Two Weeks – Grizzly Bear on Vimeo
10:11 am
A fun little video from Gabe Askew showing a few months work to create a fan video for the song “Two Weeks”. See the video after the break.
One Trillion Dollars Visualized from Mint
9:45 am
Mint Software follows on the popularity of the previous “Debt Hell” infographic, by releasing a new video visualizing $1 Trillion.
It’s official, trillion is the new billion. No longer is government spending talked about in terms of a mere ten digits. With the recent flurry of government spending, we are going to need another three zeros to make sense of it all. One trillion dollars is a number that few people can comprehend, let alone your standard nine digit calculator. So what does one trillion dollars look like?
A fun & entertaining look into a truly depressing statistic. See the video after the break.
Artists Create Stunning Works Of Art From Mounds Of Data
10:30 pm
Gizmodo has gathered a small gallery of 6 images demonstrating both the skill and beauty behind some fantastic data visualizations.
Some of the visualization we’ve covered before, such as the Web Trends Map and (shown to the right) Click-stream visualization of Science Articles.
Is Bestario’s “Atlas of Innovation” Useful? or Data Porn?
9:51 am
Bestario, a Spanish infograhpics firm, has built a new website called “The Wainova World Atlas of Innovation”. It attempts to map the world’s major science and business incubators with the professional associations linking them, but in the opinion of many winds up being a bit too much flash without any function.
The failing here illustrates an important point about information graphics in general: They’re only as good as the data they map. Without interesting data, they can’t tell us anything worth knowing–and the ultimate promise of infographics is that they provide us surprising insights that we would have otherwise missed. That’s why the best data visualization teams–such as that of The New York Times–are comprised equally of computer scientists, cartographers, journalists, and just a couple of designers
via An Online “Atlas of Innovation” | Design & Innovation | Fast Company.
20 Visualizations to Understand Crime
8:15 am
FlowingData has compiled a great list of 20 visualizations of various crime statistics. Most of it is targeted to specific areas (a neighborhood, a city, etc) but some is more diverse like the “Flash Face” sketch artist tool.
There’s a lot of crime data. For almost every reported crime, there’s a paper or digital record of it somewhere, which means hundreds of thousands of data points – number of thefts, break-ins, assaults, and homicides as well as where and when the incidents occurred.
With all this data it’s no surprise that the NYPD (and more recently, the LAPD) took a liking to COMPSTAT, an accountability management system driven by data.
While a lot of this crime data is kept confidential to respect people’s privacy, there’s still plenty of publicly available records. Here we take a look at twenty visualization examples that explore this data.
Using VRay EXR’s in AfterEffects
8:30 am
A quick tip from Chad Smashley on how to use VRay EXR’s in AfterEffects.
So here is a quick tip on how to get Vray to render out mutli-channel exrs and how to get After Effects to read them. If you dont have Vray, you can download the exr used in this tutorial here. Enjoy! BTW, please let me know if there is a topic you’d like me to cover in my next post.
Vray EXR Tip from chad smashley on Vimeo.
Graphical History of the American Flag
8:45 pm
Another great Independence Day find from Mike Wirth, courtesy of Cool Infographics.
A great infographic for America’s Independence Day from Mike Wirth. The graphical history of the American Flag shows a circular timeline of when changes were made over the years and when stars were added. I love additional information Mike included like the official folding pattern and the state each star represents by showing them chronologically. Makes a great poster!
via Cool Infographics: Graphical History of the American Flag.
Online game site Gaikai Video Demo
9:51 am
Previously mentioned Gaikai has just released a video demonstration showing how it works, and how well. The blog post accompanying the video has some interesting details:
(1) No installing anything. (I’m running regular Windows Vista, with the latest Firefox and Flash is installed.)
(2) This is a low-spec server, it’s a very custom configuration, fully virtualized. Why? To keep the costs to an absolute minimum. We had 7 Call of Duty games running on our E3 demo server recently.
(3) Data travel distance is around 800 miles (round trip) on this demo as that’s where the server is. I get a 21 millisecond ping on that route. My final delay will be 10 milliseconds as I just added a server in Irvine California yesterday, but it’s not added to our grid yet. (So this demo is twice the delay I personally would get, the good news is I don’t notice it anyway.)
(4) This server is not hosted by a Tier 1 provider, just a regular Data Center in Freemont California. Also, I’m not cheating and using fiber connections for our demos. This is a home cable connection in a home.
(7) Our bandwidth is mostly sub 1 megabit across all games. (Works with Wifi, works on netbooks with no 3D card etc.)
Check out the video after the break. It looks like they might really have something here. The demo shows Spore (PC version), Mario Kart 64 (in an Emulator), and several others all running within FireFox.
Making of “Le Rabbit” by Jose Alves da Silva
10:40 am
Jose Alves da Silva talks about an interesting image he created called “Le Rabbit”, and how much difficulty he had in creating it.
During the creation of this image I have bumped into several problems, especially regarding the fur. I am not a digital hair expert and I had to face some questions for the first time. These problems may sound basic to a part of the readers but I have decided to talk about them and the way I have solved them because some of you might consider these tips valuable. Regarding the motivation to create this piece, I had been wanting to make a more cartoonish character for ages, because this is a type of language at which I feel really comfortable. An image about a humanized rabbit with lots of attitude started forming in my mind… and what was supposed to be a modelling exercise of a few days ended up being a finished piece that took me about 2 months! Jose Alves da Silva
UN Security Council Resolution Visualizations
5:23 am
Piero Zagami has built an interesting collection of visualizations around the United Nations Security Council Resolutions.
UNSC/R: this is the abbreviation for the United Nations Security Council Resolutions. These documents represent the decisions of the UN’s executive body. This massive amount of data (more than 1700 documents) doesn’t come in any organized form. The purpose of this project is to apply information design strategies to create visual maps of the Resolutions to help students in politics approach the subject of the UN.
Most of the visualizations appear circular in form, mapping colors to the quantity of resolutions passed over time. It’s a massive tome of information, although I see no way to procure it.
VizWorld.com 
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