Slashdot Mirror
Graphics in Science
BishopBerkeley writes "Nature has an interesting nugget about the second meeting of the Image and Meaning Initiative which was held at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It is about the use of graphics in presenting scientific data. I am also a big advocate of using nice graphics in scientific presentations, but I also agree with Felice Franel, the founder of I-M, that not all images are meaningful scientifically. In fact, one encounters (and I am ashamed to admit that I have published) images that look nice but have no scientific import at all. One very cool Harvard physics professor, Eric Heller, produces wickedly beautiful (and meaningful) images of quantum mechanical models. These images have made the covers of Science and Nature, and are featured in his online art gallery, which was reviewed in the New York Times in 2002." And of course, any mention of graphic information should not go by without a big shout out to Edward Tufte.
Nature has symmetry everywhere. GUT of science and art.
Well, I've taken a slightly different tack in my research. While the computer might be better at actually analysing the data, visualisation can be a great tool in getting the results of that analysis to the user. In my case I've visualised the states of self learning intrusion detection systems so that the user can 'see for himself' why the system operates the way it does. Making under and overtraining and false alarms visible to an extent they weren't before.
But I agree. Even though I started out (PDF) doing straight up visualisation, I've come to believe that it's the combination of computer analysis and visualisation to better match the capabilities of the human operator and the machine that's the interesting field to explore.
Stefan Axelsson
What is your favourite open source cross-platform toolkit for making scientific graphs?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I am about to start a course in Computation Biology and bought Fundamentals of Biochemistry (Voet) as some background reading. The maths leaves me cold and when an equation is rearranged I just can't grasp the significance of it.
However, the graphics of 3D molecular structures that start off simple and then end up in a huge DNA helix just blow me away and I spent yesterday morning staring at them in wonder (more than I have ever studied a work of art). Somebody put a lot of effort into that and I now have an appreciation and wonder of the mechanisms of life.
I have long lamented the lack of visual effort in interface design, specifically in the realm in which I currently work, musical synthesizers.
.. and I have concluded that one of the reasons we see waves of synth revivial occurring every few years is because that is how long it takes someone to 'grok' their synthesizer, and while we wait for that grok to occur, no use occurs.
One of the problems with synthesis today is that it is too scientific
I recently made a commitment as a synth builder to attempt to enforce a few rules on myself; one of them is the "No Label Philosophy", which basically means that if a knob needs a label in order for the user to work out what it does when they turn it, then its a poor interface design, but if it doesn't, its a strong one.
The question I have is, where are other examples of 'illustration pushing concept' in the slashdott'ers world today? Have you recently seen some examples of graphical/icon-based design being used to clearly communicate very high-order concepts to the end user? What are they? Anyone got any pointers to examples of superlative graphical interface function, where you know instinctively what is going to happen because the picture tells you so?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Another example of scientific art is this very beautiful animation of some sort of fractal. (Note: Turn down sound volume prior to viewing.)
I think therefore I am. Therefore, I think, I am.
This page: http://www.jimworthey.com/jimtalk2004nov.html is the graphics that I used for a talk last year. As you read through, you'll see 3D pictures and animated graphics. When you see a 3D graph with a border, that links to a VRML pic that you can zoom and rotate. For free VRML viewer see http://www.parallelgraphics.com/ for example.
Once upon a time..
(A fairytale of magic pictures)
--
"A kind of HTML, the codingsystem used for the layout of webpages, but
then for graphics". That's what SVG is about. SVG is an abbreviation of
Scalable Vector Graphics and describes how something is to be presented.
The thickness of the lines, the patterns to fill planes, color
distribution, masks and filters for effects like smooth flows, and more.
In August of this year a international conference on SVG is held in
Enschede and Ruud Steltenpool# is one of the organisers. In this edition
of OpenMagazine he tells, mostly by using a fairytale, what makes SVG so
interesting.
--
by Ruud Steltenpool
The little girl open*s the 'story-book' (2 screens fit together as pages
with a computer and a wireless connection integrated) and sees a young
lady, a princess of course, standing next to a pond, her face *the same
as* as the girl's own.
"Shall i tell you a story?", asks the princess and the kid silently
mumbles "yes, pwease".
"Once upon a time..." starts the princess and unfolds the story while the
words appear one by one on the other page. The drawings change along
accordingly, not really continuously moving images, but more like a
richly illustrated book. When the little girl touches the dwarf picture
in front of her, the princess departs slightly from her story and tells
about the dwarf, who in turn also makes himself heard. Yesterday the
dwarf was a
unicorn and tomorrow a magical bird maybe, cause the story changes based
on interaction with the girl. Stories can get saved - "same as yesterday"
says the girl - or it can be a never ending story growing with the child.
Maybe in interaction with the stories of hundreds of thousands of other
children.
"Scalable Vector Graphics" is the quite imposing term for these pictures,
the words and the connections. A bit of technical speach, that next to the
obvious, carries along lots of extra meaning. Many people that work with
it, therefore rather use the abbreviation SVG, because the full variant
sells it short. A better description of this technology might be 'magical
pictures'.
Pixels
An ordinary picture in a page is usually far from magical, whether it's a
local document or on a webpage or whatever. Apart from maybe the place and
size in the page, they contain no information about themselves. Of course
you can make such an ordinary picture clickable (link it), maybe even
make the result dependent on where you click and add a short description
in HTML that might serve as a pop-up text. This however changes nothing
to the fact that the picture is just a bunch of colored pixels, without
any built-in meaning. No semantics, as its called in computerlingo.
Now imagine you do are able to put this meaning in. So every element in
the image - the princess, the pond, the dwarf, maybe even the horn of the
unicorn - would hold enough information to identify itself. Or enough
information to change the representation of itself or its surrounding,
for example by moving, turning, growing, shrinking or changing the
colors. Also imagine that this image can communicate with the internet,
save information about itself, renew stories, maybe communicating with
other stories so in case of common story lines one could start a joined
adventure. It are all possibilities of SVG.
SVG in essence is a language that describes images in text. It describes
how something must be presented: the thickness of the lines, the patterns
to fill the planes, color distribution, masks and filters for subtle
effects. And more. So only at the final moment of presenting this
description is calculated into pixels. Also it can flourish images into
animations: movements along complicated paths, a poisoned apple fluently
going from sickly purple to tempting red, or the girl that grows after
drinking from the bottle saying "Drink me". SVG controls the flow of text
Tufte is a wonderful lecturer.
He promotes himself aggressively.
He picks on some sacred cows that need to be picked on, such Powerpoint. (It is alarming that business leaders believe it is reasonable to expect complex ideas to be explained in a few sentence fragments.)
Tufte missed the boat on interactive computing - he's stuck on the printed page. Which is OK, but how are you reading this? I did notice in one of his latest talks that the sort of icons and tiny unreadable plots that would be bad if other people used them, are good if Tufte uses them. But, hey, he's only human like the rest of us and sometimes ambiguous little decorations do look good!
Stephen North, AT&T Research, Florham Park NJ USA, (973) 360 8638 "Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus!"
As a programmer and sometimes teaching assistant I've been doing a lot of stuff with techniques to represent the structure of information (ER models, UML class diagrams, RDF, etc.) and of discrete processes (state machines, flow diagrams, Petri nets, UML activity diagrams, UML message sequence charts, etc.)
Considering the popularity of such techniques I find it odd how little material I have encountered on their actual useability, compared to other forms of representation. There still appear to be hordes of professionals in the software industry who routinely dismiss diagram techniques as being useless, or worse, a tell-tale sign of a weak mind (as Dijkstra did), without feeling the slightest need to substantiate such sentiment with evidence of any kind. At the same time, none of the proponents of diagram techniques I have seen (speaking or in writing) make any serious useability arguments in favour. Clearly it's easy to draw up small examples on which a particular diagram technique does well, and other examples to discredit the same technique. But that is the full extent to which the matter seems to be dealt with, even among professional software design specialists, such as the designers of the UML.
So what I have been reading, mostly between the lines, is that formulas are "too hard" while diagrams are "too easy". Well, on the whole there may be a grain of truth in this thought, but I'd like to see more details. Are there any serious studies on the useability for diagrams (vs. that of tables, or formulas, or other types of visualizations) for conveying information? Or is this whole subject really as trivial as everybody appears to believe?