Over at The Guardian they’ve been busy digging through the many WikiLeaks documents (of which I must remind you it is currently against the law to own or read) and has already created several visualizations of the data within. However, they wanted something more ‘comprehensive’ that a map of locations, and decided to create a keyword-visualization which reveals some interesting ideas within the documents.
This is a picture of the 11,616 SIGACT (“significant action”) reports from December 2006. Each report is a dot, labeled by its key words. Reports with similar key words have edges drawn between them. The location of the dot has nothing to do with geography. Instead, we ran an algorithm that pulls dots with edges between them closer together. Then we labeled each cluster by the key words that are common to the reports in that cluster, and colored each report/dot by the “incident type,” as entered by military personnel. The result is an abstract map of the bloodiest month of the war.
You can read more about it here, or get the technical details and full-resolution map here.
Photographer Olivier Grunewald at Boston.com has captured some amazing pictures of sulfur mining at Kawah Ijen, a volcano in East Java, Indonesia. Sulfur mining in a volcano? Yes. Miners earn approximately $13 a day hauling sulfur down the mountain. As you can see from the picture at the right, the sulfur can catch fire and burns with a blue flame. It gives me the feeling of an image of fire and ice, although the “blue ice” in this case is actually on fire. Also, inside this volcano is a sulfuric acid lake. Click on through to see some amazing images.
Escaping volcanic gasses are channeled through a network of ceramic pipes, resulting in condensation of molten sulfur. The sulfur, which is deep red in color when molten, pours slowly from the ends of these pipes and pools on the ground, turning bright yellow as it cools. The cooled material is broken into large pieces and carried out in baskets by the miners.
Looks like Vizio is stepping into the passive 3D Television market with a nice $3500 65-inch television that uses circularly polarized passive display technology, instead of the more common active technology. This makes it very similar to the existing JVC television (that I own and love), however it claims a bit more compatibility:
The XVT3D650SV supports the widest selection of 3D formats to ensure compatibility across Blu-ray, broadcast, cable, satellite, and gaming. In addition to the standard formats, VIZIO also supports SENSIO® Hi-Fi 3D, the high quality, visually lossless 3D format that enables 3D content to be delivered over 2D infrastructure as well as RealD’s patented side-by-side format.
University of Toronto Professor Aaron Hertzmann is winner of the 2010 Steacie Prize for natural science, becoming only the award’s second Computer Science profession to win it since it’s inception in 1964. Primarily for his work in computer vision and machine learning, he’s been involved with several nonphotorealistic rendering technologies currently under investigation by groups like Pixar.
Hertzmann is well-known in the field for his influential work linking three separate research areas within computer science – computer graphics, machine learning and computer vision. By focusing on the application of machine-learning techniques and Bayesian methods, he has resolved a wide range of computer graphics problems. These include computer rendering of images in diverse artistic styles (an area known as non-photorealistic rendering); automated construction of mathematical and computational models of human locomotion for computer animation in film and computer games; estimating the three-dimensional structure of a non-rigid object from a video sequence of that object; and finding new methods for removing the effects of “camera shake” from photographs in digital photography.
I found this tool from my perusing the economic blog a The Big Picture. We all know that search engines use algorithms to decide which web sites should show up first, and which should be placed lower. In fact there is a whole business of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) dedicated to ranking your website higher in the list. The higher you are in the list, the more visits you will receive and potentially you will receive more ad revenue.
PageRankGraph helps you understand how these rankings are calculated, by showing the sites that link to a domain, with an estimate of how much influence each site has on the target domain’s score.
The lines in the graph represent inbound links that are boosting the target site’s ranking. The more juice a domain is delivering, the thicker and stronger the connection is. This means that the most helpful domains are drawn close to the center of the picture, while less important ones are left on the edges. If you mouse-over each domain, you’ll see a tooltip giving more information.
You can see that informationisbeautiful.net has a really strong connection with Vizworld. That is because they have 7 links to Vizworld. This is a nice little tool that you can find at PageRankGraph.
Over at FlowingData they’ve compiled their list of the 10 best Data Visualization Projects of 2010. A few are well-deserved, like the Nature by Numbers video, some I feel are out of place, like the ranking of the “Journalism in the Age of Data” as #2 (it’s only a documentary, no actual visualization). In particular, I like his bashing of the recent ‘infographics’ craze.
Data visualization and all things related continued its ascent this year with projects popping up all over the place. Some were good, and a lot were not so good. More than anything, I noticed a huge wave of big infographics this year. It was amusing at first, but then it kind of got out of hand when online education and insurance sites started to game the system. Although it’s died down a lot ever since the new Digg launched.
Break out your red/cyan glasses for today we have Ebisukou Fireworks Festival filmed for you in 3-D by Takashi Sekitani. You can also visit his website to see more 3-D movies and photos there.
Ebisukou Fireworks Festival on November 2010 in stereo 3D, taken using two HD cameras apart about 12m. Please enjoy the 3D fireworks synced with music.
Over at FXGuide, they have a great writeup of the various effects in the new Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie. Covering work done by MPC, Framestore, Cinesite, and others, it goes into incredible detail of several of the effects. I love the discussion of the “standing tidal wave” from the end of the movie.
Markers placed on the beach set out the proposed location of what was conceived as an enormous standing tidal wave. “Our problem was that it was to be on screen for minutes and minutes,” said Fawkner. “And in broad daylight. The other problem was how to realise the wave given that it was kind of alive but also static. We also had to work out just where all the water was actually coming from.”
There were $130 billion in earmarks in the United States 2011 budget. That is about $1,100 per family household in the U.S. Where did all that money go? Mike Shedlock at the Global Economic Trend Analysis blog has posted some information visualizations using the Tableau software and data from Sunlight Foundation. Surprisingly, at least to me, the state in which I live received a good portion of that money.
While the maps can show which state received the most money, and which congressmen had the most earmarks, it does not tell you what the money was used for. For example, I would not be surprised if in 2006 there was a huge spike in earmarks for Louisiana after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In that case, earmarks would have been a good use of money. Right now I am at a loss as to why Mississippi received so much money in earmarks in fiscal year 2011.
The world’s first stereoscopic website as been created. It is meant to be viewed on the latest generation of stereoscopic high-definition televisions. The website is using a side-by-side format for 3-D televisions to use. Right now, there is very little content, and I mean very little content. Since I do not have a 3-D HDTV hooked up to the internet, I cannot tell you how well the effect works. The problem is, there is little to no content. What is the point of having such a site without anything really to look at?
Over at The Guardian they’ve been busy digging through the many WikiLeaks documents (of which I must remind you it is currently against the law to own or read) and has already created several visualizations of the data within. However, they wanted something more ‘comprehensive’ that a map of locations, and decided to create a keyword-visualization which reveals some interesting ideas within the documents.
Looks like Vizio is stepping into the passive 3D Television market with a nice $3500 65-inch television that uses circularly polarized passive display technology, instead of the more common active technology. This makes it very similar to the existing 
University of Toronto Professor 
Over at FlowingData they’ve compiled their list of the 10 best Data Visualization Projects of 2010. A few are well-deserved, like the 
Over at FXGuide, they have a great writeup of the various effects in the new Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie. Covering work done by MPC, Framestore, Cinesite, and others, it goes into incredible detail of several of the effects. I love the discussion of the “standing tidal wave” from the end of the movie.
VizWorld.com 
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