Justin Blinder | Blog

We Read, We Tweet from Justin Blinder on Vimeo.

“We Read, We Tweet” geographically visualizes Tweets about New York Times articles. Each line connects the location of a tweet to the contextual location of the article it references. The lines are generated based on the sequence in which the tweets occurred. The result is a visualization of the global interest of specific New York Times articles through reader’s Tweets. The video only shows a small portion of tweets aggregated from each article, some of which contain of corresponding Tweets.

The articles and tweets are constantly being aggregated and stored in a database, making use of the Twitter, Backtweets, Google Maps, and New York Times Articles API.  Every 10 minutes, the Backtweets API is queried to find the most recent New York Times articles that have been tweeted about. For each article found, the New York Times Articles API is queried and if a contextual location is found, that location is then geocoded using the Google Maps API. Every tweet that mentions this article is also geocoded using the Google Maps API, and both the article and tweets are stored in a database. The Backtweets API was quite awesome with parsing out shortened URLs. The visualization itself was written in Java / Processing.

I’m currently rewriting parts of the app, mainly the interface components, the camera, and some performance issues. I’m hoping to release on online interactive version soon.

Snoozy the Sloth is a plush toy with a respiratory system.  He sleeps while clinging onto a user, allowing them to feel both the contraction and expansion of his chest, as well exhaling of air from his mouth. The main concept behind snoozy is to create an intimate, yet passive, toy interaction that relaxes and comforts a user, through the tactile experience of steady breathing patterns. Creating a system that was battery powered, and used actual air flow rather than simply faking chest movemment with a motorized system, were of main importance.  Snoozy’s main internals consist:

• an arduino
• a breadboard
• 2 dc motor diaphram pumps
• a latex glove (his lung)
• 1 9v battery
• 1 12v battery
• a solenoid valve.

The circuit uses 2 TIP102 transistors to seperate the 9v going to the Arduino, and 12v going to the motors and solenoid valve. The pumps, each located in one of his legs, push air into the latex glove until it’s fully contracted.  The motors then shut off, and the air is released through by solenoid valve located in his head. An located in the Snoozy’s chest, fades in and out in accordance with his breathing. The pumps seemed a bit loud at first, however the majority of user testers (aged 18-30) seemed to not mind the noise. I’m still in the process of looking for a quieter alternative (an important concern for younger users), with enough pressure to fill the latex lung.

Components

Main Circuit

Working Internals

“Snoozy The Sloth” Video

I created this toy for Yury Gitman’s “Making Toys” class at Parsons The New School For Design

A few of the write-ups Snoozy has received:

• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• BoingBoing Gadgets
• Crunch Gear
• HackADay
• Make