Home » Archives for January 2010
Wired Science has posted an article showing a map of global shipping routes based on GPS data. The article is based on a study that will be published in Journal of the Royal Society: Interface. The top port in the world turns out to be the Panama Canal. The top port in the U.S. turns out to be Houston, which was a surprise to me. From the article:
The team pieced together a year’s worth of travel itineraries from 16,693 cargo ships using data from LLoyd’s Register Fairplay and the Automatic Identification System, which tracks vessels using a VHF receiver and GPS.
Citation: “The complex network of global cargo ship movements” Pablo Kaluza, Andrea Kölzsch, Michael T. Gastner and Bernd Blasius, J. Royal Society: Interface
via Wired Science : A Year of Global Shipping Routes Mapped by GPS
Graphics infographic
Good is sponsoring a contest this month to produce an inforgraphics on the Haitian earthquake. They are interested in an infographic that takes a look at why the earthquake was so devestating, the toll that it took on the people, the recovery efforts, and the aid that is flowing from around the world. From the article:
This will be the first in a monthly series of infographic design contests here at GOOD. The topics, judges, and prizes may vary from month to month, but we’ll always be asking the brilliant creative members of our community to help in our quest to make the world’s data more accessible. Here’s this month’s project:
Highlight the scope of the Haiti earthquake, as well as the aid given to help recover from the disaster.
via Good : Project: Create an Infographic About the Haiti Earthquake
Graphics contest, haiti, infographic
The Harvard Business Review has posted an inforgraphic showing the size of each country’s bailout relative to the GDP of the country. A high ratio indicates stress in the country, while a low ratio shows countries that are likely to recover more quickly. The largest bailouts occurred in the West, where the crisis originated. The infographic also shows the size of each country’s stimulus relative to the GDP of the country. Personally, I am not a fan of pie charts, and especially overlapping pie charts. From the article:
The economic crisis will influence business long into recovery. As strategists target global investments, they need to understand the effects of bailout and stimulus programs. Calculating these interventions as percentages of GDP helps identify which economies will be stressed and which will have the resources to bounce back.
via Harvard Business Review : Vision Statement: A Map to Healthy—and Ailing—Markets
Graphics infographic
Not a terribly viz-oriented news topic, but it is popular today. Watching the announcement, I found myself very underwhelmed and wanted to share some thoughts:
- No mention of GPS
- No mention of 3G or Edge They just announced that “Some models” will have cellular connectivity
- No mention of a Camera
- Applications can run “in a box” or “2x pixel”, implying the screen is double-wide and double-tall as the iPhone screen.. Making it something like 960×640 (480×320 doubled). But no mention of running multiple apps at once in a side-by-side or foreground/background usage.
- Not 16×9.. The res would take 720p with space leftover, but not 1080.. Not a bit deal.. (Sorry, Brain fart there. I was thinkin 480p) As it is, it doesn’t handle any HD format.
- Very impressed by the battery life on it.. They claim 10 hours of Video playback, and a full month of Standby.
- iBooks is neat.. corny name, and it looks like they just cut-n-paste Delicious Library & Stanza for the interface..
- ePub compatible.. that’s nice.. Now to see how easy/hard it is to get ePub books from other sources into it.
As I write this they are discussing iWork for the iPad (getting tired of the iNames). I have to wonder why? Do they really think people are going to be writing documents or building spreadsheets on this thingSeriously? Maybe a document/presentation viewer, but the full suite?
No word on details like the chipset involved. Several people theorized it might sport the new PowerVR chipset, but nothing has been announced one way or the other. The only concrete numbers so far is the 1Ghz custom ‘A4′ processor from Apple. The games they’ve shown are better than iPhone/iPod graphics, but not as good as PC, which is to be expected. That could all easily be explained by the improved CPU.
What are your opinions?
UPDATE: The Apple iPad page is live.. Some things to note:
- The resolution is 1024×768, better than I expected. Still not HD-worthy, but better.
- It says it will play up to 720p, but I guess it must be resampling it.
Hardware apple, ipad
At the recent TechEd conference, Intel was demonstrating their new Smoke Gaming engine on a Windows7 machine and a Windows Vista machine. Both machines had identical hardware (Intel i7 chipsets internally, of course) but the Windows7 machine was significantly faster.
See what a difference the new Windows 7 kernel makes compared to Windows Vista. The windows 7 kernel is optimized for use with Intel core microarchitecture not only does it perform faster it also allows you to put a few cores to sleep while maintaining peak performance.
The demonstrator attributes this to Windows 7′s better handling of multiple threads and improved understanding of the Nehalem architecture.
See the demonstration after the break.
Read more…
Hardware benchmark, intel, smoke, windows7
Jon Peddie Research has published their year-end financial analysis of the major players in the PC Graphics industry, and found everything growing quite well: a 14% year-to-year growth.
Intel was the leader in Q4’09, elevated by Atom sales for netbooks, as well as strong growth in the desktop segment. AMD gained in the notebook integrated segment, but lost some market share in discrete in both the desktop and notebook segments due to constraints in 40nm supply. Nvidia picked up a little share overall. Nvidia’s increases came primarily in desktop discretes, while slipping in desktop and notebook integrated.
Also, this year saw a new category on the market: CPU-Integrated Graphics (CIG). While there are only a few offerings to think of right now (Tegra? Larrabee didn’t make it), it’ll continue to grow in coming quarters.
image courtesy of ndevil
via Astounding year-to-year growth in PC graphics; Quarter-to-quarter also beats expectations – Comments – Press Releases.
Hardware 2009, financial, jpr
A great idea that several larger studies should implement, Artifex Studios actually advocates their employees working on their own non-work animations as a tool to not only exercise their creativity but to polish their skills.
“A few years ago I said to myself, ‘If this is not a place I’d be interested in working at, I can’t expect other people to be interested in working here,’” says Stern,
They are currently in post-production on their first project, a short 15-minute film to be used as a portfolio piece for the company, but plan to produce several more.
via Artifex keeps creative juices flowing; Small visual effects company nurtures the film projects of its own employees | Kelowna.com.
Graphics artifex
If you’re running a WebGL compliant web browser, you can head on over to Shader Toy and interactively build Pixel Shaders in your browser and see the results. This is all possible thanks to the new WebGL support and enables an incredible level of experimentation and interactivity, directly in the browser.
Unfortunately I’m not near a WebGL browser at the moment. Someone take a Pic and send it to us, and I’ll be happy to include it!
Graphics, Science browser, interactive, shader, webgl
Good has published an infographic on Haitian Aid. It shows the amount of the individual donations that are above $1 million, and who it was from. The United States has donated $114.48 million, while the UK has donated almost $31 million. Some other notable donations include Sandra Bullock and Goldman Sachs, which both donated $1 million. Of course, Goldman Sachs is paying out $16.2 billion in bonuses.
via Good : Who has given how much to Haiti?
Graphics infographic
Here’s the pixels for today:
VizWorld.com 
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