The Max Planck Institute is one of Germany's most successful research organizations, having produced about 17 Nobel laureates and 13,000 yearly academic publications since its foundation in 1948. The Max Planck Research Networks [max-planck-research-networks.net] visualization application in turn is showing off the institution's international collaborations with other organizations in the world.
Developed by Moritz Stefaner and Christopher Warnow, the application runs on a semi-public multi-touch screen, which displays a network graph of the relationships between all relevant organizations, an accompanying world map, plus various bar graphs that reveal other facts and important statistics. The data is gathered from analyzing the co-authorship connections detected in the 94,000 publications that were produced over the last 10 years.
For the network graph, the relative size of an institute's icon represents the number of scientific publications, and the width of the connecting lines reflects the number of jointly published papers between 2 separate institutes.
The Ultimate List of Interactive Tables | Seth Sandler
"The following is a timeline of interactive tables. These tables may involve multi-touch, single-touch, audio, objects, or other unique types of table interactions."
Today was the launch of Visual.ly, the most daring start-up in visualization after the previous demise of Swivel and other "social visualization" ventures.
Once their web servers can handle the load, the new and the already much hyped website allows access to over 2,000 different infographic illustrations, uploaded by designers like JESS3 and David McCandless, and including a large collection of own infographics. Visual.ly has already attracted key partners in publishing, design and distribution, including The Atlantic, CNNMoney.com, eBay, GOOD Magazine, OMD, National Geographic, The Next Web, and Smirnoff. Each of these publications is allowed to upload its own graphics, which can then be embedded and shared via a Visual.ly-created embed code.
Visual.ly is also launching a so-called "Twitter Visualizer" application to exemplify the kind of automated tools it is creating to turn data into illustrative images. The visualization compares one's Twitter activity and personality to that of others, including celebrities or Web gurus: "Twitter Visualizer is a great example of how Visual.ly can be creative with numbers. With 34 celebrities, five mouths, seven hair colors, 12 hair styles, two genders, 11 outfits, 2 positions, and 28 accessories, the program can put each Tweeter in 17,592,960 different scenarios." (example image below)
The Twitter Visualizer is the first of a series of self-service tools that will allow any person to turn huge amounts of data into infographics "automatically". This main infographic creation engine will be launched later this year, marking the end of Visual.ly's beta period.
For a really long time, Google has been treating the social world the same way as Microsoft treated the internet. We all remember how Bill Gates back in 1994 said "I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years." and for many years (and still to this day), Microsoft suffers from their lack of internet mindset.
Google has been the same way. Social to them was an algorithm - something to add to search. But in recent years, things have started to change. First with Google Wave (brilliant idea, but the world wasn't ready for it - and it was too hard to replace email). Then Google Buzz, which flopped catastrophically. Then with several minor projects that didn't really catch on. To the recent Plus one button, which wasn't really social.
But now, it seems like Google is actually on to something. The new Google+ is all about you as a person, the connections you have, and how Google can help you to have a more meaningful "social circle." It is not about algorithms. It is about people.
I haven't tried it yet. I do not have access (for several reasons). But I can give you all the things I have seen.
Not all relationships are created equal. So in life we share one thing with college buddies, another with parents, and almost nothing with our boss. The problem is that today's online services turn friendship into fast food-wrapping everyone in "friend-paper"and sharing really suffers.
In light of these shortcomings we asked ourselves, "What do people actually do?" And we didn't have to search far for the answer. People in fact share selectively all the time - with their circles.
Sparks - conversations
Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. On any topic you want, in over 40 languages. Simply add your interests, and you'll always have something to watch, read and share - with just the right circle of friends.
Hangouts - the Skype killer!
With Google+ we wanted to make on-screen gatherings fun, fluid and serendipitous, so we created Hangouts. By combining the casual meetup with live multi-person video, Hangouts lets you stop by when you're free, and spend time with your Circles.
In the same vein as the Tron special effects guys, Tatiana Plakhova has created some rather stunning works of art centered around data visualization. Plakhova, a graduate of Moscow State University, owns the design studio Colour Atelier in Russia.
For his final project at the Royal College of Art's Innovation Design Engineering program, Hannes Harms wonders, "What if there was a way to make food information more visual and track all of our intake? What if there was a way to embed data directly in food?"
His answer: "NutriSmart," a which essentially entails replacing food barcodes with RFIDs, where data—regarding provenance, nutrition, preparation, etc., not to mention allergy information—can be tracked from farm to table.
While the Society for Information Display's "Display Week 2011" doesn't sound like the sexiest event, it was at that conference in Los Angeles that a company called Polymer Vision showed off their latest technology: A rollable flatscreen.
Polymer's 6-inch SVGA display is 800x600 pixels and (thus far) just black-and-white, but it can be rolled into a radius of just six millimeters--meaning it would fit around a tube less than a half-inch in diameter. While integration into actual products is presumably a ways off, it's not hard to imagine, say, scroll-shaped iPads in the future.
Europe will presumably get a look at the technology when Polymer Vision travels to LOPE-C, the upcoming Large-area Organic & Printed Electronics Conference, to be held in Frankfurt at the end of June.
