VizWorld.com

Slate has a nice short (4 minute) interview with Nicholas Felton, creator of the annual Feltron report that always makes waves in infographics and visualization circles.

New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton tracks where he goes, what he eats, and a million other tiny details about his daily life. Then he packages the data in beautiful annual reports. The publications used to be aimed just at friends and family, but now you can see them too.

The interview gets into a few of the social details like how much time he spends tracking the data, and the various tools he uses to keep up with it.  Hint: He makes liberal use of an iPhone Calendar (shown above on his desktop).  He also uses the FitBit, which I’m really excited to see how that turns out in his 2010 Annual Report.

Science felton, interview, slate

Fans of Pandora will find themselves browsing eBay in search of those fancy Avatar 3D BluRay discs, as new information says that the previously known Panasonic deal is actually an exclusive deal until February 2012.

Panasonic has confirmed to me that it’s nabbed the exclusive global distribution rights to the blockbuster title until February 2012. Until that point, it will only be available as a retail incentive to buyers of the brand’s 3DTVs and Blu-ray players.

That is an amazing duration on such a deal.  Panasonic no doubt paid a bundle, if it’s true.  I’m not very familiar with the ‘AVZombie’ site.

via Panasonic ties up Avatar 3D Blu-ray until Feb 2012, no retail release planned for 2011.

Hardware 3d, avatar, bluray, panasonic

Hubble has recently imaged an expanding shock wave from a supernova that exploded 400 years ago. This supernova, called SNR B0509-67.5, is located approximately 160,000 light years from earth. When it exploded, the supernova would have been visible from the southern hemisphere. SNR B0509-67.5 has been imaged by the Chandra X-ray observatory as well.

Hubble has spotted a festive bauble of gas in our neighbouring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Formed in the aftermath of a supernova explosion that took place four centuries ago, this sphere of gas has been snapped in a series of observations made between 2006 and 2010.

The delicate shell, photographed by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, appears to float serenely in the depths of space, but this apparent calm hides an inner turmoil. The gaseous envelope formed as the expanding blast wave and ejected material from a supernova tore through the nearby interstellar medium. Called SNR B0509-67.5 (or SNR 0509 for short), the bubble is the visible remnant of a powerful stellar explosion in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a small galaxy about 160 000 light-years from Earth.

Ripples seen in the shell’s surface may be caused either by subtle variations in the density of the ambient interstellar gas, or possibly be driven from the interior by fragments from the initial explosion. The bubble-shaped shroud of gas is 23 light-years across and is expanding at more than 18 million km/h.

Astronomers have concluded that the explosion was an example of an especially energetic and bright variety of supernova. Known as Type Ia, such supernova events are thought to result when a white dwarf star in a binary system robs its partner of material, taking on more mass than it is able to handle, so that it eventually explodes.

Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys observed the supernova remnant on 28 October 2006 with a filter that isolates light from the glowing hydrogen seen in the expanding shell. These observations were then combined with visible-light images of the surrounding star field that were imaged with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 on 4 November 2010.

With an age of about 400 years, the supernova might have been visible to southern hemisphere observers around the year 1600, although there are no known records of a “new star” in the direction of the LMC near that time. A much more recent supernova in the LMC, SN 1987A, did catch the eye of Earth viewers and continues to be studied with ground- and space-based telescopes, including Hubble.
Notes

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Acknowledgement: J. Hughes (Rutgers University)

via : Hubble spots a celestial bauble

Science astronomy, eso, hubble, nasa

Facebook staffer Paul Butler has created this beautiful map of the millions (billions?) of friendships stored in the social network, using something that looks like edge bundles to create the beautiful map.

Butler started by using a sample of 10 million friend pairs, correlated them with their current cities and then mapped that data using the longitude and latitude of each city.

That was the easy part. Creating the right effect to show connecting relationships between thousands of cities proved to be a challenge.

Follow the link for the full-size graphic.

via The world’s Facebook relationships visualized [PHOTO] | The Daily Caller – Breaking News, Opinion, Research, and Entertainment.

Graphics facebook

An updated version of the World Map of Social Map was just released, by Vincenzo Cosenza, showing, above all, the growing dominance of Facebook worldwide. A social media landscape was also produced by Fred Cavazza, and Socialcast shows some ways to calculate ROI of Enterprise Social Media. From IT Grunts comes the evolution of Location Technology, and we finish with the Blog Economy, by the Grasshopper Group.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

Scientific publisher ‘Springer’ has released a collection of free analytics and visualization tools for traffic on their website, showing which publications are the most popular and allowing you to track how often they are downloaded.

The interactive visualizations include a map showing where the downloads are coming from, a constantly updated keyword tag cloud, and a graphical and textual display of real-time downloads. There’s also a search feature that shows you a chart of the downloads, as well as a “Top Five Most Downloaded” list for every journal and book.

via New Visualization Tool Gives Real-Time View of What Scientists Are Reading.

Science interactive, realtime, springer

It’s that time again, and the Academy has announced the 15 candidates for the Visual Effects Oscar.  Check out the list and see which ones you think deserve.

• Alice in Wonderland
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
• Clash of the Titans
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1
• Hereafter
• Inception
• Iron Man 2
• The Last Airbender
• Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
• Shutter Island
• The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
• Tron: Legacy
• Unstoppable – Out of control

Personally, I’m pulling for Iron Man and Tron:Legacy.  What about you?

via Oscar 2011: The 15 candidates for the visual effects.

Graphics academy awards, oscar, vfx

AMD has published a “whitepaper” (it irks me that they call these Whitepapers when they’re actually powerpoint presentations) discussing optimizations for Image Convolution algorithms on both CPU and GPU.  They start with an algorithm and add some optimizations for the memory overlap, and then naively port it to a Radeon 5870 to run in 1511 ms.  Then, with some careful optimizations, work it down to a mere 182ms!

Download the PDF, or view it Online.

Science algorithm, amd, opencl, whitepaper

Over at Discover Magazine, Razib Khan looks at a recent paper called “Principal Component Analysis under Population Genetic Models of Range Expansion and Admixture” which takes a detailed look at the synthetic maps that dominate gene expression research.  Theoretically showing how humans have migrated across continents and genes have varied over ages, modern research seems to indicate that these supposed details are actually just visualization artifacts of a flawed data analysis algorithm.

And yet one aspect of this great work which never caught on was the utilization of “synthetic maps” to visualize components of genetic variation between populations. This may have been fortuitous, a few years ago a paper was published, Interpreting principal components analyses of spatial population genetic variation, which suggested that the gradients you see on the map above may be artifacts:

via Live not by visualization alone | Gene Expression | Discover Magazine.

Science geneology, pca, research

Over at the “Internet Evolution” blog, Rob Salkowitz talks about that fun little piece of Microsoft Technology ‘Pivot’ that first appeared around a year ago.  It’s a neat interactive way to view data that shows a lot of promise, but hasn’t really materialized in any large way.  He wonders why, and breaks it down to the fate of Microsoft’s LiveLabs division.

LiveLabs was insulated from Office groupthink and politics, but also from the unit’s enormous clout as Microsoft’s cash-cow. Consequently, LiveLabs proved a real-life demonstration of the cartoon where the mad scientist comes out of his lab and says, “Eureka! The experiment is a success! Unfortunately, the subject died.”

He then laments the failure and how this product will never come to light.

I guess nobody ever told him about the March TED Talk on the subject, or the PivotViewer website and free-download.

via Internet Evolution – Rob Salkowitz – The Coolest Microsoft Tool You May Never See.

Science microsoft, pivot