Archive for February, 2008
Monday, February 25th, 2008
Box office sales visualization
The Ebb and Flow of Movies graphic at The New York Times displays the box office sales (adjusted for inflation, of course) for popular movies over the last twenty years. I think this is excellent work, but I wanted to see long-term patterns that are easier to see when zooming out (as in this thumbnail).
Found [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Sunday, February 24th, 2008
Examples of InfoVis
The Parsons Institute for Information Mapping
InfoVis site (”1100+ examples of information visualization”) does have many great examples of InfoVis. You can search or browse through the images (although browsing is done by where the graphic comes from, not the content of the graphic). The site accepts submissions.
Found via SimpleComplexity.
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
X11 2.1.4 for Mac OS X 10.5.2
The XQuartz project released the 2.1.4 X11 update (requires Mac OS X 10.5.2).
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, Mac by Michael Galloy
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
IDL seminars
I attended the IDL Workbench seminar held by “Vis” this afternoon. Despite using the Workbench for the last eight months or so, I learned a few things about it. There are more 1/2 day free seminars coming for both IDL and ENVI. The schedule listed Introduction, Intermediate, and Advanced courses in the Workbench, as well [...]
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, News by Michael Galloy
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Updated Brewer color tables
I have updated the Brewer color tables that I posted last fall. The download includes mg_loadct and mg_xloadct, which are wrappers around loadct and xloadct that use the Brewer color tables instead of the default color tables.
The update fixes the qualitative color tables. These color tables are for labeling, so they contain 3 to 12 [...]
5 Comments » - Posted in IDL, Information design by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
Animated transitions
I saw Jeffrey Heer present his work on animated transitions at IEEE Vis 07. I think this idea has a lot of promise, but I wonder when it’s worth the extra complexity to produce the animation. For most ad hoc analysis, this would not be worth it. But it might be useful for the big [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Information design by Michael Galloy
Friday, February 15th, 2008
IDL Workbench seminar
There’s another IDL event at LASP; this one popular enough to have to be split into two groups. I’m in the afternoon session. See you there!
It’s next Thursday February 21, 2008 at LASP in Boulder.
4 Comments » - Posted in IDL, News by Michael Galloy
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Google hosting scientific data
Google is planning to host a lot of scientific data. Below are the slides from Jon Trowbridge at Google (my favorite part is comparing the transfer rates of FedEx to Ethernet):
Depending on the API Google provides, it would be convenient to have IDL bindings capable of grabbing parts of this data.
Link via FlowingData.
No Comments » - Posted in IDL, Information design by Michael Galloy
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008
Valentine’s Day at NASA Goddard
I’ll be at NASA Goddard on the evening of Feb. 13 and during the day on the 14th. Drop me a line if you want to meet up in Greenbelt.
No Comments » - Posted in Admin by Michael Galloy
Thursday, February 7th, 2008
Information Visualization by Colin Ware
I finally got a copy of Information Visualization by Colin Ware and started reading it. Information Visualization and Readings in Information Visualization edited by Stuart Card, Jock Mackinlay, and Ben Schneiderman are considered the classics in the field of Information Visualization (or InfoVis).
In Information Visualization, Ware evaluates visualizations using the scientific methods of psychology. Perception, [...]
