Visualization of Today

787 billion dollars to track. Graphs to make. If anyone can do it, Edward Tufte can: he's the data visualization superhero. Read about him taking on the ARRA stimulus package.

Graphical perception – learn the fundamentals first | FlowingData

Came across this discussion of Cleveland and McGill's work on Flowing Data regarding visualization of data. Things to keep in mind.

When it comes to visualization, especially on the Web, you have to be open-minded, and you should be willing to try new things. There’s no advancing otherwise. However, before you dive into the advanced stuff - like just about everything in your life - you have to learn the fundamentals before you know when you can break the rules.

[From Graphical perception – learn the fundamentals first | FlowingData]

GIS Platform - uDig

Whenever I think I have found the general set of tools for my computer that make me functional and effective, I come across another amazing bit of software out there that blows me away. This time I've stumbled onto uDig - a java based, eclipse rich GIS client. It is platform free and excellent. As they put it:

The goal of uDig is to provide a complete Java solution for desktop GIS data access, editing, and viewing. uDig aims to be:

• User friendly, providing a familiar graphical environment for GIS users;
• Desktop located, running as a thick client, natively on Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux;
• Internet oriented, consuming standard (WMS, WFS, WCS) and de facto (GeoRSS, KML, tiles) geospatial web services; and,
• GIS ready, providing the framework on which complex analytical capabilities can be built, and gradually subsuming those capabilities into the main application.

With tools like this, ESRI folks should be worried - yeah, they provide the "industry standard" but with the prices they charge they better be offering something that makes one head spin -- and on every platform!

Some good free Mac graphing programs

I am happily a full-on Mac users these days. I still keep a window box at home and at the office to do the kinds of things that remain only possible on a windows box due to specific software packages: ArcGIS, SolidWorks, ERDAS and well, that is about it. Increasingly I am finding new ways of doing even these things on the Mac. For example, QGIS is an excellent (and free) GIS front end to GRASS.

Some of the programs I am finding for the Mac are really gems that make using OS X a techie dream. For example (and this doesn't include the world of X Windows based software):

Plot: http://plot.micw.eu/Main/HomePage This is a great free program for doing XY charts with lots of controls for error bars, perl based scripting, etc.

Octave: http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/ An incredible package for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically using a Matlab language - all for free. See also: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=2888&package_id=237839

VVIDGET: http://www.vvidget.org/ The rather incredible VVIDGET application that allows one to drag and drop all kinds of features into 2D and 3D graphs. Something ya gotta see...