VizWorld.com

The New York Times has a series on U.S. government aid to its citizens, including unemployment insurance, food stamps, and cash welfare.

The number of food stamp recipients has climbed by about 10 million over the past two years, resulting in a program that now feeds 1 in 8 Americans and nearly 1 in 4 children.

I missed the story when it was published back on November 28, since I was busy ringing a cowbell, but as one who works amongst the poor and the homeless, this is an interesting story to me. Behind the numbers are real adults and children who depend upon the government, the kindness of charities, and the kindness of people, for their next meal.

The map and story brings out interesting facts, but you have to be careful to look at the underlying data. For example, the map states that California enrolls just half of those eligible for aid, while Missouri enrolls nearly all its eligible people. However, the data the New York Times links to from the article is from the USDA for 2006, which is prior to the recession. Yet the New York Times labels it as being from June, 2009. Using a search engine, I found USDA data that was for 2007, which makes me curious as to why the New York Times did not use it. At least the USDA in their report puts error bars on its estimations. (For the record, the error bars are +/- 2% for California.)

via Food Stamp Usage Across the Country – Interactive Map – NYTimes.com.

Science government, infographic, infovis

Jess Bachman (Wallstats) and Mint get into the Holiday Giving Spirit and whip up a nice infographic visualizing who gives to charities, how much, and who needs it the most.

Americans lead the world in charitable contributions, giving $300 billion a year to charities. Sounds like a lot right? But this is just a drop in the bucket compared to the over One Trillion Dollars needed to keep US charities in operation, more than the US government collects in taxes. The rest comes from their own assets, government support, and foreign investment. Our visual guide to giving shows who’s paying and offers some tips on how to pick a charity of your own.

via Charity: Who Cares? | MintLife Blog | Personal Finance News & Advice.

Graphics charity, infographic

Mastersfx, creator of practical character effects for several Hollywood projects, has just launched a digital division to be led by Andre Bustanoby.  Already contributing to several big projects (Twilight: New Moon, Sanctuary, Fringe, Eureka, etc) the new division allows Masterfx to integrate practical effects with digital FX, giving them a more fully rounded offering.  Masters had this to say:

“Our new digital group allows our company to integrate the best of both worlds within special and visual effects. There will always be room for practical, on-set effects that include makeups, prosthetics, puppets and other character gags. By enhancing these moments with our digital expertise, our company's contributions to film, TV, commercials and multi-media projects lets us plan every FX design in advance, pre-visualization, so we can best determine the most dramatic—and efficient—element to deliver. We can 'throw all the tools' onto the table, and can then decide which to ultimately deliver to the director.”

via MastersFX Launches Digital Division, Names Andre Bustanoby Visual Effects Supervisor – SHOOTonline.

Graphics mastersfx, vfx

It was back at NAB in April when NVidia announced they were bringing a new Quadro card, the QuadroFX 4800, to Mac users.  Exciting, definately, but the $1800 price tag makes it a significant investment and reviews have been few and far between. ArsTechnica takes it upon himself to remedy this with a fairly extensive review on some of the best Mac hardware available, and finds the results disappointing:

For some 3D enthusiasts, getting a Quadro is a rite of passage that says “I’m now a CG professional,” but that milestone relies on an image that the Quadro just doesn’t live up to on the Mac side. If the Quadro’s Mac drivers became the norm across all platforms, it would cease to be a Quadro—it would be an slower gaming card with a lot of memory. I can understand why NVIDIA isn’t enthusiastic about adding resources to a niche market within an already niche market, but it would be dishonest not to try and give this card feature parity for Mac users.

A second look at the Nvidia Quadro FX 4800 Mac Edition.

Hardware benchmark, mac, nvidia

For all of you visualization scientists out there, NCAR has just released version 1.5.2 of their multiresolution analysis tool VAPOR.  In addition to several bug fixes, they’ve added a few new features:

Improved support for transparency

VAPOR now provides limited support for display of semi-transparent surfaces. Multiple two-dimensional semi-transparent surfaces (Probe, 2DData, and Image) will correctly display in a scene provided:

• The surfaces do not intersect each other
• All the surfaces do intersect the line from the camera to the scene rotation center

This capability enables users to apply multiple images upon a terrain surface image (e.g. political boundaries, rivers, etc.) by positioning the partially transparent surfaces slightly above the terrain image. If there are additional semi-transparent shapes in the scene (volume rendering, isosurface, flow lines) they may not render correctly. Best results are obtained by keeping semitransparent objects separated from one another and in the center of the view.

Improved diagnostics for OpenGL and for application startup. If the user sets the VAPOR_DEBUG variable, the console will report more extensive information about the graphics capabilities and the initial progress of the application. This can be useful in understanding many VAPOR failures. On Windows, these messages are reported to the log file.

Freely downloadable at their site, it’s a very powerful tool for visualizing multiresolution or structured data, used a lot in atmospheric work.

via VAPOR – Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Soloar Researchers.

Science ncar, software, vapor

Jon Peddie takes his considerable track record and inside knowledge of the computer industry and uses it to build a convincing argument against the earlier rumor (more like Thought Experiment) that Intel could buy NVidia.

It’s unlikely, regardless of how big Intel’s checkbook is, that the two companies could ever agree on the price.

The Nvidia BOD and shareholders of Nvidia would never approve a friendly acquisition by Intel, and Nvidia has a multi-voting technique that would delay any hostile attempt for over a year.

If Intel could buy Nvidia, one of the first things it would do would be to dump the ARM-based Tegra product just as they dumped the ARM-based XScale product, which they did because they think the x86 has a more promising and scalable future. Given the huge goodwill they’d have to pay to get Nvidia, selling off an asset at a breakeven point at best would hardly endear the company to Wall Street or its shareholders.

via Intel Will Never Buy Nvidia – Comments – Blogs.

Hardware intel, jpr, nvidia

A mere 60 shots ranging from a short 3 to 12 seconds showcase the work of Tippet Studios in the movie New Moon, as wolves race through the forest with extraordinary realism.  CGSociety talks to them about it and gets some great details on the tools and processes they use in-house.

To help achieve the fullness and fur realism needed, Aharon Bourland, Technical Art Director and Look Development, helped create Tippetts’ in-house tool, Furator.

New Moon was the second Tippett film where this tool was used. Similar to Shake in that is uses a tree-based system, it allows for characteristics of hair to be added via nodes, then merged back together for the final groom.

It was developed to be highly flexible and extensible, such as the ability to twist a group of hairs from the tip and leave the base alone.

Another very helpful addition was Scraggle, a tool that used a CV interp node that increased the number of CV’s and resulted in a scraggled hair, then further adjusted so that the majority of scraggle was towards the base, creating the illusion of a thicker undercoat with smoother fur on top.

via CGSociety – NEW MOON.

Graphics movie, tippet, twilight, vfx

AMD has a video on YouTube showing the game Dragon Age: Origins running in 5760×1200 on three screens using Eyefinity technology.

AMD’S Simon Solotko demonstrates the new Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare’s stunning new fantasy RPG, in its full, dark, glory across three monitors at 5760×1200 resolution with ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics and ATI Eyefinity technology.

via YouTube – Playing Dragon Age: Origins at 5760 x 1200 Resolution | ATI Eyefinity Technology.

Read more…

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity, video game

[H]ard|OCP has taken delivery of the MSI Big Bang motherboard which has the Lucid Hydra. Lucid is a chip designer company with funding from Intel. The Hydra chip is an independent solution to allow multiple GPUs to render scenes in games. This means that you are no longer dependent on SLI from NVidia or Crossfire from ATI. If you are using Windows 7, you can use both NVidia and ATI in a multiple GPU configuration, although there are caveats with that. Hit the link below to read more about it.

via: MSI Big Bang’in with Lucid Hydra

Hardware ati, hydra, lucidlogic, multigpu, nvidia, video game

In a great win for new insight via visualization, Carlos Paris shares his amazing discovery of organized chaos in prime numbers through rendering stacked circles or sizes from 1 to 101.

Developing Figure 2 for the first few circles took me a few minutes, but that was more than enough. When I saw the pattern, it just exploded in my face. It is orderly chaos! That's when I felt something from beyond the screen staring back at me. The patterns and shapes generated above never repeat, they always look different depending on your location to the right of the origin. And most importantly, now you can visually tell how all circles fit into each other! I call the image a “Map of Factors” because it tells you all the factors for each number. Wherever you have only 2 circles intersecting the horizontal axis at their right quadrants, you have a prime number! The green vertical lines show the locations of the prime numbers.

The site shows the construction of several visualizations, and animates some of them which yields an odd 3d-like effect.

Primal Chaos. via Infosthetics

Science primenumbers, visualization