VizWorld.com

FluxFun has the first part of a 2-part writeup on data visualization of court data.  I know, not the most exciting stuff, but an area with tons of data (Judges, lawyers, outcomes, etc) all in public form, but with no good way to trudge through it all.

As the cliché goes, data is king, but information is power. In a democracy, transparency is a requirement to good governance. Transparency is measured against the amount of useful, relevant, and timely information provided to the people. I believe that through Larc’s taxonomies and other derivative information provided by data visualization makes as better as a nation, and as a people.

via Data Visualization: Designing Understandable Data for You, Me, and Everybody | FluxFun Enterprises.

Science legal

We continue with our compilation of infographics about Facebook’s long history of privacy issues, today with works from Namesake, Zone Alarm, Flickr user Sarah Wheaton, and Wordstream. We do believe that many of the problems described here are being solved, simply because Facebook – or any other site – can’t afford to be constantly on the spot, both legally, facing lawsuits, and, more important, ethically. Because, despite the fact that nobody’s forcing you to use Facebook, you are its Product. Without the content you share, and the information you provide, there’s no way Social networking Sites can monetize themselves. Right?

Read more…

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

My Favorite visualization tool ParaView has just hit v3.12, adding in new client-server communication code, better plugin support, and (what I think is the neatest feature) Streaming Visuals.

ParaView 3.12.0 includes updates to the streaming framework at Los Alamos National Lab (LANL). The multi-resolution streaming view now automatically adjusts resolution to match the projected image size. Moreover, VTK filters can now modify meta-information, so they can modify the data while still allowing the streaming framework to cull and prioritize pieces.

I’ve been watching this feature steadily for the last 2 years or so, and I’m so excited that it’s finally come to the main distribution!  Go download it now!

via Kitware – News: ParaView 3.12.0 is Now Available!.

Science kitware, paraview, software

When it comes to internet privacy, few companies have been so targeted by lawsuits and controversial than Facebook. The number one Social Networking site has been trying to fight back, and reconquer its users trust, but the problem it doesn’t seem to be near its end. However, with over 800 million user, is it really that big of a problem for Facebook? Today’s infographics come from Mashable, Bit Defender, PC Mag and Zone Alarm.

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

Bentley has just purchased the “Pointools” company, hoping to add their 3D scanner expertise to their existing portfolio and add it to their existing model and GIS viewing information.

Bentley CEO Greg Bentley told conference attendees the Pointools acquisition was a strategic move that will allow the company to make point cloud data “a fundamental technology.” In a preview of what Bentley intends to offer users, massive point cloud data was shown streaming in an ‘on-demand’ fashion into a Navigator view, running on a separate thread from other project data. “No more carrying big hard drives or clogging networks,” Singh said of how Bentley will integrate point cloud data into project workflow. “As point clouds become a fundamental part of your information modeling, it becomes more integrated and useful.”

via GraphicSpeak » Bentley acquires Pointools, vows to make point clouds ‘a fundamental data type’.

Graphics point cloud

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is getting ready for a big new IBM iDataPlex system named “YellowStone” that will give them 1.6 Petaflop of HPC goodness along with 149.2 TB of RAM across 74,592 Intel cores (with Sandy Bridge).  Press releases like these come regularly, but this one actually makes note of how they plan to manage the massive amounts of simulation data coming from the system.  They’ve setup a dedicated 17PetaByte filesystem shared between YellowStone and a pair of dedicated Analysis & Visualization systems.

The DAV resource is made up of two systems, one designed to facilitate large-scale data analysis, and the other for parallel processing and visualization activities. Taken together, these components will dramatically improve capabilities central to NCAR’s mission, such as climate modeling, forecasting, and preservation of critical research data. The NWSC will serve researchers across the United States and around the world who will interact with its systems remotely.

Nice to see the visualization aspect in the same press release as the computational announcement.  Apparently we have their director to thank for some of this:

CISL director Al Kellie emphasizes the importance of the integrated computing resource, explaining that what makes this system exceptional for geoscience research is the linking of a very large centralized file and data storage system to a high-performance computational cluster and visualization resource. “While we wanted to make sure we had adequate computing capacity, we knew that it would be of limited use if we didn’t ensure easy access to the data and appropriate resources for storing and analyzing it,” Kellie says. “In addition to high-performance machines, researchers need quick access to their data and a way to analyze it, to see what it means. This system addresses those needs elegantly.”

via HPCwire: NCAR to Install 1.6 Petaflop IBM Supercomputer.

Hardware, Science hpc, ncar

Social networking sites brought new challenges, both to individuals and companies, when data and privacy are concerned. In today’s round-up, we’ll take a look at the most secure Social Networks, how we’re tracked trough location-based social media, the perils of phishing attacks in these sites, and the relation between Social Media use and burglary. Infographics provided by Zone Alarm, Barracuda Labs, Visible Technologies and Credit Sesame.

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

The Kitware Blog just pointed me to a pair of important RFI’s posted on the Science & Technology Policy Office’s website, both focused on Open and Public Access to data.

The first is focused on long-term broad public access to digital data resulting from federally funded work, with a deadline of January 12th.  The second is similar, but focuses on access to scholarly publications based on such federally funded research.  The first is important, but I think the second is even more so.  Far too often scientific publications get locked up inside organizations like ACM and IEEE, requiring the public to then go back and buy them.  Effectively, interested citizens wind up paying twice (once via Taxes, and again via the Organization).

So go hit the links and submit your input on how this should be handled!

The Kitware Blog – Open Access and Open Data for Federally Funded Scientific Research.

Science government, rfi

Robert Kosara, EagerEyes, has posted his VisWeek roundup.  He takes a bit of a different view than others, focusing on the work this year in validation & verification of visualization techniques, like the work done by Michelle Borkin in medical visualizations:

Michelle Borkin presented fascinating work on the use of colormaps in the diagnosis of coronary heart disease. Their 2D representations using perceptually uniform colormaps led to significantly fewer errors than the usual 3D representations and/or the dreaded rainbow colormap.

I also like his bit about a “Hippocratic Oath” of visualization, the classic “do no harm”.

via Visualization is Growing Up | eagereyes.

Science visweek

Data breaching, identity theft, privacy violations. The Internet is far from being a safe place, although a lot has been made to improve the Digital Ecosystem during the years, and this will be the focus of the nest two weeks of Daily Viz from Visual Loop. To start this series, we bring the works from Site Jabber, Center of Media Design, KBSD Digital Marketing, Select Out and Boston.com, covering issues like the Privacy Bill of Rights, online reputation, and the way we are tracked 24/7 using the internet, among others.

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