Here's a website that provides a nice, clear visualization of all known atomic elements. I found this site through Infosthetics. Each visualization shows the neutrons, protons, electrons, the spin of the electrons, orbital shells, and sub orbital shells - with the electrons mapped to each sub orbital shell. It reminds me of high school chemistry class, but better.

A good article on the importance of looking at Paretian distributions for visualizing data. The main point that the author makes is that Paretian distributions are important tools for visualizing important upcoming trends in the data. Guassian distributions have a tendency to show important future trends as unimportant outliers in the data set, that is future trends will only appear outside of the Bell curve until it is too late to take any action. However, using a properly created Paretian visualization, the importance of data points that fall outside the norm, but which are attracting lots of attention or have many 'links' will be visually apparent.

Bruce Herr and Todd Holloway created a visualization of the popularity of Wikipedia articles. They started with a very large node map of the articles, then sorted out the articles that have been most frequently edited by users. The more frequently edited articles are larger dots of darker color. What really got my attention was Todd Holloway's statement that he is working on a project that will change the labels of google map data based on the zoom level a user has chosen. I can't wait to see that in action (and hear how he does it).

The article is located here.

This site always seems to have some great links to interesting data visualization projects. The diversity of stuff on the web is just amazing.

I was reading about a new semantic search engine called Hakia. Titus Hoskins wrote an article on Site Pro News about how semantic search could be the death of Google. I'm not trying to preach about how google is the enduring world champion of the internet. Eventually Google will slide into the background of the popular imagination, eventually. However, Hakia is not going to precipitate that slide. Why do I think so?

On the topic of semantic search, Titus overlooks Google's own efforts in this arena. The admitted Google efforts to develop AI are likely based upon semantic recognition. Google is not being blindsided by the efforts of startup's like Hakia or similar semantic search companies.

International automakers are looking to develop computer models of humans for improving the design of their cars. The Global Human Body Models Consortium LLC was quoted in the article as saying that the models provide better data. It is also likely that a computer model will save automakers a lot of money becuase they will not need to actually build a car before they crash test it. The automakers consortium contacted 40 research and universities world wide to help with the creation of full body models and specific body part models.

Microsoft has this interesting page on facets. This is an approach to modeling on grouping data sets. Their method of grouping permits viewing multiple types of metadata at once, allowing a user to see several hierarchical structures simultaneously.