Climate change scientists have started a fightback against sceptics who argue that the observed changes in the Earth’s climate can largely be explained by natural variability. This comes after the email hacking furore.

A major Met Office review of more than 100 scientific studies tracking the observed changes in the Earth’s climate system finds that it is an “increasingly remote possibility” that human activity is not the main cause of climate change.

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“A simple visualization of IRC communication behavior: Who is talking to whom? Or, more appropriately: Who is namedropping whom?

Circles represent usersand arcs represent references where a reference is a message from a user containing the name of another user.

Arcs are directional and drawn clockwise: In the upper half of a graph they point from left to right, in the bottom half from right to left. Arc strength corresponds to the number of references from the source to the target.

This visualization favors strong social connections over sociability: Frequent references between the same two users feature more prominently than combined references from several sources to a single target.”

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“My final year project in information design. Two big (200cm x 90cm, 80 x 36 inch) posters show the variety and attitudes of members from an internet community like MySpace.

On the first poster you can see the functions used, as well as additional information such as age, educational background, family status, gender and how often they are logged in. So, all demographic data which are available from every member’s profile.

The second poster gives you an overview of the geographic position, based on a map. You can see where the members are distributed. The aim was to give the management the opportunity to know much more about the members than would have been possible with a simple scan of their database only”.

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“The looks del.icio.us project is my first attempt to combine graphics design with programming. The concept is to see how users develop and sustain their tagging methodologies on del.icio.us.

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“VisIt is a free interactive parallel visualization and graphical analysis tool for viewing scientific data on Unix and PC platforms. Users can quickly generate visualizations from their data, animate them through time, manipulate them, and save the resulting images for presentations. VisIt contains a rich set of visualization features so that you can view your data in a variety of ways. It can be used to visualize scalar and vector fields defined on two- and three-dimensional (2D and 3D) structured and unstructured meshes. VisIt was designed to handle very large data set sizes in the terascale range and yet can also handle small data sets in the kilobyte range”.

“VisIt was developed by the Department of Energy (DOE) Advanced Simulation and Computing Initiative (ASCI) to visualize and analyze the results of terascale simulations. It was developed as a framework for adding custom capabilities and rapidly deploying new visualization technologies. After an initial prototype effort, work on VisIt began in the summer of 2000, and the initial version of VisIt was released in the fall of 2002. Although the primary driving force behind the development of VisIt was for visualizing terascale data, it is also well suited for visualizing data from typical simulations on desktop systems. Because of its applicability beyond visualizing terascale data, we are making VisIt freely available”.

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Narrative 2.0 visualises music. The music was segmented in single chanals. The chanals are shown fanlike and the lines move from the center away with the time. The angle of the line changes according to the frequency of the channel, while the frequency reaching a high level, the chanal becomes highlighted by orange.

The visualisation should not necessarily return exact informations, even if the arrangement and uniformity of the music can be read. The purpose was to create even more an aesthetically responding visualisation with the music as an artist.

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“Here & There is a project by S&W exploring speculative projections of dense cities. These maps of Manhattan look uptown from 3rd and 7th, and downtown from 3rd and 35th. They’re intended to be seen at those same places, putting the viewer simultaneously above the city and in it where she stands, both looking down and looking forward.”

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“For a long time now I have been a great admirer of Matthew Hurst’s work and I’m continuously impressed by the works posted at visualcomplexity.com. So I decided it was time for me to try something like this myself.

What I did is write a program that is able to log in to a very popular German Social Networking website and grab some data from it. I grabbed the friends of my profile (only 2) their friends (about 100) and the friends of their friends (about 5000). I used PHP with cURL for that and saved the data to a MySQL database.

Then I looked for tools to visualize the data. Turns out it’s quite hard to find something suitable. Ultimately I ended up using Pajek and Walrus.

The results I got from Pajek were a bit disappointing as the network creation algorithm does not seem to work that well on very large (>5000) nodes and it is unable to render images that emphasize a 3D feeling (so no eye candy):

The results I got with Walrus where definitely better. It was quite complicated to get Walrus to accept my data as it heavily relies on a spanning tree, but I managed to get it to work.”

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History Flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki* pages on Wikipedia.

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