a common activity like it is for humans now. They can produce art already, but not as common as you or I could just go draw, paint and such.

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100 Years of Nova Scotian Weather Online and Interactive… and Then Some

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I just finished recreating a Tableau “viz” that is a series of online, interactive dashboards with weather information for eight places in Nova Scotia from the past 100 years (1917-2016):

  • Halifax
  • Liverpool
  • Yarmouth
  • Greenwood
  • Halifax Airport
  • Amherst
  • Antigonish
  • Sydney

They are on the Tableau Public site under my profile listing all my vizzes so far. Not many but the start of something good!

I also have dedicated weather vizzes for:

from reasonably good data sets that existed so I didn’t have to kill myself getting all the data from nearby weather stations and cobbling them all together! I had over 1600 files for those 8 places! Well, Halifax didn’t have a great data set but since so many Nova Scotians live in the area, including me, I didn’t want to leave them out.

2015 CCHS Interactive Online Report Card

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For my learning of Tableau data visualization software, I created an interactive workbook I put on the Tableau Public website with the 2015 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) public data released by Statistics Canada. It essentially translated about 47 thousand lines of aggregate survey data into a comparative report card of dots comparing health related matters among demographics of people in provinces to each other via the Canadian average for their demographic. You can extract all kinds of information and stories without having to look at one number on this thing, although if you mouseover any dot, you’ll see all the stats that come with it that was also used in making comparisons!

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