Home » Archives for August 2010
Today we start with an Interactive graphic by The Wall Street Journal, analyzing Google’s widening reach. We then move to the look on business Email usage in America, provided by Rack Space, followed by a great piece from All Things CRM, with some CRM tactics to win back former clients. And we close today’s selection with two informative designs about Health and Environment. The Pyramid Of Conservation, from Treehugger, and GOOD‘s view about the impacts of driving in obesity.
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Graphics, Science design, infographic, Visual Loop, visualizations
Transparency: Does Commuting By Car Make You Fat?
Understanding Google PageRank
The Ins and Outs of Assisted Living Homes
Bacon Bits
Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list
Since WikiLeaks released the massive war data last month, several people have been scouring and slaving over it in hopes of discerning some noticable patterns in the numbers. A few people have taken it and managed to create some rather eye-catching visuals, such as Danish newspaper ‘Extra Bladet’ who has mapped 70,000 of the records as shown above. But they’re not the only one:
Wired’s Noah Shachtman points to one such series of maps compiled by Drew Conway, a New York University political science graduate student. Using open source statistical tools, Conway mapped the spread of reported combat by year (below). “The results are unnerving, like stop-motion photography of a freeway wreck,” Shachtman wrote. He also linked to some interesting illustrations at Visualizing Data.
via WikiLeaks War Data Visualizations – Science and Tech – The Atlantic. (thx to ebruhwiler)
Science visualization, war
Samsung has just put a new 3D TV on the market, the PN50C490, which is available for only $989, making it one of the first large-format 3D televisions under $1000 I know of. At 50″, it’s only 720p but a nice 50-inch Plasma.
I do have to wonder about the ability to sell a 3D 720P television, but if you want to dip your toe in the water of 3D without going full-out, this might be a good “Starter” TV.
Amazon.com: Samsung PN50C490 50-Inch 720p Plasma 3D HDTV: Electronics.
Hardware 3d, plasma, samsung, tv
Patrick Shettlesworth designs concepts for Sony Online Entertainment giants like EverQuest and Planetside, as well as newer games like The Agency, and has used the Wacom Intuos for some time. Draw his concept on paper, scan it in, then touch it up with Photoshop and his Intuos, to provide the final result. In about 5-7 hours per character. He just upgraded to the new Cintiq, eliminating the paper drawing and scanning phase, and now can do the same work in 3 to 5 hours.
“With interchangeable pen nibs that emulate the feel of traditional media, the Cintiq gives you a natural drawing response that lets you be as expressive as you want,” he says. “I usually begin with a really firm pen tip, so I can keep the lines tight and clean. Once I start painting, I switch to a looser tip. It’s a process of gently laying in colors and gradually building them up, rather than going in really hard and firm.”
This new routine has transformed his process, providing an uninterrupted workflow that saves over two hours of development time per character. “It feels so much better to be on top of a drawing with your hand, the way you would do it on paper,” he explains. “I get into a rhythm when I’m doing something like this, and I don’t want to break it by having to scan or go back and forth with an eraser. And because I can move fast and loose in any direction, I can come up with way more iterations as I draw.”
A great success story, from someone in the industry using the tool every single day. Full details after the break.
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Graphics, Hardware cintiq, sony, wacom
RTT, creators of several custom visualization applications for a wide variety of customers, and Bunkspeed, creators of the GPU-accelerated Shot renderer, have joined together in a partnership. The two companies are an obvious match, as both use mental images iray in their products. Together, they aim to integrate Bunkspeed Shot and RTT DeltaGen into a seamless pipeline for modeling and rendering.
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Bunkspeed and RTT have each established unique positions within their market segments. While RTT addresses process-oriented 3D visualization solutions for larger corporations, Bunkspeed has established an excellent offering for quick visualization tools at an attractive price point,” said Ludwig A. Fuchs, co-founder and director of RTT. “From a strategic point of view, we see the collaboration with Bunkspeed as a great addition to our portfolio.”
Read the full release after the break.
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Graphics bunkspeed, rtt
Dell now has a 16-GPU PCIe Expansion Chassis for sale, enabling you to install up to 16 GPU’s and hook it all up to a single computer. The design of the device was pushed by the Oil and Gas industry who have really embraced GPGPU computing as a way to accelerate their massive dataset analysis.
I thought it was really interesting that when an oil and gas customer came to Dell and asked for a chassis solution for GPUs, their “GPU-to-server” ratio requirement went from 2:1 in the beginning all the way up to 4:1 (4 GPUs per server).
Presumably this ratio was determined by testing and maybe tuning their GPGPU application. Or it simply might’ve been because the chassis made it practical to access 4 GPUs.
Oil and Gas have always loved GPU technology, first for the ability to visualize and render their massive datasets interactively, and now for it’s amazing ability to run their massive image analysis kernels at unheard of speed. The massive quantity of GPU’s is only partially driven by computing power, tho, as I bet it’s mainly driven by memory requirements (drop 8 of the new Quadro 6000′s in there and get access to 48G of Video Memory).
via What Is Your Application’s GPU-to-CPU Ratio? – Blog – Pixel I/O.
Hardware, Science dell, gpgpu, oil&gas
VizWorld.com 
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