Visu2011 will be on the12th of October, and features the french community of information visualization and computer graphics specialists. Attendees will get details on a good collection of topics including:
· Techniques visualization adapted to the new computing infrastructure, storage, communication and display.
· post-processing algorithms for analysis and visual interpretation of scientific data.
· Algorithms for the visualization of scientific data scale.
· Development representations taking into account the human perceptual abilities, combined with intuitive interaction techniques and ergonomic.
· Algorithms for the visualization of information (non-spatial data).
In addition, they’ll get a tour of the new “CCGT”, the computing center that is home to the 1.7 Petaflop “CURIE” supercomputing.
The website is French, but translates into English fairly well.
Jeffrey Breen has some nice one-liners for R that show how you can use the popular statistics package with the “Google Visualization API” to create some great interactive graphs, specifically the famous “Motion Chart” shown by Hans Rosling at TED2006.
First up: the googleVis package by Markus Gesmann and Diego de Castillo which makes it easy — often with just one-line of R — to harness the Google Visualization API. Annotated timelines, gauges, maps, org charts, tree maps, and more are suddenly at your command.
The Statistical Graphics blog brings us news of two great articles from Robert Kosara, Andrew Gelman, and Antony Unwin in the most recent Statistical Computing and Graphics Newsletter. First up in a great infovis article from Robert Kosara emphasizing how Visualization is more than just “pretty pictures”.
Information visualization is a field that has had trouble defining its boundaries, and that consequently is often misunderstood. It doesn’t help that InfoVis, as it is also known, produces pretty pictures that people like to look at and link to or send around. But InfoVis is more than pretty pictures, and it is more than statistical graphics.
Then Andrew Gelman and Antony Unwin take a stab at the untapped field of statistical graphics in another great article.
Within academic statistics (and statistically-inclined applied fields such as economics, sociology, and epidemiology), graphical methods tend to be seen as diversions from more “serious” analytical techniques. Statistics journals rarely cover graphical methods, and Howard Wainer has reported that, even in the Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics, 80% of the articles are about computation, only 20% about graphics.
The entire newsletter is available as a free PDF, so go check it out!
TechCrunch’s Devin Coldewey has a early article about the Lytro camera, based on some early photographs made by Eric Cheng. He agrees that the camera itself is fascinating, but believes that it’s more damaging to photography that beneficial.
Speaking from the perspective of a tech writer and someone interested in cameras, optics, and this sort of thing in general, I have to say the technology is absolutely amazing. But from the perspective of a photographer, I’m troubled. To start with, a large portion of the photography process has been removed — and not simply a technical part, but a creative part. There’s a reason focus is called focus and not something like “optical optimum” or “sharpness.” Focus is about making a decision as a photographer about what you’re taking a picture of. It’s clear that Ng is not of the same opinion: he describes focusing as “a chore,” and believes removing it simplifies the process. In a way, it does — the way hot dogs simplify meat. Without focus, it’s just the record of a bunch of photons. And saying it’s a revolution in photography is like saying dioramas are a revolution in sculpture.
I disagree with him. Of course this first version won’t offer much to professional photographers, but just as early digital cameras were nothing but toys but eventually became the mainstay of photography, so will computational cameras like the Lytro. The first offering is too limited and resolution-shy to be of much use to professionals, but as the resolution climbs and people come up with more fascinating feature that can be done with the plenoptic photographs, I’m sure they’ll eventually become the new mainstay of photography.
To get this second week of car related infographics going, we’ll start with a selection of posts about fuel. First Billshrink‘s interactive comparison of gas prices around the world. Then, Mint, Fleet Cards USA and Climate Grump show the advantages of green fuel adoption, and we close up with Well Home‘s mechanical monstrosities of Fossil Fuel extraction.
In a new research study published in the Journal of Vision, author Martin S. Banks exposed several subjects to varying depths of 3D imagery to see how they stressed viewers eyes.
According to the article, 3D content viewed over a short distance (like with desktops and smartphones) is more visually uncomfortable when the stereo content is placed in front of the screen. In a movie theater, it’s the opposite: Stereo content that is placed behind the screen causes more discomfort than scenes that jump out at you.
With 3D cropping up everywhere, I suspect we’ll see many more similar studies.
Update 7/27: Be sure to read the followup to this article here, complete with a link to the actual paper.
Another day, another image optimization tool. This one is called ‘RIOT’, and while it only runs on Windows it enables a nice side-by-side view of your images so that you can interactive tweak parameters and compare the result to the original image.
Radical Image Optimization Tool (RIOT for short) is a free image optimizer that will let you to visually adjust compression parameters while keeping minimum filesize.
It uses with a side by side (dual view) or single viewinterface to compare the original with the optimized image in real time and instantly see the resulting file size.
Could be a great tool for folks looking to maximize individual images (webmasters for example hoping to optimize bandwidth).
SmartDataCollective has an interview with Tableau’s Ellie Fields on the importance of data visualization and it’s many benefits.
Take any computer science Ph.D. and put five pages of rows and numbers in front of them and they’re not going to very quickly understand what’s in there. Our brains just don’t work that way. Our brains work in stories and they work in pictures. What data visualization allows you to do is take a whole bunch of numbers and tell stories with it. There’s almost never just one story in a dataset. Different people might have different stories they care about.
Visu2011 will be on the12th of October, and features the french community of information visualization and computer graphics specialists. Attendees will get details on a good collection of topics including:
Jeffrey Breen has some nice one-liners for R that show how you can use the popular statistics package with the “Google Visualization API” to create some great interactive graphs, specifically the famous “Motion Chart” shown by Hans Rosling at TED2006.
The 
TechCrunch’s Devin Coldewey has a early article about the Lytro camera, based on some early photographs made by Eric Cheng. He agrees that the camera itself is fascinating, but believes that it’s more damaging to photography that beneficial.
To get this second week of car related infographics going, we’ll start with a selection of posts about fuel. First 
FurryBall has just hit V2.1, boasting lots of new features for bokeh, realtime effects, and stereo rendering.
In a new research study published in the Journal of Vision, author Martin S. Banks exposed several subjects to varying depths of 3D imagery to see how they stressed viewers eyes.
SmartDataCollective has an interview with Tableau’s Ellie Fields on the importance of data visualization and it’s many benefits.
VizWorld.com 
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