Content about Images

Video of the week - When your visualization wall isn't enough

Getting a good sense of your data on a mere large HD screen isn’t easy. And, sure, your friendly neighborhood visualization wall is an improvement, at about 13 million pixels projected across 84 square feet.
But wouldn’t it be better to stand in the center of a 2800 square foot sphere, interacting with your data in three dimensions at a resolution of 24 million pixels? Not to mention listening to audio cues in surround sound, projected from 500 individual speakers plus subwoofers.
Welcome to the AlloSphere, the visualization jewel of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Construction on the facility was completed in 2007, but the team behind the AlloSphere has continued to roll out additional features since then.
In this week’s video JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, the woman behind the AlloSphere, speaks to the audience at TED 2009 about five different research projects that

Video of the Week - Simulations show scenarios for oil spill

This animation shows one scenario of how oil released at the location of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico may move in the upper 65 feet of the ocean. This is not a forecast, but rather, it illustrates a likely dispersal pathway of the oil for roughly four months following the spill. It assumes oil spilling continuously from April 20 to June 20. The colors represent a dilution factor ranging from red (most concentrated) to beige (most diluted). The dilution factor does not attempt to estimate the actual barrels of oil at any spot; rather, it depicts how much of the total oil from the source will be carried elsewhere by ocean currents. For example, areas showing a dilution factor of 0.01 would have one-hundredth the concentration of oil present at the spill site.
The animation is based on a computer model simulation, using a virtual dye, that assumes weather and current conditions similar to

Image of the week - Traffic visual

This visualization of traffic flow in downtown Chicago was created using data generated by TRANSIMS, the TRansportation ANalysis and SIMulation System.
TRANSIMS is a regional transportation modeling and simulation software environment, used in this case to generate data that represents car paths. In order to bring that data to life, those car paths were converted into trajectories. Next, the trajectories were read into a data visualization plug-in called Maya, which was developed by Alex Betts at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Advanced Visualization Laboratory. The finishing touch was to add accurate models of buildings.
TRANSIMS is part of the US Department of Transportation’s Travel Model Improvement Program. In order to create the Chicago version of TRANSIMS, AVL has been collaborating with the Argonne National Laboratory TRACC Center.
What next? According to the AVL website, “AVL’s Matt Hall is creating an

Image of the Week - Protect your identity - the comics said so!

Reproduced with permission. Please visit www.SecurityCartoon.com for more material.

Believe it or not, one of the leading causes of security vulnerabilities is the apt and malicious use of social engineering.
That's what Sukamol Srikwan Jakobsson and Markus Jakobsson aim to address using cartoons such as the one pictured above.
Srikwan Jakobsson and Jakobsson are both adjunct professors at Indiana University-Bloomington's School of Informatics. The two crusading researchers co-authored a paper about the cartoons entitled "Using Cartoons to Teach Internet Security," published in Cryptologia, vol. 32, no. 2.
Their "About" page states:
Some people believe that security education is pointless, and that technology alone can address security problems. They point to previous failures to communicate important advice, and argue education is like nailing jelly to the wall. Others, mostly people who read source code, underesti

Announcement - HD videoconference, Internet2 Meeting, DUSEL

Inspecting the neutrino detector under construction in the Homestake gold mine in 1965. Image courtesy Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake

WHAT: Internet2’s 2010 Spring Member Meeting will transport participants nearly a mile underground to explore America’s newest networking frontier. The live high-definition videoconference will show how the former Homestake gold mine in South Dakota — once the deepest mine in North America — is being transformed into a high-tech national Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL).
The HD videoconference will connect the meeting’s hotel ballroom audience to the so-called “4850 Level” — the construction site 4,850 feet deep inside the Sanford Underground Laboratory at Homestake — and to Pierre, South Dakota, where the state’s governor will offer his perspectives on the unique history and scientific import

EGEE User Forum Highlights Created with flickr slideshow. Images of EGEE User Conference in Uppsala, Swede. All images were taken by Corentin Chevalier of GridTalk For those of you who were not able to attend the EGEE User Forum in Uppsala, Sweden, here's a few highlights courtesy of the many people who contributed photographs for the use of iSGTW. Here, you can get a sense of everything -- although admittedly not get the experience of such Swedish institutions as cookies and caviar (from a toothpaste tube) for breakfast, served at the Akademi hostel at the University of Uppsala. —Dan Drollette, iSGTW

Image of the Week - Do you speak grid?

Image courtesy GridTalk

 
Coming to you live from Sweden is the EGEE UserForum, the last event before handing over the reigns to EGI. Thanks to GridTalk’s GridCast, you can get much the same experience as those attending in person.You can get the latest via twitter, see and hear events by podcast, and enjoy the highlights .Held from 12 April to 15 March, the event promises to showcase grid technologies and connect developers, users and newcomers to distributed computing.
Can’t make it in person? With GridCast, you will be there virtually to catch the latest — minus the region's traditional repast of pickled herring, shellfish and aquavit (a chilled drink which the San Francisco Chronicle said is the source of over 9,000 Swedish drinking songs).

Video of the week - RHIC’s hot quark soup

Earlier this month, two separate groups of scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider announced new results.
For the first result, scientists rolled back the clock to measure the temperature in the first instants of the formation of a quark-gluon plasma “soup.” They found that at that instant, the temperature is a whopping four trillion degrees. To put things in perspective, the temperature at the sun’s core is a mere 15 million degrees Kelvin, while the temperature at the core of a collapsed Type II supernova is only 100 billion degrees.
The second group of scientists discovered that, in the magnetic field induced by the accelerator’s colliding charged particles and the vortices that form in the resulting quark-gluon soup, positively charged quarks tend to move in one direction, and negatively charged quarks in the other. That makes it an example of asymmetry, an asymmetry that could give physicists clues as to

Image of the Week - ISGC 2010, Taipei, Taiwan

Image courtesy GridTalk

 
It’s hard to get a sense of Asia, but thanks to GridTalk’s GridCast you’re not too far removed from the International Symposium on Grid Computing 2010.Get some feedback from the conference room floor, hear the word on the street via twitter, see podcasts (available soon).Held from 5 March to 13 March, the event promises to showcase grid technologies and connect developers, users and newcomers to distributed computing in Asia. Come along and check out the benefits of grid computing for business and research, now and in the future.Can’t make it? The GridCast team will be there to blog the latest on all that's happening!  

Video of the week - Computational analysis methods and issues in neuroscience

A talk given by University of California, Berkeley doctoral candidate Bradley Voytek, uploaded on 14 January 2010. Video courtesy of Google engEDU Tech Talks Channel on YouTube.

Love them or hate them, you have to admit that Google has been a regular source of innovation throughout the years.
So it should come as no surprise that Google fosters creativity in their employees by regularly hosting talks from researchers in a wide variety of fields ranging from current affairs, science, engineering, humanities, business, law, entertainment, medicine, and the arts.
In keeping with Google's usual culture, they post these talks on YouTube at a rate of about two each week. The top three most viewed talks? “Sex on the Internet,” with 1,492,499 views; “How to count all human carbon,” with 228,633 views; and “jQuery,” with 189,719 views. The three highest rated videos, on the othe

Opinion: Supporting the arts and humanities with e-science

There’s a reason why certain tools become classics, almost indispensable for everyday life. Image courtesy Annette Gulick, stock.xchng

Supporting really useful general tools is often the best way to support specialists, says EGEE’s Danielle Venton.
The early days of the World Wide Web were primarily an exclusive, though not a closed, party. Its main attendees were elites in the physics and computer science communities.
Today, the bulk of the developed and developing world is involved. Every sector of society puts the Web to use: your local dance company, church and city council likely all have Web sites. Through these you can learn about and communicate with them in ways not possible before.
Similarly, managing data with e-Infrastructures (distributed computing systems and the like) was, like the Web, initially confined to specialized communities. Today, however, nearly all researchers, including those in the a

Image - Satellite maps aid Haiti earthquake relief

Click on map for full-screen, PDF version. Original courtesy UNOSAT

Emergency response teams in Haiti are getting a helping hand from UNOSAT, the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) Operational Satellite Applications Program. Operating out of  CERN, UNOSAT is supplying maps of the roads in Port-Au-Prince to help humanitarian aid workers avoid road blockages. The maps show the location of debris that is blocking roads and bridges outright (shown in red) or partially restricting access (shown in orange).
The computer-intensive raw images from UNOSAT are transferred to EGEE, where programs compress the satellite images for transmission over low-bandwidth connections, allowing users to access the latest maps from devices as simple as mobile phones — essential in areas where land-lines are down and infrastructure destroyed. The location of the debris is captured by the GeoEye-1 satellite and placed on top of the c