A clever, and slightly scary, writeup from Kieran Healy puts a revolutionary-spin on the current NSA PRISM debacle, showing how even all this “useless metadata” can be collected into scary and telling pieces of information.  Specifically, how the membership rosters of 7 social clubs could be used to find the central traitor in the midst, Paul Revere.

He seems to bridge several groups in an unusual (though perhaps not unique) way. His name is Paul Revere.

Once again, I remind you that I know nothing of Mr Revere, or his conversations, or his habits or beliefs, his writings (if he has any) or his personal life. All I know is this bit of metadata, based on membership in some organizations. And yet my analytical engine, on the basis of absolutely the most elementary of operations in Social Networke Analysis, seems to have picked him out of our 254 names as being of unusual interest.

via Using Metadata to find Paul Revere – Kieran Healy.

Voreen 4.3 adds two new raycasters: An octree-based out-of-core renderer implemented in OpenCL (sample workspace: raycasting-largedata-cl.vws), and a multi-volume raycaster implemented in OpenGL 4.3 (currently only on NVIDIA) that supports polyhedral proxy-geometries as well as integration of semi-transparent geometries (sample workspace: raycasting-multivolumegeometry.vws).

via Voreen 4.3 Released | Voreen – Volume Rendering Engine (Official Project Website).

NVidia gets ready early for Windows 8

Quick Summary: the AMD FirePro W5000 took 1min and 38 seconds. The Nvidia Q2000 took about 3 mins, almost 1.8X times compared to the FirePro W5000.

It’s impressive how much better the AMD card did, but I personally would rather see this up against the Quadro4000 card.  The W5000 has twice the memory bandwidth (256-bit) vs the Q2000 (128-bit), while the Q4000 has the same 256-bit bus.  The W5000 still boasts higher overall bandwidth at 102.4GB, but I would be curious to see how the two cards compared on even-bandwidth.

via AMD FirePro W5000 vs Nvidia Q2000 in Solidworks 2013 using a car model to do 5 basic tests | FireUser Blog.

Infographics Summary for 2013-05-14

Infographics Summary for 2013-06-12

Top 7 Business Degrees of 2013

Top500 Supercomputing Sites.

Benchmarks of Nvidia’s new Kepler-generation Quadro K5000 and K4000 GPUs

Doug McCune has an interesting way of representing 24-hour cyclical data over an infinity symbol (the lemniscate).

You follow the time by working your way around the infinity. If you start at the top of the symbol at noon, you would start moving around clockwise to 1pm, then 2pm, etc. You’ll reach the center at 6pm, at which point the symbol crosses itself and you then read it counter-clockwise around the bottom.

What you end up with is a way of dividing up the times of day into quadrants. The top-left quarter of the image is the morning, from 6am-12pm. Then the top-right is the afternoon, from 12pm-6pm. Then you have the evening in the botom left (6pm-midnight) and then late-night is in the bottom-right (12am-6am). These quarters match well with how I mentally categorize times of day.

It definitely looks neat, and has some interesting properties, but all in all seems to be a bit more confusing than beneficial.  Perhaps his chosen data is simply a poor example, or perhaps expanding the symbol’s width would help to eliminate some of the clutter and confusion.  Either way, it’s an interesting idea.

via Visualizing Time with the Infinity Hour Chart | Doug McCune.

48-hour Sale for Foundry’s CameraTracker – 40% OFF!

VFX in Los Angeles – 100 hour weeks & homeless

The sports network said there were too few viewers to make 3-D broadcasts worth it. It didn’t say exactly how many viewers had, but the number was “extremely limited and not growing.”

via ESPN to kill 3-D broadcasts by end of year.

“With Qube! 6.5′s new features, we will be able to track our farm utilization down to the shot level,” said Tony Pelle, Director of Production Technology for Rainmaker Entertainment. “Insightful data on job efficiency is what our artists and supervisors need to keep our productions on track. And with less maintenance downtime to look forward to, we’ll have more time to refine the render farm to meet the ever-changing demands of our productions.”

Full release after the break.

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Read the rest of PipelineFX Releases Qube! 6.5 (608 words)

Thinkbox Software releases Deadline 6

Silicon Graphics Releases VUE Viz Platform

Shotgun Releases UI Overhaul with Artist-Friendly Shotgun 5.0

The recent crash and rebirth of Rhythm & Hues has put the whole VFX industry under scrutiny, and at the recent “Produced By” conference they convened a panel to discuss what’s changing in the industry and what we could see on the horizon in the next few years.

“You already have visual effects appearing in every single line item,” he points out. “It’s in vehicles, it’s in extras, it’s in cast, it’s in set design. It’s all throughout the budget of the film. And yet we’re still making films with this notion that down the hall we’ve got these visual effects. And anytime you need these digital tools you call digital effects. Which is insane.” He likened it to having a production department for hammers and having to go see them every time you need a hammer. DeFaria thus sees a change occurring in the next few years “where we’re breaking down digital effects into much smaller pieces. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

via Pros Forecast The Future Of VFX, Post-Rhythm & Hues.

The Editors Lounge Post-NAB Avid Party

3 Ways to Create a more Sustainable Future on the Road

The future of virtual reality: conquer vertigo or surgery?

Over at FXGuide they have an interview with “Victor”, a young starting VFX professional traveling and working VFX internships in Los Angeles in shocking conditions.

Victor’s annual income is under $10,000. In Los Angeles the poverty level for a single member household is $11,490. He has healthcare because the Affordable Care Act mandates that he can stay on his parents plan, but that coverage is effectively limited to the Emergency Room.

Surely this isn’t the norm, but it is a testament to the recently plummets in the VFX industry that it’s become a bit of a flooded market in the US, and unfortunately several professionals are finding it difficult to get work in reasonable conditions.

via VFX in Los Angeles – 100 hour weeks & homeless.

48-hour Sale for Foundry’s CameraTracker – 40% OFF!

Visualizing Time with the Infinity Hour Chart

Russia has long had a long history of strong engineering, and recently they’ve turned their focus onto software and CAD systems.  There have been several new CAD kernels from the major players recently, but over at GraphicSpeak they take a look at what the Russians are bringing to the table.

The C3D kernel is not the only kernel being built in Russia. There is also a government mandate to build the Russian Geometry Kernel, RGK, a B-rep (boundary representation) modeler, which also supports NURBS curves and surfaces. The description of the RGK says it’s been optimized for complex operations including using special types of curves and surfaces designed for the kernel, and as a result, it is faster and more precise. The RGK is being developed by Russian mathematicians at the Moscow university, and like the C3D modeler, it has support for multi-threading and GPU acceleration.

via GraphicSpeak » Does the CAD world need another geometry kernel?.

AllThingsD has a great interview with Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell, founders of the Oculus VR company, and they break down lots of details from their personal beliefs on what will “make or break” consumer adoption of VR and the Rift, as well as their current plans on changes between the development model and upcoming consumer-grade units.

What are the limitations of the Rift right now, beyond needing to be wired into a PC?

Mitchell: We don’t have positional tracking right now.

Luckey: [That means] you can’t track movement through space, you can only track rotation.

Mitchell: That’s a big one, something we’d love to solve for the consumer version. The only other “limitation,” I’d say right now — well, there’s things we want to improve, like weight. The more comfortable it is, the more immersive it is. So, there’s that. There’s resolution. We want to bring the resolution up for the consumer version.

via Oculus VR Co-Founders Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell on Rift (Q&A) – Eric Johnson – Media – AllThingsD.

Minecraft Oculus Rift Mod

Stereoscopic Player 2.0.6 with Oculus Rift Support

What’s The Big Problem With Developing Oculus Rift VR?

Render Farm managers should take note that ThinkBox Software has jsut released Deadline6 for Windows, Linux, and Mac based render-farms.

The latest version of the render queue management system features an incredibly flexible and efficient User Interface across all platforms, combined with a new highly-scalable database backend. The new User Group Management system allows users to be split into groups, with different permissions assigned to each group. Farm administration is made easier with the ability to stream the render log from remote machines.

GraphicsSpeak has a few more details on what the new version includes such as Amazon EC2 support, new graphic charts of your data, and real-time viewing of slave node logs.

You can get a free 2-slave version for testing, and contact Thinkbox directly for pricing and trial licenses of bigger tests.

via Thinkbox Software – Deadline.

VSG Acquires amira 3-D Visualization and Analysis Software

Guide to What’s New in Adobe’s CC software

Shotgun Releases UI Overhaul with Artist-Friendly Shotgun 5.0

You probably don’t think of farmers are very data-driven or technology conscious people, but in a recent talk from Monsanto they discussed how they’re using many big-data technologies to help the more technologically-oriented farmer of the 21st century use remote sensing and the power of the Cloud to more intelligently select crops.

The proof is how much data the company tracks on a regular basis (see Monsanto’s chart above). Monsanto’s core projects generate huge amounts of bits, especially its genomic efforts, which are the focus of so much public attention. Other big data gobblers are the phenotypes of millions of DNA structures that describe the various biological properties of each plant, and the photographic imagery of crop fields. All told, there are several tens of petabytes that need storage and analysis, a number that’s doubling roughly every 16 months. As a result, Monsanto has become a big user of Hadoop, H Base and other analytics-and-storage tools.

This could be a great opportunity for some interesting visualization research, merging the photographic and remote sensing data into statistical growth models to show predictions of output and estimate effectiveness of various crops.

via How Monsanto Is Expanding Its Footprint Through Data Analytics.

Shade VFX Expanding Despite Visual-Effects Industry Troubles

NodeBox – Data Visualizations for Curious Creatives

Six startups re-imagining how we consume data

Posters should present case studies of success, failure, experimentation, design, development, methodology, best practice lessons and other topics relevant to a commercial context. Discussion could include one or more of what were the business objectives, who were the users, what were their needs, what were the design objectives, what technology was developed, what was the result, how did it perform, what were the lessons learned and what are the next steps?

Having spent several years myself in government doing visualization, I know there’s a fundamental misunderstanding in many folks about what visualization can (and more importantly should do).  Many see it as simply a waste of time and money, preferring massive charts of impossibly small text and numbers, because the powerpoint slide full of 8-point font looks impressive to stakeholders, regardless of what it says.  Many don’t understand that visualization can be a far more effective method of changing perception and understanding of a problem, and were really amazed at what some very basic visualization techniques can do.

So if you have any (publicly-releasable) examples of good (or bad, I suppose) uses of visualization in government or industry, considering submitting.

via VIS Tutorials and the Industry and Government Experiences Track | eagereyes.

Shade VFX Expanding Despite Visual-Effects Industry Troubles

NDP’s ‘corporate welfare’ for film industry won’t save jobs

Where are the data visualization success stories?

It’s hard to believe Data Points hit the shelves two months ago. (Thank you to everyone who got a copy!) It still feels brand new in my head. I kind of thought that time would slow down after I finished the book (and dissertation), but it seems to be moving even faster now.

Hit his website and leave a comment for a chance to get a free copy!  Or just buy it from Amazon and enjoy it now.

via Comment to win a signed copy of Data Points.

NodeBox – Data Visualizations for Curious Creatives

Six startups re-imagining how we consume data

How Monsanto Is Expanding Its Footprint Through Data Analytics

Kitware and the Insight Toolkit (ITK) team are pleased to announce ITK 4.4.0! The tarballs can be downloaded on the Sourceforge page. Major changes made in this release are detailed below, and there will be an ITK 4.4.0 release webinar on Tuesday, June 11th at 3PM ET to provide an overview of the new version. To take part, join the “ITK BarCamp” GooglePlus community, and join the “What’s New in Release 4.4.0” event.

This version has new MINC, SCIFIO, and DCMTK support, as well as the usual performance improvements and bugfixes.  There is, however, a known issue in Debug mode under Visual Studio which is already fixed and available in nightlies, and will be part of the soon-to-come 4.4.1.

via Kitware – News: Announcing ITK 4.4.0!.

Kitware to Accelerate Community-Driven Medical Innovation

Kitware Professional Training Courses

Kitware releases open-source Tubular Segmentation library TubeTK

Pro Tools 11 is now more powerful than ever with turbocharged 64-bit performance.  Avid’s Senior Solution Specialist Scott Wood showed how the faster-than-real-time bounce capabilities now delivers audio mixes with lightening fast speeds of up to 150 times faster than real-time. Other features demonstrated included the new built-in metering standards that have a variety of scale and ballistics options in delivery of higher sound quality.

Get the full details after the break.

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Read the rest of The Editors Lounge Post-NAB Avid Party (549 words)

Come to the NEO3DO glasses-free 3D Tablet Launch Party

Pros Forecast The Future Of VFX, Post-Rhythm & Hues

Watch A Mind-Blowing Visualization Of ‘The Rite Of Spring’

Robert Kosara has an interesting piece about the “banking to 45-degrees” phenomena in line-charts and its origin in a 1988 paper.

What people often miss, however, is what task Cleveland and the McGills were after. The paper is very specifically about the comparison between the slopes of two lines, and the slope is the average between those two lines. So if the goal is to be able to compare the rates of change between lines, the 45º average slope makes sense as a rule. It may be a good idea in other circumstances as well, but this particular study does not offer any information to support that.

Interestingly, at last year’s InfoVis some researchers replicated the work and found it not entirely accurate, but rather the 45-degree result was a result of boundary conditions.

via Aspect Ratio and Banking to 45 Degrees | eagereyes.

Top 7 Business Degrees of 2013

Meet @InfoVis_Ebooks, Your Source for Random InfoVis Paper Snippets

Google Maps is a huge project involving AI, computer vision, big data, and lots of physical hardware and people.  At the recent Google I/O event, they discussed one project “Ground Truth” that constantly refines the data to ensure accuracy and relevance.

For example, Google might get road information from a government that indicates a particular road is a two-way street. But Google’s own traffic data, gathered anonymously from people’s Android phone data, might show that it appears to be a one-way street. A Ground Truth operator then can look at Google Street View data, including signs, to see what’s actually there, he said.

via With Ground Truth, Google marries virtual world with the real | Internet & Media – CNET News.

‘Art of Science’ exhibit makes the connection between truth and beauty

Another Reason Why Virtual Reality Doesn’t Work Yet

The future of virtual reality: conquer vertigo or surgery?