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A Snapshot of Canon.

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The Knight Foundation has announced the winners of the annual Knight News Challenge, and it includes a few important tools for data visualizations for journalists.  Eric Rodenbeck’s ‘CityTracking’ won $400k, and Eric Gundersen’s ‘Tilemapping’ gets a nice $74,000 to make map mash-ups simpler.

Hear the winning entries pitch their ideas in the video above.

Knight News Challenge | You invent it. We fund it..

Science knight news challenge, news, visualization

Recognizing the growth in popularity of the the Vue software suite, E-on has just announced the new ATC Program (Authorized Training Center) that offers educational training and discounts to educational institutions, as well as resources and demos on their website to standardize the educational process.

“Increasingly the marriage of CAD Architecture with CG Digital Nature is becoming a mainstream requirement for presenting and showcasing designs ” explained Will Yankey Professor of Architecture at Kansas State University. “The new e-on ATC program is exactly what we were looking for as we would like to make Vue more pervasive for student projects within the College of Architecture.”

via e-on software – E-on Software.

Graphics e-on, education, vue

The BP Deepwater Horizon caught fire and sank after an explosion on April 20, 2010. The subsequent oil loss into the Gulf of Mexico is threatening the health of the Gulf and coastal ecosystems in the region. Using high resolution satellites from NOAA’s partners in Earth observations, NESDIS scientists are able to track the location of the oil plume as it is circulated throughout the Gulf due to changing winds and currents. Satellites providing data for these analyses include the MODIS sensor on NASA’s Aqua and Terra, Canadian Space Agency’s RADARSAT-2 SAR, JAXA’s ALOS satellite, Satellite Imaging Corporation’s SPOT-5, and the SAR sensor on European Space Agency’s ENVISAT. This animation shows the extents of the oil spills as observed by the aforementioned satellites. The observed extents may in some cases not reflect the actual extents due to the difficultly in identifying oil slicks from space. In addition, the extents shown characterize only the surface oil, not the subsurface plumes that are now being documented.

credit: NOAA

via : YouTube

Science bp, oil

Nintendo announced their venture into 3D gaming with their new handheld device, the 3DS. Alison Haislip talks to Kit Ellis at their booth to learn what’s in store for the Wii and 3DS.

via : YouTube

Hardware nintendo

Last week we were able to interview Berk Geveci, Kitware’s Director of Scientfic Computing, about Kitware’s dedication to open source computing and their popular VTK and ParaView products.  Berk now leads a team of 18-20 people focused on high performance computing scientific visualization and, more recently, informatics and information visualization.

Kitware is approximately 12 years old, and started as a research company around the Visualization Toolkit (VTK).  The business model is founded on supporting and consulting on open-source software, tho now they have 5 differenct groups on various interests.  Berk runs the Scientific visualization group, but they also have groups on computer vision, medical imaging and computing, data publication, and software processes like CMake and CDash.

During the course of the interview we discussed how Kitware deals with open-source and proprietary technologies, their government and industry collaborations, and what we might see in the next version of these popular products.

Read the interview after the break.

Read more…

Science feature, interview, kitware, paraview, vtk

M*A*S*H Infographic picture by bladehelm – Photobucket.

infographics television

OK Go has just released their newest video, and this one uses time-warp effects to great results.  Discovery Magazine talks to them about their work, and gets some details on the sheer scale of the project.

“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.”

via The OK Go Video: Playing With the Speed of Time | Discoblog | Discover Magazine.

Graphics music video

The World Cup isn’t just taking the world’s sports fans by storm, but seems to be engaging the worlds data visualization community en masse as well.  South African based startup company ScoreGrid has a new webapp online that visualizes the various games of the World Cup.

Although its visualization has similar features as Adidas MatchTracker (annotated timeline with the graphical depiction overlaid on a virtual grass field), and NYTimes Goal (localized, but static, heat map), its originality might lie in the fact that it particularly focuses on the dynamics of the ball (instead of players), such as the ball's location over time, how long it was possessed by each side or how long it was present in each half.

via ScoreGrid: More Visualized Real-Time Football Cup Data Statistics – information aesthetics.

Science sports

UNHCR refugee statistics: full data, as a spreadsheet | News | guardian.co.uk.

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