VizWorld.com

NASA has taken the extensive data from their MODIS satellites and created an impressive visualization of large fires across the world from 2002 to 2001, and combines it with snowfall and seasonal changes.

The tour begins by showing extensive grassland fires spreading across interior Australia and the eucalyptus forests in the northwestern and eastern part of the continent. The tour then shifts to Asia where large numbers of agricultural fires are visible first in China in June 2004, then across a huge swath of Europe and western Russia in August. It then moves across India and Southeast Asia, through the early part of 2005. The tour continues across Africa, South America, and concludes in North America.

Surprisingly, even with all the recent fires in the US MidWest, only 2% of the fires in the world occur in the US.  Most fires occur in the African savanna from agricultural activity and lightning strikes.

via NASA – NASA Releases Visual Tour of Earth’s Fires.

Science gis, modis, nasa

There’s no way we can speak about email marketing without mentioning spam. The “inbox Nightmare” affects us all, and we dedicate our last post of this series to facts and stats behind the business of spam. Yes, because it is a huge business. Contributions today from NewScientist, WikiBon, UnSubscribe, Wired and Emailium.

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

Infographics website startup Visual.ly has just accomplished the impressive goal of raising $2M in venture capital.  It could just be proof that the dot-com bubble isn’t gone yet, or (more likely) proof that the “Next Big Thing” could be visualization.

“There are no tools for this type of thing. People are either creating really bad-looking visuals using Microsoft Applications [such as the native Windows app MS Paint] or they’re hiring a graphic designer, which takes time and money — it’s a hassle,” Visual.ly co-founder and CEO Stew Langille told VentureBeat. “So, we’re trying to create a tool that we can license out to the industry.”

via Visual.ly raises $2M to make your data pretty and interesting | VentureBeat.

Graphics infographics, venture, visually, Website

Next month’s SuperComputing 2011 event in Seattle, WA will feature some of the biggest names in high performance computing, and where the computers go so do the data analysis and visualization people.  One name at the event, Kelly Gaither, is responsible for this year’s “Scientific Visualization Showcase”.

What is most enticing about this year’s “SciVis” vignette is the concerted effort in abstracting the science and technique from its analytical interpretation. Kelly makes data vivid …tangible and textured…visual…stimulating…enticing…visceral…art. And, while “SciVis” is a common practice, from remote visualization to large projection and cave displays to observe “data” in depth and motion, Kelly’s innovative endeavors promise to reach far beyond the scientific realm and spur imagination.

Kelly Gaither & TACC are big proponents of massive tiled displays so I’m sure there will be several to see.  In addition, they do some interesting work in web-enabled remote visualization via their tools EnVision & Longhorn.  Hopefully they’ll have some other neat stuff to show off this year as well.

via HPC INNOVATOR Series – Kelly Gaither.

Science conference, sc11, scivis

Details of the Computational Camera “Lytro” are finally emerging, and it’s combining an Apple sense of minimalistic style with some high-end photo processing features, all into one tiny sleek package. Engadget was lucky with the first hands-on:

Right off the bat, you’ll notice its diminutive size. If we’re frank, we were expecting something more akin to a DSLR — visions no doubt conjured by the immense arrays used to do this sort of wizardry back in the day. Its small, beautifully made, anodized aluminum body reminds us of a cross between an iPod Nano and an iSight camera — inspiration that isn’t only skin deep, as Lytro’s desktop software (which you’ll need to open and export .lfp files) is currently Mac only, with a Windows version in development.

I must admit, I’m also surprised by the form factor but it truly is beautiful.  Given how much can be done after the moment with this camera, it kinda makes sense that it would have almost no on-device controls.  Also, they’ve created a neat flash/javascript based viewer that you can play with on their website, letting you export the raw LFP files to sites like twitter and facebook so that viewers can adjust the focus on their own.

Hopefully they’re working with groups like Adobe to create Photoshop importers for their format, so that eventually we can do some even more amazing things like photos with multiple focal depths (put the foreground and background in focus at the same time) or pseudo-HDR.

via Lytro.

Hardware camera, lytro

Despite being far from “dead”, the truth is email must evolve, specially when it comes to its appeal to the youngsters. Aweber shows what do teens think about email, while Litmus breaks down some of the email reading habits. Next, from One Lily, some tips on email etiquette, followed by Mimecast‘s great email migration and Yahoo‘s interesting interactive visualization of its email network worldwide.

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

The new SolidWorks2012 offers some limited GPU features focused around making the visuals pop a little more than classic CAD packages.  Over at SolidSmack they take it for a test-drive with one of the lower-end professional cards, the Quadro 2000, and find it works surprisingly well.

The image below is a screenshot of a data set from NVIDIA shown in SolidWorks with RealView graphics on. RealView graphics utilize the GPU to render the semi-realistic graphics on the SolidWorks screen. The other window is the PhotoView 360 Preview window. PhotoView 360 is 100% CPU-based rendering and doesn’t task the GPU, so for PV360 rendering your benefits come along with more multi-threaded CPU cores. The SolidWorks models are all CPU as well. The GPU does little for processing the model, so more GPU’s won’t gain you any added performance.

Of course, it sounds like SolidWorks isn’t really pushing the GPU that hard, focusing only on some nice rendering features in the realtime viewport.  High-end renderings are still classic CPU raytracing, and none of the software seems to use any GPGPU features, so the lower-end cards make for a nice inexpensive way to add some more “oomph” to your workstation.

Of course, NVidia is quick to point out the growing trend of designers using post-rendering tools like KeyShot and BunkSpeed to do their high-end renderings, which will definitely take advantage of higher-end Quadros.

via Can SolidWorks 2012 Spit the NVIDIA Quadro 2000 GPU Juice? – SolidSmack.com.

Graphics, Hardware gpu, nvidia, quadro, solidworks

CNet UK has a nice little info-video online (Perhaps we need a new word?) chronicling the history of the iPhone from inception to the iPhone 5 (Which wound up being the 4S actually).

Watch out for the number of transistors inside an iPhone 4, which we compare to an early Intel chip. It’ll blow your mind — and help explain why the whole world thinks it’s normal to be able to find out where the nearest good pizza restaurant is while watching the latest Hollywood blockbuster and tweeting about it.

A surprisingly good combination of information & motion graphics here, makes for a fun watch.

via iPhone history animated in our infographic video | CNET UK.

Graphics animation, apple, infographic, iphone, video

Robert Kosara and his student Aritra Dasgupta are presenting a paper next week at InfoVis on something most people would consider contrary to classic Vis: How to obscure information.

The point of visualization is usually to reveal as much of the structure of a dataset as possible. But what if the data is sensitive or proprietary, and the person doing the analysis is not supposed to be able to know everything about it? In a paper to be presented next week at InfoVis, my Ph.D. student Aritra Dasgupta and I describe the issues involved in privacy-preserving visualization, and propose a variation of parallel coordinates that controls the amount of information shown to the user.

via Paper: Privacy-Preserving Visualization | eagereyes.

Science paper, visweek

For our third day dedicated to Email Marketing infographics, we bring you some additional tips and facts about what it takes to make a successful email marketing campaign: the best time to send out your emails, how to increase deliverability and the growing importance of Mobile Email Marketing are just some of the topics covered here, with a help from Emailvision, Marketing Zeus, Kissmetrics, e-Dialog and CC Loop.

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