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Last month, I attended the annual meeting of the ESRI Petroleum User Group (PUG) in Houston, Texas. This is the conference where oil and gas companies’ GIS professionals learn the latest applications of ArcGIS and geospatial technology to the exploration and production workflow.

It was my first time at ESRI PUG, having worked as a geologist and geophysical interpreter, i.e. the end customer, until 2009. Viewing the world of petroleum data management and analysis from the technology vendor/contractor side is a fresh, challenging flip on the same question all of us in the geo-industry ask: How can we push the limits of data access, analysis, visualization and scientific understanding using tech solutions, in this case GIS? This requires technological innovation, but, most crucially, a strong focus on the customer’s problem and closing the interpretation-GIS gap.  This last theme came up over and over again, even if not explicitly stated always, during the three days of the conference.

I’ll put the concept in context as I run down key conference proceedings.

PLENARY

1. Keynote Address given by ESRI’s Clint Brown, Product Director, and Damian Spangrud, ArcGIS Platform Manager. After a few obligatory minutes on the hydrocarbon exploration and production (expro) lifecycle, Brown and Spangrud tag-teamed an hour-long talk and demo of the ArcGIS Explorer operational dashboard. Two items of note: a) Bing Maps as part of basemap library, which means viewing well location in birds’ eye view along with well and company-specific lease information, and b) ESRI in the cloud (I hate that word “cloud” – all we need is more marketing-speak) – more specifically ArcGIS Server on Amazon to use geoprocessing tools directly, presented by Lawrie Sims, ERDAS founder and ESRI’s current director of imagery enterprise solutions.Tom Bell, Shell’s head of GIS services, talked briefly about CAD integration into ArcGIS (more on this later).

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Science 3d, conference, energy, esri, feature, geospatial, petroleum

StatPlanet is a interactive data visualization and mapping tool that can be run in your browser, or as a stand-alone application. Their demo contains information on life expectancy, population, age, agriculture, GDP, poverty, health, and much more. It allows you to perform bar graphs, time series, and scatter plots with the data. All-in-all it is a nice application.

It is interesting that they had no life expectancy data for Greenland and Taiwan, though missing Western Sahara can be expected. From their website:

StatPlanet is also available as a stand-alone application which can be used as free educational software. It comes with up-to-date statistics on demography, economy, education, environment & energy, gender and health, for most countries in the world.

via : StatPlanet

Graphics interactive infographic

Adobe has announced that they will be formally offering a first-look at Adobe CS5 at the global launch on Monday April 12th at 8am PDT.  You can hit their website to see a few sneak peeks and the countdown timer.  You have to register to see the live webcast, but I’m sure notes will be everywhere if you can’t make it.

Adobe Creative Suite 5 Launch.

Graphics adobe, software

Rumors are abounding about the release of the GeForce GTX 480 and 470 this week. One of these rumors is that Nvidia is forcing vendors to buy older, low end graphics cards to be able to get an allocation of the newer GeForce GTX 480 and 470 graphics cards.

Personally, I am not sure that it is true. But then again, we have word that Sparkle is preparing a 2GB version of the NVIDIA GeForce GT 220. Why would anyone want a 2GB low end card? I do not know. Now comes word that Sparkle is releasing a GeForce 210 with 24 cores, a GPU speed of 475Mhz, 1GB DDR2 at 800MHz, and a memory interface of 128 bits. Normally a GeForce 210 comes with 16 cores, a GPU speed of 589Mhz, 512 MB DDR2 at 800MHz, and a memory interface of 64 bits, although I did find one GeForce 210 with a memory interface of 128 bits. I have my doubts that a 2 GB GT220 is needed, though a 128-bit memory interface for a GT210 can’t hurt. Perhaps the rumor is true then.

Hardware fermi, geforce 210, nvidia

With all of the science behind the Large Hadron Collider, you just know there has to be some earth shattering visualizations to parse out the mountains of information right?  You’ld be right, but you may not be able to understand the super-technical pictures.

There is a near-constant buzz of activity now that the LHC has started up again. And large monitors display very impressive, technical-looking visualizations of potential events as they are detected.

Unlike Monty Python’s machine that goes bing, however, these displays are rife with meaning. You just need a secret decoder blog post!

The “Symmetry Breaking” team has a few of the pics with details describing just what you’re looking at.  Be forewarned, tho, that even with details you still not have the slightest idea what’s going on.

• A CMS display
• An ATLAS display
• An LHC display

via Blogs of the week – LHC event displays: not just pretty pictures.

Science lhc, Science, visualization

New Scientist has a graphic posted on spam. Not the luncheon meat, or the Monty Python skit, but that unwanted email. Tip of the hat goes to Flowing Data who posted about this.

Originally the canned meat product that threatened to engulf a 1970 sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, spam now overruns the internet. With the rise of “botnets” – networks of “zombie” computers programmed to send out mass mailings without their owners’ knowledge – something like 9 out of every 10 emails are now unsolicited. Spammers have been dealt a few blows in recent years, but as long as there is money to be made they are unlikely to go away anytime soon.

via Spamdemic: Tracking the plague of junk mail – tech – 26 February 2010 – New Scientist.

Graphics infographic

The Relativistic  Heavy Ion Collider announced some exciting new results earlier this month from two separate groups of researchers, and the iSGTW brings us the news and a great video showing what they’ve discovered.

For the first result, scientists rolled back the clock to measure the temperature in the first instants of the formation of a quark-gluon plasma “soup.” They found that at that instant, the temperature is a whopping four trillion degrees.  (…)

The second group of scientists discovered that, in the magnetic field induced by the accelerator’s colliding charged particles and the vortices that form in the resulting quark-gluon soup, positively charged quarks tend to move in one direction, and negatively charged quarks in the other. (…)

See the video below.

via Video of the week – RHIC’s hot quark soup.

Science research, visualization

Tableau has another great graphic showing the distribution of votes in the recently passes Healthcare bill.  Up top you see their geographic map showing the distribution of uninsured patients and voting delegation, and below that is a collection of graphs adding in information on campaign contributions.

After much deliberation, fighting, infighting and some rather intense partisan antics, the House passed the health care reform bill Sunday. It is hard to think of a subject more controversial in American society today and the voting behind the bill proves it. If you have any interest in the subject, you can download the workbook and use the data to see the story from your own point of view.

See the chart after the break.

via Healthcare bill will most benefit those who did not vote for it | Tableau Software.
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Science health, interactive, tableau

When you run a website, compressing images becomes a way of life.  Finding clever ways to crush every single byte of of them not only reduces bandwidth, but reduces load times and costs as well.  Over at the WebDesignerDepot, they have an extensive writeup on techniques for ‘optimizing’ your images.

Making pages load fast is crucial to keeping the attention of visitors. They’re fickle folks these users, easily disappointed if they don’t get immediate results. When they click a link, they want the target right away.

One of the biggest bottlenecks on web pages is the size and quantity of images. The obvious solution is to use fewer images. But other techniques can help us get the most out of every pixel.

The cover the usuals (Don’t make unnecessarily large images, use sprites) but also get into some interesting tricks like Photoshop’s “19%” Glitch and how various formats treat vertical and horizontal details (like Bar-codes).

via Techniques for Squeezing Images for All They’re Worth | Webdesigner Depot.

Graphics, Science algorithm, compression, imageprocessing

MAXON, creators of the CINEMA4D suite, have released the information related to their NAB2010 presence, and boy is it a whopper.  In their booth (#SL5624) they will, of course, have demonstrations of BodyPaint3D and CINEMA4D.  They will also have a collection of guest artists on-hand demonstrating how they use the MAXON tools in their work.  Just a few of the names include:

• John LePore, associate creative director for Perception, an award-winning New York City-based creative studio, returns to the MAXON booth to ‘wow’ visitors with his engaging presentation style and demos of the studio’s latest motion graphics campaigns using CINEMA 4D on behalf of NBC, Powerade and SPEEDtv.
• Nate Mitchell, graphic supervisor at Innovative Show Design (ISD), a design firm specializing in scenic and lighting services for television productions, corporate events, and live theater, returns to the MAXON booth to present set design projects using CINEMA 4D on Face the Ace, Poker After Dark, and High Stakes Poker.
• Rob Garrott of Bending Pixels, has directed, animated, designed and produced numerous broadcast projects for leading brands.
• Nick Campbell of Greyscale Gorilla, a seasoned motion designer (Dexter, the Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien, Target, Blackberry), will demonstrate the incredible ease with which CINEMA 4D sparks creativity.

And more.  Read the full release after the break, and then be sure to go cash in our free Exhibition-floor Code for some free passes to the MAXON booth at NAB!

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Graphics, Hardware alioscopy, cinema4d, maxon, nab