GOOD has a new “Transparency” online showing the 10 most expensive pieces of art ever sold, including the recent record-holder “Walking Man I” from Alberto Giacometti. I don’t fully understand the graphic, their choice of black and white silhouettes instead of photographs and the mapping of scale on a 6-foot basis all seems somewhat arbitrary and unhelpful. Nonetheless, I link it here for you to see for yourself.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently announced that it is consolidating its climate change research capabilities into the NOAA Climate Service office. As part of this consolidation, the NOAA Climate Services has recently installed a dashboard on their web site for the dissemination of climactic data in a user-friendly format. The dashboard has two tabs. The first tab, called Climate Change, covers all the hot-topic issues, such as the yearly temperature, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, sea level rise, incoming sunlight, and decreasing Arctic sea ice. The published data ranges from 1880 for temperature through 2008. Some data series, such as the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, do not go back the full range. The second tab, called Climate Variability, covers the Oceanic Nino index, Southern Oscillation index, Pacific-North American pattern, North Atlantic Oscillation index, and the Arctic Oscillation index. The published data for the Climate Variability data ranges from 1950 for temperature through 2008.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory is a new spacecraft that NASA is launching to study solar activity and space weather. The new spacecraft is designed to take measurements of the Sun’s interior, its magnetic field, the solar corona, and the sun’s irradiance. To do this, the SDO has three main instruments.
The third of these instruments is the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA). The AIA is a collection of four telescopes which will photograph the Sun’s surface and atmosphere. The AIA uses a 4096×4096 thinned back illuminated CCD to capture the images of the Sun. The AIA will take these images across 8 different wavelengths (out of the 10 available wavelengths) every 10 seconds. This will cover nine ultraviolet or extreme ultraviolet bands, and one visible light band. It is anticipated that that scientists will discover how storms start on the Sun, and propagate through the Sun’s atmosphere. Read more after the break, including a the official video on SDO.
NVidia has a new blog posting about the Mercury playback engine that Adobe first announced back in December.
Essentially, Adobe has redesigned their entire video rendering and playback engine to harness the NVIDIA CUDA parallel processing architecture of Quadro graphics processing units (GPUs). The result is a fluid, real-time editing experience for adding additional effects, multiple layers, or ultra high resolution content. No more wasting time waiting for things like Encoding and Exporting progress bars to slowly fill the box.
In addition to listing some of the impressive new features (no-wait interaction with 2k or 4k frames!), they have some example videos demonstrating the features.
Kevin Weil of Twitter’s Analytics team took a deep look at the massive firehose of data that was Twitter during Super Bowl 44 and visualized the data about the game and about the advertising as a percentage of Twitter volume as a whole.
We categorized each incoming tweet as about the Super Bowl itself, about the brands or the commercials, or neither. Dividing each group by the total volume of tweets, we produced the graph below which represents a minute-by-minute reflection of people's thoughts and emotions during the game
Of course, several of the big spikes related to touchdowns, interceptions, and the famous on-side kick. I’m surprised at how “steady” the tweet volume was during the half-time show. Get the full chart and details at their site.
The “Graphics Gems” books (I, II, III, IV, and V) have long been a mainstay of anyone doing complex computer graphics and interactive programming. Full of code snippets, algorithms, and clever ways of solving routine problems in new efficient ways, they are almost the holy tome of OpenGL and graphics programmers. NVidia is now working to create a similar series of “core information” books for GPU programming and is soliciting articles and information for a “GPU Computing Gems”.
You are invited to contribute to GPU Computing Gems, a contribution-based book that will focus areas on practical techniques for GPU computing in some key focus areas:
· scientific simulation
· video and image processing including compression
· engineering simulation
· computer vision
· numerical algorithms
· signal processing and audio processing
· life sciences
· interactive physics simulation and AI for games and entertainment
Computer vision systems are becoming increasingly common, but also increasingly complex as we get closer and closer to understanding how the human eye and brain collect, store, and organize information. The Visual Neuroscience Group at the Rowland Instititute at Harvard is in the business of computer vision and needed some pretty intense computational power to crunch some numbers. They decided to venture into the new arena of GPU computing, and built an incredibly powerful computer that fits into a mere 18-inch cube.
A few months ago, nVidia generously donated 8 of their impressive 9800GX2 graphics cards to our lab, to help us scale-up our efforts. The resulting machine is described below. With peak performance around 4 TFLOPs (4 billion floating point operations per second), this little 18”x18”x18” cube is perhaps one of the world’s most compact and inexpensive supercomputers.
Be sure to check out the Flickr gallery showing the build & completed system.
The definitive guide to the graphic presentation of information. In today’s data-driven world, professionals need to know how to express themselves in the language of graphics effectively and eloquently. Yet information graphics is rarely taught in schools or is the focus of on-the-job training. Now, for the first time, Dona M. Wong, a student of the information graphics pioneer Edward Tufte, makes this material available for all of us. In this book, you will learn:
to choose the best chart that fits your data;
the most effective way to communicate with decision makers when you have five minutes of their time;
how to chart currency fluctuations that affect global business;
how to use color effectively;
how to make a graphic “colorful” even if only black and white are available.
The book is organized in a series of mini-workshops backed up with illustrated examples, so not only will you learn what works and what doesn’t but also you can see the dos and don’ts for yourself. This is an invaluable reference work for students and professional in all fields.
For the last two years or so, the “Plight of the VFX Artist” has been slowly building up steam in news journals and circles of employment, discussion how VFX artists are undervalued, overworked, and generally forgotten in the hollywood buzz machine. With recent films like Avatar attributing more of their success to the visual effects than the A-list actors, it’s back again but with a bit more momentum. In a recent piece from Lee Stranahan published in the Huffinton Post, Stranahan brought it back into the forefront with great success.
Visual Effects Society chairman Jeff Okun said Stranahan’s column is “absolutely true.”
“The fact that we have no representation means we have no voice anywhere,” Okun said, “so it’s a free-for-all from the bottom up and the top down,” where artists and studios alike must haggle for the best deal possible.
Still, what’s the solution? Should VFX artists risk having more work outsourced overseas by simply demanding more money? Or is a Union the answer? Dave Rand, who recently signed up with the IATSE Animation Guild, seems to think unionizing is the answer:
“I have had by far the best year of my 18-year career in digital f/x,” he said. “I made more money, had the best lifestyle, worked with state-of-the-art technology for a company that has attracted the best talent in the industry. I’ve been treated wonderfully up here.”
GOOD has a new “Transparency” online showing the 10 most expensive pieces of art ever sold, including the recent record-holder “Walking Man I” from Alberto Giacometti. I don’t fully understand the graphic, their choice of black and white silhouettes instead of photographs and the mapping of scale on a 6-foot basis all seems somewhat arbitrary and unhelpful. Nonetheless, I link it here for you to see for yourself.
Here’s today’s pixels:
NVidia has a new blog posting about the Mercury playback engine that Adobe first announced back in 
The “Graphics Gems” books (
For the last two years or so, the “Plight of the VFX Artist” has been slowly building up steam in news journals and circles of employment, discussion how VFX artists are undervalued, overworked, and generally forgotten in the hollywood buzz machine. With recent films like Avatar attributing more of their success to the visual effects than the A-list actors, it’s back again but with a bit more momentum. In a recent piece from Lee Stranahan published in the Huffinton Post, Stranahan brought it back into the forefront with great success.
VizWorld.com 
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