Andrew Odewahn has an article up at O’Reilly Radar on the dangers of visualization as an influential tool and biased visualizations in particular. He uses this example (shown above):
As an example, consider this recent visualization called Your New Health Care System from the minority members of the U.S. Senate’s Joint Economic Committee, led by Republican U.S Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas.
As a pure piece of design, it’s incredibly effective. Every element — shape, color, size, orientation, typography, and layout — conveys a sense of bewildering complexity and raises an unstated message of “See how complex this is? It can’t possibly work.”
This is nothing new, the argument’s been around for a while. The only real hope is educating the public ( a notoriously difficult thing to do ) to beneath the pretty visuals at the underlying data.
Geo-data company Urban Mapping has just announced their first reference application ‘Geo Fact Finder‘, an interesting mashup with Bing Maps to overlay lots of different social and demographic indicators.
The below screen shot shows off recent unemployment rates, shown in a thematic map at five percent intervals. Overlay with (say) political affiliation, educational performance, demographics, consumer expenditures, doom & gloom (tornadoes, hurricanes, coastal vulnerability to sea level rise), public transit, vacancy rate and much, much more…
Let’s start this week with a bunch of Social Media facts and figures. Flowtown made a nice update to the Social Networking Map, originally launched in 2007, and from Online Schools two infographics showing some interesting stats about Facebook and YouTube. Then, we have a look at Wikipedia’s lamest edit wars, by Information is Beautiful, and we close this Monday roundup with an overview about the history of Apple, by Online PhD.
ForCG has a nice collection of particle flow animation videos. Most of them are just whispy shapes with an amazingly relaxing effect, but a few show merging particle effects with video inputs or models of things like the sun.
Upcoming film “The Other Guys” showcases some eye-catching visuals in the opening and ending credits done by Picture Mill., specifically the ending credits which feature several animated infographics and charts of bloated CEO bonuses, the stockmarket crash, and effects of the massive government bailouts recently.
“Bold, brightly colored charts and graphs fill the screen with enraging data about bloated chief-executive bonuses, billion-dollar bank bailouts,Ponzi schemes and other entries in the encyclopedia of modern financial infamy. ” A.O. Scott – NY Times, August 5, 2010
Watch a segment of their work at their website, linked below.
I’m gonna take a step away from our usual content and ask that you head over to the Pepsi Refresh project and vote for the “Make Juvenile Myositis a Memory” project. I know someone (names withheld for privacy) with a child with JM, and it’s a hard disease for not only the kids but the parents. With the possible money they could win:
This project will allow the CureJM foundation to continue critical research. Funding the center of excellence will allow JM researchers to combine clinical evaluation with drug research targeted at combating the devastating effects of this disease. Many researchers believe that there is also a genetic predisposition to autoimmune diseases. As such, they feel that a child afflicted with JM is likely to have a blood relative who suffers from another autoimmune disease such as diabetes or arthritis. Continuing to fund this vital research is of paramount importance to fulfill CureJM’s goal to make sure that no child suffers another day with JM.
They’ve in the running for the big reward, the $250. Just visit their website, or click the badge here to cast your vote. You can vote every day, and help find a cure.
The Chaos Group held their User Group Event at SIGGRAPH2010, and the guys from CGArchitect and VRayInfo were in attendance. They’ve posted several pictures and some details on the event, which seemed to include a heavy emphasis on interoperability with other software packages, doing things like exporting simulations from Houdini to Maya via VRay Animated Proxies.
The User Event was held on Thursday the 29th of July at the Los Angeles Conference Center. Among the things presented were V-Ray RT GPU, PDPlayer, V-Ray RT for Maya, Proxy workflow from Houdini to Maya, and a sneak preview of some of the features in V-Ray 2.0.
Jon Peddie has a great look at the future of computer graphics (complete with a pic of Dick Van Dyke & William Shatner crashing his luncheon, and my blue shirt poking out behind Shatner’s elbow), that really looks at what’s going to happen in the next few years.
The Semicans will give us the engines at ridiculously affordable prices which in turn will allow the Systematics to build boxes and displays that a new generation of Algorithmics will use to give us procedural AI simple UI tools for things like facial simulation and/or recognition, robotic control in a virtual rig or a hardwired machine, and natural language realtime translation conversations with peers and machine.
Someone should get Jon Peddie up on stage at SIGGRAPH sometime. I think he’ld do better than the disappointing “Future Directions of Graphics Research” panel.
At the recent SIGGRAPH2010, tri-Ace’s Research & Development Department was on hand with two courses during the conference:
Color Enhancement and Rendering in Film and Game Production
Physically Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production
The slides and course notes for both talks are online and talk about new spectral rendering algorithms and film simulation in video games. Great talks, and highly technical while not being overbearing. Get the PDF’s and PPT’s on their site.
Andrew Odewahn has an article up at O’Reilly Radar on the dangers of visualization as an influential tool and biased visualizations in particular. He uses this example (shown above):
Geo-data company Urban Mapping has just announced their first reference application ‘
Let’s start this week with a bunch of Social Media facts and figures. 
ForCG has a nice collection of particle flow animation videos. Most of them are just whispy shapes with an amazingly relaxing effect, but a few show merging particle effects with video inputs or models of things like the sun.
VizWorld.com 
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