VizWorld.com

FlowingData has compiled a great guide on nine different methods to visualization proportions (pie, donut, nightingale, etc), giving you when to use and when not to use the various methods.

With all the visualization options out there, it can be hard to figure out what graph or chart suits your data best. This is a guide to make your decision easier for one particular type of data: proportions.

Maybe you want to show poll results or the types of crime over time, or maybe you're interested in a single percentage. Here’s how you can show it.

via 9 Ways to Visualize Proportions – A Guide | FlowingData.

Science guide, infographic

Compete.com has taken their tracking data for the big shopping holiday weekend and compared the numbers on some of the largest merchants on the internet, taking particular interest in the price wars between WalMart and Amazon.com .

Generally speaking, mass merchants fared very well online last Friday. While more people are going online to shop this year, bringing cautious smiles to nervous retailers, consumers are continuing the trend of concentrating their shopping on large mass merchant websites in search of deep discounts and one-stop shopping.

Of course, these numbers don’t come from actual traffic but rather from compete’s “estimated” traffic, which in my experience is somewhat speculative (if you search for the VizWorld.com traffic, it’s waaay off from what Google Analytics & my own logfiles say), but the trends are interesting.  In particular you can see how brick-n-mortar Walmart had a larger Black Friday than Cyber Monday, but Amazon was opposite.

via Walmart and Amazon.com Battle for Online Supremacy.

Science amazon, shopping, visualization, walmart

Google has turned their considerable computing power to more “sustainable” goals with a new product announced yesterday at the UN Climate Change Conference.  A prototype system that combines with Google Earth uses their significant cloud computing horsepower to automatically detect and visualize areas of suspected deforestation.

The prototype system, could, for example, allow users to show forest cover and deforestation over time in Rondonia, Brazil from 1986-2008 in just seconds. This type of computation normally takes days or weeks, but the massive horsepower of Google’s data centers makes the information much more quickly. In practical terms, that means police investigators can get to the root of illegal logging activity quickly, and activist groups like Greenpeace could call out logging operations in real-time. The system could also be used in the proposed UN REDD program, which might pay developing countries to cut down on deforestation.

Google Blog via Google Earth Uses the Cloud to Fight Deforestation | Sustainability | Fast Company.

Science climate, deforestation, google, un

It’s no secret that the most powerful supercomputers in the world lie in the hands of the National Science Foundation, the NSF.  John West (of InsideHPC) mentioned a paper by Larry Smarr, a big name in HPC circles, which talks about what the NSF has gotten right and wrong over the duration of the program.  A few things to call out for us Viz folks, first a “Good”:

Drove Scientific Visualization. The need for visualization of the massive datasets generated by the NSF centers drove the development of computer graphics teams at a number of centers. The concept of data-driven scientific visualization quickly swept the academic community, but also had a major impact, largely through SIGGRAPH, on Hollywood and later the gaming community. For instance, Stefen Fangmeier, who was NCSA scientific visualization project manager in 1987, went on to spend over 15 years as a visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, working on such films as Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, Dreamcatcher, Perfect Storm, and Master and Commander,

So we have the NSF to thank for alot. But it’s not all good, as evidenced from this clip of “The Ugly”:

Lack of balanced user-to-HPC architecture. From the beginning of the NSF centers program, a basic architectural concept was building a balanced end-to-end system connecting the end user with the HPC resource. Essentially, this was what drove the NSFnet build-out and the strong adoption of NCSA Telnet, allowing end users with Macs or PCs the ability to open up multiple windows on their PCs, including the supercomputer and mass storage systems. Similarly, during the first five years of the PACI, both NPACI and the Alliance spent a lot of their software development and infrastructure developments on connecting the end-user to the HPC resources. But it seems that during the TeraGrid era, the end-users only have access to the TG resources over the shared Internet, with no local facilities for  compute, storage, and visualization that scale up in proportion with the capability of the TG resources. This sets up an exponentially growing data isolation of the end users as the HPC resources get exponentially faster (thus exponentially increasing the size of data sets the end-user needs access to), while the shared Internet throughput grows slowly if at all.

In short:

• Thank the NSF for pushing Scientific Visualization to deal with massive datasets & create realistic visuals
• But they kinda dropped the ball, and aren’t properly handling SciVis requirements now.

For any readers out there working in the NSF, what do you think? Agree, Disagree?

Smarr on “the good, the bad, and the ugly” in the NSF supercomputer program | insideHPC.com.

Science hpc, nsf

Merry Christmas Adobe Illustrator users, as noupe has compiled a massive list of goodies just for you.

In this article, there are over 200 (mostly) free resources for Adobe Illustrator. Since many designers have made these resources free for others, please take the time to check out the license agreements before using any resources for projects.

Finally, have fun stockpiling all the brushes, patterns,, symbols, vectors, swatches, and fun additions to the Adobe Illustrator presets. After all, among these resources, there’s sure to be a few gold nuggets just waiting to be found.

Fire up those download managers, you’re gonna be burning up the bits tonight.

via A Gold Mine of Adobe Illustrator Resources – Noupe.

Graphics adobe, free, illustrator, list

From a recent “Intel’s Insides”, NVidia’s blog/comic dedicated to poking fun an Intel’s foray into GPU development (now dead, tho the comic strip lives on).

Just too good to pass up.

Home.

Graphics, Hardware humor, intel, nvidia

The above image has been popular on the internet this week, the mysterious blue and white spiral hovering over the horizon of Norway.  Alien invasion?  Death ray satellite?  Well, Doug Ellison ran computer simulations showing the effect could have come from a misfired missile tumbling through the sky (creating the white spiral of smoke) and leaking fuel (the blue spiral), and it probably came from Russia based on the region.  Russia initially denied it, but has just recently changed their tune:

The jinxed Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile failed at the third stage after being test-fired from a submarine in the White Sea, Russia’s military said.

They still won’t claim that the lights are from their rocket, but given the circumstances it seems likely.

See Doug Ellison’s simulation and video of the actual lights after the break.

via The answer to the mystery of Norway’s spiral light display: Was it a failed Russian Bulava missile test? | Mail Online.

Read more…

Science norway, photography, simulation

A new article on Tripwire Magazine compiles a list of 75 tools for visualizing your data on the web, and breaks it down into Javascript solutions, CSS solutions, Server-side solutions, Flash-based solutions, and other online tools and services you can investigate.

Images says more than a thousands words. It is common sense and wise people has followed this rule for centuries by creating illustrations of thier ideas and thoughts. Today it is easier than ever as the technology for presenting nearly any type of information as a graph or chart on a web page is getting really mature. Reading through this article you will be faced with the problem on what technology and specific implementation you should use. It is not a trivial question and I recommend that you use comments on this article to share your ideas, concerns etc. with peer readers. This way you may get the input from the community that you need to create the optimal solution.

via 75+ Tools for Visualizing your Data, CSS, Flash, jQuery, PHP | tripwire magazine.

Science interactive, list, visualization, web

Realsoft Graphics has released the newest version of their Realsoft 3D tool, version 7, for Windows.  New features include:

• Render engine’s memory management has been redesigned. The allocated memory is now split into a common, scene specific part, and to a render thread specific optimization part. This improves memory management dramatically in multi-core machines. A dual core system can typically render 50 % more complex scenes, a quad core 2 times and an eight core system 3-4 times more complex scenes than before.
• Ray tracing is typically 10-20 % faster than V6 with all kinds of scenes.
• Bottlenecks related to ray tracing detailed polygon models optimized. One million face triset model rendered using 16*12 render boxes renders now almost 10 times faster!
• A new Walkthrough rendering mode for fast rendering of static (architectural etc.) scenes
• Ray tracing visible measuring objects
• Efficient analytic Lathe and Tube compound tools. Creating rotational shapes can’t get easier.
• Easy Real3D-like Twist tool
• New animation tools: Warp, Noise and Shrink Wrap modifiers
• Motion curve tracker tool
• True volumetric explosions
• New particle tools for surface distribution, emitters, and volume filling. The tools provide easy particle flow and lifetime controls.
• Full support for OpenEXR image format
• 2D vector export from viewports (PostScript format supported)
• Automatic density control for snapping grids

Upgrades for existing owners cose 150 € with new purchases costing 600 €.  Versions for Mac and Linux are coming soon, and a free trial will be released next month (January 2010).

REALSOFT GRAPHICS.

Graphics realsoft, software

Framestore joins the ranks of ILM, Weta Digital, and Sony Pictures Imageworks as a Foundry Nuke Site License Holder, and will be using it in their upcoming 2010 productions.  Claiming that it’s somewhat due to the death of Shake, they also really seem to love the product:

Christian Kaestner, Head of Nuke Compositing at Framestore, said “The decision to invest in Nuke came down to speed and flexibility. Nuke is simply incredibly fast, interactive, and flexible, even in quite complex comps with several hundred nodes. The interactivity the artist gets from Nuke out of the box is quite impressive – it even allows the supervisor to sit down with the artist to do an ‘interactive’ session if needed. And when building Nuke into the pipeline, we were able to access existing Python scripts and modules that weren't even designed for use with Nuke.

Our artists adapted quickly to the Nuke workflow. The first full Nuke project was Quantum of Solace, which was one of the smoothest projects I have ever worked on and won us a VES nomination for 'outstanding compositing'. Most recently, Avatar, required us to push technology to the limits – not just at the 3D or TD level but also at a compositing level – Nuke surpassed all of our expectations.”

via CGSociety – Framestore gets Nuke.

Graphics foundry, framestore, nuke, software