MaryAnn's Blog

Last week, we worked independently to try and answer some design questions related to the website. My teammates focused on the design of our landing page. Meanwhile, I looked into the idea of running our tools client-side The Problem Imagine you are the CFO for a large corporation. You would like to find a way to increase the profit of your company for the next year. You have 15 years worth of data regarding budgets, expenditures, and profits. You also did a web search and found annual reports of all your competitors. Comparing these reports, you have ranked your company amongst your competitors by net worth. You find that your company ranks #7, but 5 years ago it ranked #4. The analysis you are trying to do is complex. it requires a massive amount of data, somewhere around 30GB worth of documents. Additionally, the data you have on your own company is proprietary, and you don't want your competitors to find it on the web. Problems with Our Ranking Application In the cu...

Last week, I took a bit of a break from my previous task. Instead, I joined forces with the rest of my team to figure out the LineUp codebase. We met on Friday and Saturday in a hackathon-style event and worked together to read through all the files. What we learned LineUp was written in TypeScript, which is a version of JavaScript with type-checking. There are 6 typescript files in the src folder which are briefly described below. The codebase we downloaded came with a node_modules folder that has 655 different packages. app.ts This is the largest typescript file in this folder. Includes methods for fixing missing data values and initializing LineUp with a header bar and dataset (calls array of datasets from datasets.ts). datasets.ts  Specifies an array of datasets that are included in the demo folder. This array is loaded by app.ts. export.ts Includes methods for exporting to CSV and exporting to JSON. gist.ts Includes methods for loading and saving to GitHub ...

The project is off to a good start. I met the rest of the students with whom I will be working this year. While they are developing the application itself, my task will be researching and preparing novel ranking tools. Introduction Rankings are a simple way compare and evaluate things. They are used all the time; we see rankings in news articles, surveys, and media and technology reviews. Their power comes from their intuitiveness. For example, the New York Times Bestseller list ranks novels based on their sales, but we easily assume that a book at the top of the list will be much more worthwhile than one that didn't make the list. Unfortunately, the simplistic nature of rankings can also be misleading. A national ranking of colleges in the US might seem informative, but a student choosing a college to attend would be sorely misinformed unless he understood exactly what factors contributed to the rankings, and in what proportion. The goal of the project is to help users und...