The US government has stood up a rather extensive data portal at Data.gov, and it seems logical that they should begin to display automatically generated and interactive visualizations of the data, right? Well, over at SunLight Labs they think that they shouldn’t.
The second reason why government should avoid spending time on adding visualizations or other bells and whistles to Data.gov is because it actually hurts transparency. Visualizations, like any other form of news product, can be editorial– even inadvertently. If government puts more of a priority on producing great visualizations and user experience than on providing quality accurate data with a great feedback loop, then it runs a pretty good chance of not adhering to the goal of being actually transparent.
Personally, I disagree with their assessment. They also make an argument that by making the data public, the community can create their own visualization which will undoubtedly be better than whatever the government would publicize, which is probably correct. However, I really believe that non-biased visualizations could be created and shown with moderate effort.
Midwest Render has been working with Thomas Fields Homes on creating some nicely rendered walkthroughs of new properties, complete with interior and exterior shots, furniture, and greenery. They’ve published the first draft of the videos online for public viewing.
Last month at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the 7th Annual Workshop on Charm++ was held. The conference was heavily focused on parallelized applications for HPC, but there were several talks on using GPU’s for parallelizing algorithms. Now, they have PDF’s and videos of all the talks available on their website for your viewing pleasure.
The University of Victoria has just received a $700,000 grant from the BC Knowledge Department Fund for various projects. Of interest is project #6:
6. New colour science lab – $82,437
This grant for equipment will help UVic create a colour science laboratory for computer graphics research and computational photography.
The lab will develop image processing techniques that will make data analysis easier. Information will be represented visually, allowing users to take larger amounts of information into account when making decisions.
The research is expected to apply to such areas as matter and energy visualization, hyperspectral remote sensing, and fields like health and society.
They also have $90k allocated to develop a computer vision system as a remote sensing tool, to detect when elderly patients fall at home and require assistance.
Panasonic has stood up a new website called “Living in HD” (LiHD for short) which aims to bring users together to aid each other in dealing with issues related to working with High-Definition .
LiHD is a community for digital video, photography and HDTV enthusiasts seeking and sharing peer-to-peer knowledge to improve their digital life. LiHD is powered by people who have answers with those who have questions, and unlike sales people who tend to be biased, the LiHD community members are all about sharing and helping each other learn and grow.
And, starting on Monday May 1st, they will be running a contest titled the “30×30 campaign“, where every day for the next 30 days they will be giving away a digital camera or camcorder each day. So go ahead and create your account now, and maybe you’ll luck out!
A new made-for-TV horror movie with effects from Grand Illusions will be airing on the Sci-Fi (or SyFy) channel this Sunday, then released direct to DVD. The movie starts Famke Jannse, Bobby Cannavale, and Ed Westwick and shows work from Grand Illusions who created the CG ghost that starts it the film, along with several other effects.
See more pictures of the movie, and the full press release, after the break.
Wired Magazine is showing a fun infographic called “The Enigmatrix”, which shows the interconnetions between math, card games, mysteries, puzzles, board games, programming code, and more. It reveals some fun interconnections, like how Board Games relate to Puzzles through games like Janga & the Tower of Hanoi. Another interesting one is how Games relate to Game Theory through Tic-Tac-Toe and the Pirate Loot Problem.
A new commercial for Major League Baseball created by Superfad for Fox Sports uses an amusement park theme coupled with b-roll framings and signature city monuments combines 100 different geographic datasets covering 20 cities to create a great commercial that’s fun to watch, while avoiding alot of old cliche sports commercial tricks.
See the full press release and more pictures, and a link to the commercial, after the break.
Gnomon has announced their next workshop “Gnomon Workshop Live!”, describing it as “A weekend of entertainment design and visual effects techniques”. It will be at their school in Hollywood, CA June 27 and 28.
The artists in our line-up include Jordu Schell, Ben Procter, Scott Patton, Ian Joyner, Paul Richards, Alex Oliver, Chuk Wojtkiewicz, Chris Kirshbaum, Jonathan Berube, Glenn Rane and more to be announced. These artists have worked on such projects as Avatar, Cloverfield, Iron Man, Transformers, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, Tron, Monsters vs. Aliens, Kung Fu Panda, World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Quake 4, Warhammer Online, Warhammer 40,000, BioShock, Hellgate and Darksiders, just to name a few.
Stephen Mann takes the new Autodesk Mudbox 2009 for a spin, and is pleasantly surprised by the performance improvements Autodesk has made, and the new attention to ease-of-use.
This new version of Mudbox is amazingly fast. I was able to smooth my models over the 32-million polygon range, and except for the time it took to do the conversion, there was no perceived slow down. Once smoothed, sculpting and painting are just as fast as they are on a 6,000 face polygon model.
Panasonic has stood up a new website called “Living in HD” (LiHD for short) which aims to bring users together to aid each other in dealing with issues related to working with High-Definition .
A new made-for-TV horror movie with effects from Grand Illusions will be airing on the Sci-Fi (or SyFy) channel this Sunday, then released direct to DVD. The movie starts Famke Jannse, Bobby Cannavale, and Ed Westwick and shows work from Grand Illusions who created the CG ghost that starts it the film, along with several other effects.
Wired Magazine is showing a fun infographic called “The Enigmatrix”, which shows the interconnetions between math, card games, mysteries, puzzles, board games, programming code, and more. It reveals some fun interconnections, like how Board Games relate to Puzzles through games like Janga & the Tower of Hanoi. Another interesting one is how Games relate to Game Theory through Tic-Tac-Toe and the Pirate Loot Problem.
A new commercial for Major League Baseball created by Superfad for Fox Sports uses an amusement park theme coupled with b-roll framings and signature city monuments combines 100 different geographic datasets covering 20 cities to create a great commercial that’s fun to watch, while avoiding alot of old cliche sports commercial tricks.
VizWorld.com 
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