US map of effective states based on US Dollar movement

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1681677/a-new-map-of-the-us-created-by-how-our-dollar-bills-move#1

Theoretical physicist Dirk Brockmann used the dollar bill tracking site Where’s George to see how money moves, and create new state boundaries based on our economies. The darker the blue lines, the less likely it is a dollar bill will have crossed it.

Syria turning off the internet

Nice article by CloudFlare with a video of Syria turning off the internet for the country.

CDNet on how Egypt did the same thing.

Publicly avalible datasets

I teach a class on Processing, which is a simplified version of Java designed to enable people to easy create graphics. My class focuses on data visualization. Below is my list of publicly available data sets which I encourage my students to use in their visualizations.

IMDB

IMDB is a website that maintains a list of movies, actors, actresses, and information about them. They offer a set of downloadable information sets. The sets can be a bit challenging to parse though, so there also exists some Perl parsing scripts.

Other

StackOverflow has a list of publicly available data sets.

SOUPS 2011

I’m blogging SOUPS 2011 over on the CUPS blog.

http://cups.cs.cmu.edu/blog/?cat=20

Trevis – a new tree visualization package

The Software Programmer and Efficiency group (SAPE) has created a new tree visualization package that looks promising. Of course it isn’t actually out yet so we will see.

Periodic Table of Visualizations

Visual-literacy.org has a nicely done Periodic Table of Visualizations.

Book: Applied Security Visualization

I just ordered a book entitled “Applied Security Visualization” written by Raffael Marty. The author previously wrote a chapter in “Security Data Visualization: Graphical Techniques for Network Analysis“, another book on how to bring visualization techniques and tools to the aid of the security community. I was somewhat disappointed with the Security Data Visualization book as I felt that it was just throwing eye candy at what I consider to be a serious problem. Many of the tools put forward by the Security Data Visualization book fail to follow the principles put forward by Edward Tufte on how to create useful and effective data visualizations. I have not yet had a chance to review “Applied Security Visualization” but based on the author’s other work I am hopeful for a clearer and more useful application of visualizations to the security domain.