In 1996, when I was working in the Philosophy Department at Carnegie Mellon, I wrote an Applet to answer d-separation questions. D-separation is an important concept in statistical causal reasoning. I was just learning Java and had never written a program to be deployed on the Web. Java (version 0.89) didn't have the Collections classes at that time and had a very rudimentary event model. I had to develop data structures for directed graphs, sets, ordered pairs, etc. The program seems very quaint by today's standards but apparently it has been used; a couple of years ago the Philosophy department took it off their server. Almost immediately email started to arrive asking what had happened to the applet. It has a small but appreciative user community apparently. Here is its address: http://www.phil.cmu.edu/~wimberly/dsep/dSep.html
The user interface isn't very robust or well-designed but it works. Here is an explanation of d-separation written by my colleague Richard Scheines: http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/scheines/tutor/d-sep.html Frank Frank -----Original Message----- >From: Roger Critchlow <[email protected]> >Sent: Mar 17, 2009 11:02 PM >To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[email protected]> >Subject: Re: [FRIAM] What's your vote for the most Fun computer project? > >I had a bunch of fun just this weekend. > >I had been noticing blog chatter about running webview's on the >Android desktop, and when I looked I found two projects dedicated to >making it possible to write applications for iPhone, Android, >Blackberry, Symbian, etc. using just html, css, javascript and a >little bit of bridging to the native phone facilities. One's called >QuickConnect (http://tetontech.wordpress.com/) and the other is Phone >Gap (http://phonegap.com/). The idea is that you build an app that >links to the webkit libraries, opens a window, and loads a url. The >url can come from the local filesystem, from the web, from an archive >built into the application, it doesn't matter as long as it loads >cleanly and finds the rest of the stuff it needs to run. > >It sounded like fun, so I started making one for Ubuntu. It's 235 >lines of bewildered.c, 58 lines of Readme.txt, and 32 lines of >Makefile which compiles to a 15608 byte executable, stripped of >symbols. ldd says it has 65 libraries linked in. > >I run it as: > > > CANVAS='http://elf.org/quantum-classical-clock/clock.html?hand_style=fade&hand_shape=lozenge&dial=face' >\ > ./bewildered --uri="${CANVAS}" --geometry=225x225-20+40 >--transparent=1 --decorated=0 -below=1 > >and I have a transparent clock with alpha blended quantum delocalized >hands running on my desktop, using the exact same code that runs the >clock on my web page in the big boy browsers. > >But it's my desktop clock, now, and my first transparent desktop bling. > >-- rec -- > >On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Owen Densmore <[email protected]> wrote: >> OK, lots of us have noticed that computing is not all that fun anymore. Its >> a grind. Sure the outcome of the grind might be rewarding. But is it fun? >> >> So my challenge to us here is: What's the most fun computer project you can >> think of. Or have done, for that matter! >> >> This includes using fun environment like NetLogo, Smalltalk and the like. >> Rapid (and satisfying!) prototyping. >> >> -- Owen >> >> >> >> ============================================================ >> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org >> > >============================================================ >FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv >Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College >lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
