Jim Anning

I’ve been collecting tweets about BBC Question Time to produce these graphs of twitter reaction. As a summary of how twitter users reacted to the programme they work fairly well.

For a while I’ve been wondering about overlaying information gleaned from social media onto the video from the TV programmes as an experiment. Will it add a useful level of analysis? How easy is it to do? Does it make sense when you watch it?

So here’s my first stab, based on data I collected for the programme on 21st March. It shows a rolling graph of positive, negative and neutral sentiment and a dynamic graph of the relative frequencies of the most mentioned words.

Naturally its far from perfect. However (as always with these things) it’s the process of building it, getting feedback and iterating that ultimately improves it and makes it into something thats actually useful to someone.

Comments / Questions / Observations etc welcome!

I thought it would be interesting to compare yesterdays UK budget speech with reaction to it on twitter. It’s one of those events where a message is ‘broadcast’ and you can then judge how it was ‘received’ by analysing relevant tweets.

People often use wordclouds for this kind of thing, but there are usually better ways to compare the information. Here is a wordcloud showing what the Chancellor actually said in the house yesterday…

Chancellors Budget Speech

…and here’s one showing all of the tweets using the #budget hashtag made while the Chancellor was speaking.

Twitter Budget Reaction

It’s hard to see the difference. If you spend a long time with it you can pick up words that are larger in one than the other, but it’s hard work. In these cases a simple old bar graph is much easier to interpret. Here’s one which looks at the top twenty or so words (having removed one’s which aren’t useful for a comparison).

This time it’s much easier to ‘spot the difference’. On twitter the words “Duty” and “Cut” featured much more heavily than in the Budget speech. The Chancellor didn’t use the word “Beer” at all. When the Chancellor referred to figures – Osborne used the word “Billion” many times – that didn’t feature particularly on twitter.

So can we draw any useful insight from the relative word frequencies? If there is a difference between the message sent and the message received, it’s that people* resonate more when it comes to changes in duty and cuts than they do when it comes to business and figures (even if they are in the billions). No surprise there then.

*more accurately… people who tweet about budgets

I’ve known Alan Bradburne (@alanb) and Matt Mower (@sandbags)  for a couple of years now. We’ve often put the world to rights over coffee, but until now, I’ve never had the chance to work with either of them. Thinking that our skills might complement each other, we agreed that we’d hack something together as an experiment… and this is the result…

Tube Insight

It hasn’t got a fancy strapline or anything yet – but if it did it might be…

“Instant feedback on your video”

or…

“Improve your business pitch / singing skills / gymnastic ability / etc with crowd-sourced feedback.”

(these are clearly rubbish strap-lines – I’m sure someone else could do better – a lot better )

The basic premise is this…

• You want to improve your performance (in some aspect)
• You know that getting feedback from your friends / peers / random-people-from-the-internet will help you
• You record a video of you doing your thing (be it a 30 second elevator speech, a product demo, a song & dance… whatever) and upload it to Youtube (or maybe you point people towards someone else’s thing)
• You ask friends to help (or whoever you want) by visiting the tubeinsight website.
• They watch your video, while moving a slider up and down to indicate how much they like or dislike what they see as your video plays. Effectively they highlight the bits where you do well, and the bits where you don’t do so well. If you want to have a go now at giving some feedback click here
• TubeInsight records and aggregates the real-time feedback from everyone.
• You go to your results page on tubeinsight. There you can watch your video with an animated graph overlay which shows everyones feedback. To see an example click here
• At this point (hopefully) you’ve learnt something. You can use your new-found knowledge however you like!

So go try it out…. (if you do, please tell us what you thought)

Obviously its a rough prototype. Maybe Like/Dislike is the wrong question to ask? Maybe the interface isn’t intuitive enough? Maybe people should be able to just review a small portion of a video etc etc.

However, even though it’s pretty basic right now, we know from the initial feedback we’ve had that there are lots of directions it could go in (if any jump out at you then do feel free to tell us, we’d love to know!)

If you know of any communities of people where real-time anonymous feedback of the sort of activity that can be video’s (no – let’s not go there) is valuable, then we’d love to talk to them – put us in touch.

Chris Hadfield is one of the Astronauts currently on board the International Space Station. He tweets a lot about life above the earth as he orbits our planet at a speed of just under 8km per second.

As I’m interested in astronomy and space-related stuff, I was idly wondering how easy it would be to map where Chris has tweeted from… he must surely be one of the most pan-global twitter users there is.

Many people choose to geo-code their tweets, showing readers where they were when they hit the tweet button. Chris’s tweets don’t include a position, but being on board a spacecraft with a regular orbit means it should be possible to reverse-engineer his location from the time each tweet was sent.

Heres a a little web-app I built which shows 800 of Commander Hadfields tweets and where the ISS was at the time the tweet was sent. (It requires a WebGL capable browser – if you don’t have one then heres a YouTube video of what you would have seen).

(for the technical amongst you….)

There were three components to building this…

1. Request a bunch of tweets from the twitter api – when these are returned, they include a UTC time which represents when the tweet was created.

2. Work out where the ISS was at the time the tweet was created. This turned out to be somewhat more difficult than I hoped, but I learned a huge amount about NORAD, orbital data, and spaceflight mathematics in the process.

3. Plot the positions on a spinning globe. To do this I used the excellent open source WebGL Earth library, which made the actual animation part of the project relatively simple.

So… is it useful?… probably not, but it made for a nice little side project.

For a side project I’m doing, I needed to be able to find out the historical position (as a latitude/longitude) of the International Space Station. Given the number of ISS tracker sites available, I’d hoped there would be an API somewhere for it. However, after much searching, I couldn’t find a single one (Wolfram Alpha’s website will give you the info, but you can’t get at the info using their API and even if you could, their terms don’t let you store the data).

Given that I needed to build something to calculate the information, I thought I may as well also publish it as a freely available API – hopefully it may save someone some work.

How it works

NORAD publishes data for earth orbiting objects which you can use to calculate their positions. The data comes in the form of TLE’s which (if you sign up for an account) you can retrieve from an api at space-track.org (if you are old-school you can use a Nasa JPL telnet interface to query their database) . Once you have a TLE you can calculate positions from it using a public domain algorithm. Each TLE is only accurate for a point in time – so as you get further away from that time, your prediction will be further out. (around 3km’s error after 24 hours) For this reason the TLE’s are published several times a day.

The api works by maintaining a database of all of the published TLE’s for the ISS since late 1998 up until the present time. When you make a request the api finds the nearest valid TLE and then uses that to make its calculations. Thankfully the astro-physics number-crunching side of things is handled by a library .

API details

You can access the api as follows…

http://jimanning.com/issapi/?unixts=1359548643

…where unixts is a Unix Epoch time in seconds. if you omit the unixts then it will return the current position of the ISS. If you specify a time in the future, it will still make a calculation, but it won’t be accurate.

You will get back something along the lines of…

{

"status":"ok",

"request":{"ts":1146446446},

"contact":"Jim Anning @JimAnning",

"tle":{"epoch":"1146440185","timeSince":1.73916666667},

"position":{"lat":51.4631650902,"lon":-70.1261097654,"alt":346.66104884,"vel":7.70831133728}

}

The tle term will give you the epoch time that the selected TLE was valid for and the number of hours between the TLE time and the time you requested.

The position term will give you the latitude, longitude, altitude (in km’s) and velocity (in km/s) of the ISS at any given time.

BBC Question Time has become one of those TV programmes that I now rarely watch without also reading and interacting with the #bbcqt hashtag on twitter. Clearly I’m not alone – last night there were approximately 36,000 tweets on the hashtag over the hour or so that the programme was on. That’s a lot of data about a TV programme – and given the programme’s political nature there must be some really interesting information in there about politicians and the way people react to what they say.

So I built this prototype to play around with the data. (edit – the one for the 31st Jan is here , 7th Feb here, 14th Feb here , 21st Feb here, 28th Feb here, 7th Mar here, 14th Mar here, 21st Mar here, 11th Apr here, 18th Apr here)

Last night I captured every tweet using the #bbcqt hashtag that was made between 10.30pm and 11.45pm (the programme runs for an hour from 10.35pm) from the twitter api (with this volume of tweets you need to be sneaky to avoid crashing into the api limits… but it’s possible)

Before the programme I wrote a quick bit of code so that during the show I could capture which person was speaking when.

Afterwards I put together some code to….

• divide the tweets up into ones that were obviously about the panellists and ones that were just generic and then further divide them up into one-minute chunks
• remove all of the rubbish bits (punctuation, inconsequential words etc) from each tweet
• run each tweet through a naive bayesian classifier to classify it’s sentiment as positive, negative or neutral (classifier code on GitHub).

With the data cleaned up and analysed I then coded up a front end to display the information (for the technical people, it uses D3.js and rickshaw.js for the graphing library).

Good things

• I like how you can clearly see how twitter reacts just after someone has spoken – obvious really – but nice to see the data doing what you would expect it to.
• There are some interesting points where clearly one of the panellists has struck a chord on a particular topic – more positive sentiment than negative after particular comments.

Things to Improve

• The classification is trained on some generic good word/bad word data – I reckon a much more accurate sentiment would be gained by training the classifier on actual #bbcqt data (especially as there’s some quite choice anglo-saxon swearing that the current classifier doesn’t recognise)
• I gave up, because I didn’t have time, but theres some really interesting information in analysing word frequencies within the tweets – maybe one to develop later

What’s next

I’m interested to find out if there is an appetite for this kind of (very niche I know) analysis – do Political parties monitor this stuff ?- is there some valuable feedback in there for them?

A little over three years ago, I co-founded a company called SocialOptic. It’s a fantastic company, with some great products, but I’ve decided the time is right to move on.

Throughout my career I have always worked on project-based things – things with a start and an end – from building news production software at the BBC to creating a new project services team in an Oil & Gas company – from rescuing failing projects to writing business cases for future technology investments. It’s always been about starting from a concept; being creative; defining the why, who, what, when and how much; getting people on side and finances approved; managing a team building something new and then handing that on to an operations team to run with.

About three and a half years ago I started mulling over some ideas I’d had for a Project Management software product. I knew that it would be a useful tool, and could also see that no-one had built it yet… So I left my job (at the time I was contracting as a Projects and Programme Manager), rented a house in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in southern Spain, and went on an extended family holiday. In between family stuff and walks in the mountains, I taught myself to write code. It was quite a challenge, but by the end of our three months in Spain a very basic version of the product was ready and soon it was up and running and available to use on the web. I called it Milestone Planner and started to watch the sign up stats with interest.

My original plan had been to go back to contracting when we returned, but while we were away the economy tanked and pretty much every company I’d worked with before had put all new projects on hold. No new projects, no need for Project Managers. In the meantime I had met Benjamin (my soon-to-be business partner) and together we plotted and worked out how we might turn Milestone Planner from a prototype product into a fully fledged business.

We took the plunge and incorporated SocialOptic Ltd… and what a ride it’s been.

Over the last three years we have built two products from the ground up. We’ve had the satisfaction of seeing users become customers and watching them put our software right at the centre of their own project processes. I’m fantastically proud of Milestone Planner and what we have achieved. As the number of customers increases, the business is moving into a new phase, one where the key activities need to be focussed on operational and support matters rather than building *new stuff* . I’m not an operations person and never will be, so have decided it’s the right time for me to move on. It’s tough when a co-founder leaves a business, but we’ve been able to structure things so that Benjamin can continue to run the ship, and steer SocialOptic towards the solid operational success that I’m confident it will become.

So… if you know anyone who’s looking for a creative professional, who can speak business and code and has a track record of getting things off the ground… I’m available (here’s my linkedin profile for a potted career history)

I’ve been thinking recently about how I can help introduce more young people to the joys of coding. So far I’ve scored a minor success teaching a group of nine year olds MIT’s Scratch, but I’d like to try something a bit more scalable, aimed at older learners.

One concept I’ve been mulling over is an easily accessible, online ‘coding game’. I have some basic thoughts, which I’ll outline below, but want to make it a collaborative, open source project. I’m putting the idea out there for comment / feedback etc and if you want to get involved in any way at all then get in touch.

So here’s my initial thinking…

• You play the game by writing code to guide a character/robot/thing around the screen to solve a series of increasingly complex challenges.
• When you complete the challenge, you get to see (and play with) the code that other people who also solved the challenge used.
• There would be a ‘compete’ mode where you could play in real time, against another coder. At the end of the challenge we ‘swap’ the code, so both people can learn from the way the other has constructed their code.

My theory is that by setting out an ‘objective’ (ie completing the challenge / beating your opponent) to the coding and then sharing the code it will encourage people to learn from each other (I’d be v. interested on any educationalists take on this approach – how would we improve it?). Of course, its not a completely original principle, but I haven’t seen anything web based that uses this combination of competition and code sharing as a learning tool before.

I’ve expanded on some of my initial thoughts in this video.

I’m keen to make this happen, but I can’t make it happen on my own. What I can do is co-ordinate stuff; contribute ideas; do some of the code etc and generally move things forward. If you can help in any way then please leave a comment on the post and I’ll be in touch.

Some links for things mentioned in the video…

• Robocode is a good example of a code based game, although my view is its a bit complex for the age group we’re targetting
• Raphael is a javscript vector graphics library – i’ve used it for a few projects and it’s good on the cross-browser front
• Skulpt is an in-browser implementation of Python. I think there are lots of things about python that make it a good language for kids to code in, but of course maybe theres a better choice
• Node seems like the obvious choice to provide any real-time element for the competitive challenges

I’ve banged on a lot about why it’s important that children learn about computing (mainly here, but also here and here). After attending the excellent coding for kids un-conference run by @hubmum and @katybeale, I made a promise to myself to do something practical to help more young people discover coding.

So… I pitched the idea of a coding for kids pilot to the Head Teacher of my son’s primary school and was pleasantly surprised that she was very open to the idea.

Shortly after that, a bit of serendipity came into play through a post on the Computing at School mailing list. Peter Higginson (mentioned on Stanford’s “Birth of the Internet” plaque) happens to live near me and was interested in doing something to help bring computer science to schools. Over a coffee (and some fascinating stories about the early days of the internet) we agreed to doing some sort of double act.

After a couple of planning meetings with the Deputy Head we settled on doing a pilot with a group of ten Year 5 (ie 9 year old) children. It would be two 1 hour sessions during school time. I was keen to target Year 5 as there is a general consensus that it’s about the age when people develop some of the thinking skills that computing needs (Plus I was somewhat influenced by Emma Mulqueeny’s Year 8 is too late thoughts)

So here’s what we did, what happened and some thoughts on what’s next…

What We Did

We decided fairly quickly to use MIT’s Scratch as the basis for the sessions. It’s free, very accessible for children of that age and there are lots of online examples and resources that the kids could run with on their own if they wanted to.

We structured each session so that it would start with Peter covering theory and explaining some principles; followed by some guided practical work led by me; then ending with some freeform kids-do-stuff-while-we-walk-round-and-help-out-where-we-can time (I’m sure theres a proper ‘teacher-phrase’ for that – perhaps someone will enlighten me).

In session 1 (full notes here), Peter introduced them to the basics of the Scratch environment, talked about variables and operations, made a dog chase a cat and showed how Scratch could be used to do some mathematical number crunching finding prime numbers (examples here). I then helped the pupils build their first programme – drawing simple shapes – starting with squares and incrementally modifying the code to draw more complicated shapes.

In session 2, (full notes here) Peter covered more theory including conditionals, loops and broadcast messages. We had then preloaded a simple game I’d put together  - Moon Monsters (example in all its glory here). I showed the students how it worked and then we encouraged them to modify it – changing how fast the monsters move, adding more monsters etc.

Some Observations 

Firstly, the kids lapped it up. It was super-satisfying to see the penny drop that they could tell the machine what to do. Since doing the pilot we’re told that the school has been opening up their ICT suite at lunchtimes and a few of them are still going in and coding off their own backs. I’m chalking that one up as a win.

Secondly, there was something fantastic about watching Peter teach the kids. A veteran of the earliest days of the internet enthusing and passing his knowledge onto a new generation – I hope that the group will remember that for a long time.

With no experience of teaching, I found prepping the practical parts of the sessions hard work – trying to get the right balance between something that the pupils will be excited by, but also be within their grasp was quite challenging. I have a new-found respect for the work teachers must put into new material for their classes.

The Future ?

The question I keep asking myself is “How do we make this sustainable?” – perhaps the answer lies in those of us who code, helping those who teach to get up to speed with something like Scratch. Maybe I can use the community we’ve built at Reading Geek Night to move that forward. Perhaps the answer lies in peripatetic coding teachers (much like the model of music and other specialist teachers). Perhaps there’s merit in out-of-school clubs and mentoring support for our newly minted coders.

Wherever the answer lies, we’re keen to keep experimenting and help get a few steps closer to an answer.

One of the things I’ve been pondering since attending the excellent Coding for Kids kick-off meeting last week is what measures should we look to for an indication of how well we are doing.

My sons primary school has recently been through an Ofsted inspection. With that in mind, it struck me that as we increase the number of kids who are exposed to programming, we should expect to see more mention of it in Ofsted reports.

So, if you were to take the last couple of years of primary school Ofsted reports and look for ones that mentioned programming, what would you find? Obviously, I wouldn’t expect the figure to be very high. Inspectors are not tasked to seek out examples of kids coding, so any mentions would just be because they had observed something that had stood out for them. However, if we are looking for evidence that Coding for Kids is having an impact, the reports might not be a bad starting point.

In a fit of data-geekery, last night I knocked together a script which scraped around two years of primary school data (10,747 Oftsted school inspection reports) from their website (Grrrr – Ofsted don’t organise their data to make this easy – but thats another story). A search for the word ‘programming’ returns 22 results. A search for the word “computing” across all of these reports returns 105 results (however when you read them, many of these are actually referring to computing facilities in the context of ICT provision).

So, looking back over the last couple of years, only 0.2% of primary Ofsted reports mention programming.

Yes it’s a very crude measure, but I’m hoping that in a couple of years, with the various initiatives being kicked off under the Coding for Kids umbrella, I’ll be be to repeat the exercise and report a much improved percentage.

(PS: I’ll try and do the same for Secondary schools at some point – also if anyone wants a copy of the base data I scraped then just shout)