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By Damien Irving.
We don’t normally like to talk ourselves up on Tumblr (ok, so maybe we do a little…), but it’s fair to say that our Software Carpentry workshops have been very popular amongst researchers around Melbourne. One of the things participants appreciate the most is the feedback they get from the helpers circulating the room. We aim to have a ratio of about 6 participants to every helper, which means people get plenty of assistance in learning the basics of the unix shell, programming and version control.
.@russellsim & @Manetheran helping researchers at the @combine_au @swcarpentry bootcamp. Thanks helpers! @ITS_Res pic.twitter.com/D5qNRvxCz5
— Damien Irving (@DrClimate)
March 26, 2014
We aim to run a workshop at least every month or two, which means we need a small army of helpers fluent in Python, Matlab and/or R. As you’ll see from the list below, people from all over the university have been signing up to our Software Carpentry teaching teams. If you’d like to get on board and help researchers who write code, please contact us at research.bazaar@gmail.com or drop by Hacky Hour and say hello!
Python teaching team
Matlab teaching team
Shanyuanye Guan (PhD student, biomechanics)
R teaching team
By Paul Mignone
In this Drop-In Session (DIS), we remained consistent with another 20+ attendees coming to the session! This time around, the students got to work with maestro Bernard Meade on using Blender for making models for 3D printing. For those not in the know, Blender is a free and open-source 3D computer graphics software product used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, interactive 3D applications and even video games!
Bernard is Blender!
However, while it is VERY powerful, it has a VERY steep learning curve. Yet despite its complexity, Bernard did manage to make it look very easy! Interested in learning Blender? Our course notes include a couple of Blender tutorials to help you get started. You can access them from an earlier ResBaz post here.
Hoe to see you all next week!
By Paul Mignone
Day 3
Day 3 starts off with mission impossible: A ‘brief’ introduction to Blender for first time users. While Blender is a powerful 3D modelling package, I’m still convinced that the interface was designed for advanced, cephalopod-like aliens from a distant galaxy. Nevertheless, trainer Dr. Jonathan Merritt fantastic tutorials made it look easy, with the students picking it up very quickly! By the end of his 90 minute introduction, students were able to use Blender to build basic structures, such as houses and cams for engineering applications.
Jonathan (a.k.a ‘Blender-meister’) making it look easy…
Next up was me (i.e., Paul Mignone) giving a presentation on advanced material properties, extending on the material presented by Dinesh on day 2. In my talk, I ask the students, “Would I use 3d printed Stanford bunny to hold up a chair?” While students argued over the answer, I finally intervened with the correct one: It depends.
The bunny could be used but it would need to be fit for purpose (i.e. designed to do the job it was meant to do). For the bunny to be fit for purpose, it needs to be both designed correctly and use the correct materials. Therefore in this lecture I educate the students on the specific material properties and how to determine which materials should be used if you were to print a structurally sound object.
Whether it’s metal or plastic, knowing material properties are critical!
The last lecture of the day was by 3D printing Jedi masters Scott Wilson and Adrian Di Lorenzo. In this lecture and workshop session, both Adrian and Scott educated the students about how to use the UP! Printers PROPERLY. They teach the students about printing objects at different infill densities, with printed supports and how to troubleshoot failed prints.
Scott and Adrian’s teachings ensure that you can print-to-success!
Day 4
Day 4 started with me (i.e., Paul Mignone) asking the question again “would I use 3d printed Stanford bunny to hold up a chair?” However the focus this time was on the design element of 3D printed objects. In this section in demonstrate how printing in the correct orientation, or removing sharp corners from your design can spell the difference between a product the can hold your body weight, and a product that will catastrophically fail. Students were given simple, 3d printed parts and instructed to break them. By the end, students were amazed how a little test can tell them so much about the quality of their printed object.
Which one was easier to break?
The last lecture of the course (and easily the most fascinating), was conducted by Robbie Fordyce and Luke Heemsbergen on the legal issues behind 3D printing, as well as the technology’s impact on society. From creative commons, to white power groups, Robbie and Luke mesmerised the class with how this disruptive technology has (and will) change us as a society forever.
Robbie and Luke showing how 3D printing is changing society and its institutions…
With the last of the training days completed, all that was left was for the students to put their new skills to the test in the 3D printing business challenge! Who ends up taking the prize? Find out in part 3! Photos from Day 1 and Day 2 can be found on Facebook here.
By Paul Mignone
Here at ResBaz we are believers in the saying, ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. We believe in empowering the Digital Blacksmith community, and to help our members better design and fabricate their ideas for the good of all. That is why we are releasing our highly successful 3D Printing Summer School course notes to all that are interested.
The attached link will give you access to the 256 page document. This document is published under Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International. Feel free to post any feedback on the course notes on the #digismith hashtag on facebook and twitter.
Enjoy and Good Luck!
By Paul Mignone
This week I had the fantastic opportunity to discuss our recent success with the Digital Blacksmith program on Triple R independent radio. With presenters Lachlan Musicman and Vanessa Toholka, we debriefed on the 3D Printing summer school as well as some of the impressive 3D printed items coming out of Melbourne University.
Me at the Triple R HQ!
Link to the interview can be accessed here. My segment in the program is from 37:30 - 53:30. However do try to listen to all of it as April Staines gives a fantastic interview about ‘She Hacks’, Melbourne’s first female hackathon.
It’s showtime!
By Paul Mignone
In this Drop-In Session (DIS), we hit a mini milestone of 20+ attendees! Congratulations to all attendees that participated in making this happen. Their reward: A fantastic crash course on how to use Solidworks for 3D printing, taught by alumni blacksmith Scott Wilson.
The master at work…
During the 90 minute stint, Scott taught the attendees on how to build 3D objects from 2D shapes, and how to use Solidworks’ advanced features to produce a high-quality model for 3D printing. He also gave the students a design challenge: Build the best looking ginger bread man you can!
You can’t catch him. Designing him however…
While Solidworks is indeed powerful (and freely available on campus for Unimelb students), it is also a commercial package with a considerable price tag for non-students. Are there alternatives out there? Sure thing! Come join us next week when Bernard gives a crash course on how to use the powerful 3D modelling package: Blender!
See you there!
by Fiona Tweedie
Identifying and analysing sentiment in social media comments quickly became a valuable tool for marketers. What better way to gauge the popularity of products, from soft drinks to TV shows, than the conversation among users on Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube… It could be the exception to the rule, “Don’t read the comments”. But are there other uses for this sort of analysis. What could you learn by analysing all of the Tweets tagged #ausvotes (or even #sausage) during the last federal election?
This map shows where different terms have been used in hateful Tweets across the US. Image from http://users.humboldt.edu/mstephens/hate/hate_map.html
Sentiment analysis uses natural language processing (NLP) to identify the attitude being expressed in text. We’ve looked at a number of sentiment analysis tools to get a sense of the strengths and weaknesses of using automated tools to try to undertake this analysis. Sarcasm tends to be really confusing to sentiment analysis tools, and it’s important that researchers are able to edit the lists of terms in use to improve accuracy for their dataset - for instance to reflect in jokes or idioms used by a particular group.
Tools we looked at
At the most basic end of the spectrum are tools like Sentiment140, which allow you to search a term or hashtag in Twitter and return an overall proportion of positive and negative tweets. It’s easy to use, but you can’t train it and you can’t BYO data. It also wasn’t very accurate when tested.
More complex tools are able to identify and categorise key words, visualise relationships between participants in a conversation, such as who replies to whom or who is most retweeted, and can be trained to provide greater accuracy.
Netlytic, for instance, enables keyword extraction and visualisation and has some network visualisation, but this isn’t strong. For instance, it didn’t readily identify Twitter handles as individuals during testing, especially if they didn’t resemble a person’s name. It was quite easy to edit the sentiment terms used and import datasets and to conduct real-time searches of Twitter.
Positive emotion words visualised by Netlytic
EtcML has a wide range of classification tools available for use and the ability to train them to your dataset. It doesn’t seem to offer the range of options around keyword identification that Netlytic does, although you can create custom classifiers which will be sensitive to topic-specific vocabulary, such as ‘bland’ or ‘soggy’ in restaurant reviews.
Sentistrength assesses both the sentiment and the strength of sentiment expressed in short texts. The emotion words that it identifies and the strength attached to them can be edited. It is also capable with identifying topics and keywords and assessing the sentiment attached to each.
From analysis to insight
Sentiment analysis offers researchers a tool to extract information from a large collection of texts, but the data that it generates will need to be tested and interpreted. In some contexts, such as comment on a panel discussion, participants may be simply reflecting on what was said, which will yield large numbers of neutral comments without giving a clear sense of how much they are enjoying the discussion or the event.
By Paul Mignone
Great News! The events of the 3D printing summer school were published by The Conversation today! The project was seen as a world first, and as a successful partnership between Resbaz and various university departments. Check it out!
By Steve Bennett
It’s pretty easy to drop “pins on a map” using Google Maps, but that doesn’t give you anything you’d want to print. And it doesn’t let you visualise a dataset. What’s the next step up?
CartoDB. It’s an impressively easy to use map visualisation platform. Upload your data in a spreadsheet, georeference it if needed, then start cranking out all kinds of different map based visualisations. You can manage your data directly online, and there’s an API to build powerful web applications if you want to go even further. If you sign up with the hard-to-find academic plans, you may find the free version meets all your needs.
Best of all, you can embed your visualisations anywhere - like right here. Here’s a visualisation I made in less than two hours with a research fellow in comparative constitutional law, Anna Dziedzic. We chose to represent the number of constitutions each country has had as the size of a bubble, while the colour shows when its first constitution was written. A small, dark red bubble indicates a country with a long, but very stable constitutional history, while a big yellow bubble hints at a brief, but turbulent history.
(Disclaimer: This is only preliminary data that has not been peer reviewed or published.)
We’ll be running CartoDB workshops for humanities and social science researchers during the course of the year, so stay tuned.
By Paul Mignone
This summer, we made history. Not only did we run the very first 3D Printing Summer School in Australia, we trained and certified the first Digital Blacksmiths in the world. Here is a brief, day-by-day summary, as well as a shout out to everyone that made this fantastic event possible.
Day 1
We kicked off with safety. Michelle Mackay introduces the students to the workshop and sets out all the safety rules and what they can/cannot do. We then moved forward with an introduction by Bernard Meade and Paul Mignone (apologies I don’t usually refer to myself in the third person ;-), who highlighted the diversity within our first batch of digital blacksmiths in training. 25% of the attendees were women (which is higher than average in technical fields) and professions ranged from architects to engineers and even hobbyists. The pie chart below really highlights the spread.
One big diverse family!
The first job started with a simple exercise: print the ever-so-adorable Stanford bunny. Cute when printed solo, adorable when printed en-masse. The students had to scale the model so that it takes approximately four hours to print. In that time students received the following:
Students were given free rein to print whatever they like from the internet before the start of Day 2. Before the end, we managed to get a photo of all the bunnies together. As mentioned, adorable when printed en-masse.
Enter the Rabbits!
Day 2
Three gangstas kick off day 2!
Students arrived early to pick their creations. To the group that printed out the gansta chess pieces, a massive kudos to you! I’m now considering printing out a set for myself! We kicked the day off with Ben giving a demonstration on how to use scanning technologies to create a 3D model. He demonstrated both professional and consumer (Autodesk 123D catch on iPhone) level scanning technology.
Ben scanning up a minion!
We then move on to David Flanders and his introduction into idea generation and basic Computer-Aided Design (CAD) using 3Dtin. If I opened a dictionary and looked up ‘conceptualise’, I wouldn’t be surprised if I saw David’s face. The man knows how to make you think about items most people would dismiss, and get you to design them better!
David. He’s an ideas man!
The day finished with Dinesh Kantheti, the mastermind behind the 3inter 3D printer, give a fantastic lecture on the types of materials available to 3D printers, and some of the pros and cons for each. Photos from Day 1 and Day 2 can be found on facebook here.
Dinesh talking materials!
By Paul Mignone
First Drop-In Session (DIS) saw a lot of our alumni blacksmiths return with many questions from the summer school. Massive shout out to Scott, Nick, Catherine, Mel, Chris, Toni and Luke for coming and helping out with the new 3D printing community members. First DIS was kept open and we questioned new and current members on what they would like to see in future sessions.
The alumni blacksmiths helped out the new community members on using the UP! printers in the workshop. I also conducted a quick Solidworks demonstration on how to create a basic 3D model. Based on the feedback, we’ll most definitely run a proper Solidworks for 3D printing demo in a future DIS.
All hands on deck for the first session!
Carpentry is a handy thing to know: build a shelf…repair a table…do some computer programming? Greg Wilson says his volunteer organization Software Carpentry aims to make scientists more productive by teaching them basic computing skills.