VizWorld.com

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.

via 20 Visualizations to Understand Crime | FlowingData.

Science crime, example, list, visualization

David Cox of North Carolina State University has created a new visualization method for DNA sequences that he’s calling “symbolic scatter plots”.

His technique starts out similar to Blast, he says, in that it takes the sequence at hand and breaks it up into small words. Whereas Blast computationally plugs those words into a database to find similar matches, his method simply maps the words. In his case those words are 3-mers that correspond to one of 64 possible choices because there are 64 possible combinations of three nucleotides. Each 3-mer is represented as a point on the scatter plot, zero through 63, with that number serving as the y-coordinate. The x-axis is the order that the 3-mer appears in the genetic sequence. Cox designed the symbolic scatter plot so that those 3-mers that correspond to the same amino acid are adjacent to each another.

It’s a good use of “human in the middle” visualization where he’s attempting to replace completely automated systems with tools to make use of the superior human vision system to better discover patterns.  His work will be presented at the 2009 International Conference on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology in Las Vegas.

via Symbolic Scatter Plot Helps Visualize Patterns Within DNA Sequence | Genome Technology | Sequencing | GenomeWeb.

Science algorithm, biomed, dna, genome, visualization

Tripwire Magazine has gathered 20 tricks for CSS that you can use to do your data visualization on the web, without resorting to Flash or Java.

In this article you will find more than 20 unique and worth knowing CSS Data Visualization Techniques. The techniques show in this article reallt takes CSS to a new level and even if you’re not going to visualize data you may get inspired from investigating them.

via 20+ CSS Data Visualization Techniques | tripwire magazine.

Graphics css, visualization, web

At the recent SciDAC conference in San Diego, 10 videos won awards at the Electronic Visualization and Poster Night.  One of those awards went to Argonne for their “Turbulent Flow of Coolant in an Advanced Nuclear Reactor”.

Both the visualizations and the computer runs for the winning entries were done at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF). The computations were carried out on one of the world’s fastest and most energy-efficient supercomputers: Intrepid, Argonne’s IBM Blue Gene/P. The visualizations were performed on Eureka with software developed at Argonne. Eureka is also located at the ALCF and is one of the world’s largest graphics processing units, providing more than 111 teraflops and over 3.2 terabytes of RAM.

You can download the video here.

via HPCwire: Argonne Recognized During Visual Celebration.

Science argonne, conference, contest, scidac, visualization

High-Speed distribution centers face a unique set of problems due to their mechanical nature and need for 24/7 problem-free operation.  Maintenance of these massive facilities is a big problem due to the specialized equipment involved, and some companies have found graphic visualizations essential.

When a system has a problem, defining where the problem lies can be a challenge. Dematic uses a graphic visualization program to tell technicians exactly where the problem is located. System manuals, including all of the parts for the equipment, are displayed on the visualization. It is a very efficient resource to identify where the problems are located and finding the right part to resolve it.

via The Changing Needs Of Maintenance In High-Speed Distribution Cen.

Science business, maintenance, visualization

IBM has announced a new initiative called “Deep Computing Services” which draws from IBM’s extensive high performance computing experience to offer clients access to specializing supercomputing skills.  Of interest is one area:

Deep Computing Visualization support — can span the design and integration of a visualization system as well as development of unique components and related services to support insight on scientific and engineering problems through visualization solutions.

No more information than that, unfortunately, other than the Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers in Montana contracted with IBM and seems fairly happy.

via HPCwire: IBM Announces New Deep Computing Services.

Hardware, Science ibm, supercomputing, visualization

Aaron Presnail has recently won the Knight News Challenge award, putting in control of a quarter million dollars.  What does he plan to do with it?

He also understands that only a handful of news outlets can afford to invest significant resources in the beautiful-yet-intelligible presentation of such data, which is why he plans to use his $243,600 Knight News Challenge award to build an open-source data visualization module targeting community newspapers, independent journalists and bloggers — really, anyone interested in publishing data visualizations.

via Knight News Challenge: Aaron Presnall’s data-viz project hopes to help small papers picture the news » Nieman Journalism Lab.

Graphics, Science knight news challenge, news, visualization

Will Evans has written a fantastic treatise on Dynamic Visualization: introduction and Theory over at Semantic Foundry.  It discusses several classifications of visualizations and how they succeed, and how they fall.

The visualizations that are created must support the cognitive requirements such as pre-attentive processing, working memory, etc.. To do this, many of the same theories, strategies, and techniques are also duplicated in a dynamic visualization (Image Theory, the Gestalt Laws, verbal / visual dual-coding, etc.) Instead, I will give a brief overview of the literature, cognitive processes, and techniques that are unique to dynamic displays. This article is roughly organized into the following sections: Introduction, Dynamic Visualizations, and Conclusion, References, and Apologia.

via Dynamic Visualization: Introduction & Theory.

Science education, infovis, theory, visualization

Right on the heels of the recent announcement of Edward Tufte’s tour, Businessweek has gathered up some of his greatest work and combined it with descriptions of the depth of meaning he was able to bring to it.

Edward Tufte defies easy categorization. His academic training and work at Stanford, Princeton, and Yale span statistics, computer science, political economy, and design. Yet he is best known for what began as a cri de coeur, published in 1983 in the form of a meticulously elegant book: The Visual Display Of Quantitative Information. Tufte’s treatise—part academic text and part coffee-table book—takes aim at the confusing and just-plain-awful graphic design then proliferating in print and subsequently, on screen. In that first volume and in others since, Tufte shows how data visualization can be done well and how powerful it can be as a tool.

via The Vision of Edward Tufte: Data’s Visualization King – BusinessWeek.

Science example, tufte, visualization

Dr. Lawrence Witmer, professor of anatomy and paleontology at Ohio University, specializes in the 3D visualization of dinosaur and modern mammalian skulls to understand the “functional morphology of the heads of vertebrates” and thus reconstruct soft tissues in dinosaurs.

These 3D images are sourced from CT scans and generated in Adobe Acrobat 3D.  Another great use of visualization technology to further science!

Science anatomy, dinosaur, paleontology, Science, visualization