Date: Thursday, July 24th, 2008, at 08:09 Subject: Polarized Colo(u)r Security: Public Location: San Francisco, California Music: Autechre Tags: diagram, polarization, quasar, visual language

Long time, no write, except for that silly link last week. I’m still working on that little project in San Francisco, which consumes an extraordinary amount of time.

At any rate, I saw the above image, which accompanies a press release from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and I figured I could express my thoughts quickly enough not to feel too guilty about taking the time to write.

The press release bears the title “Accretion Discs Show Their True Colours,” which describes the different appearance of quasars in polarized light. The press release describes the research well: “‘The crucial observational difficulty here has been that the disc is surrounded by a much larger torus containing hot dust, whose light partly outshines that of the disc,’ says Kishimoto. ‘Because the light coming from the disc is scattered in the disc vicinity and thus polarised, by observing only polarised light from the quasars, one can uncover the buried light from the disc.’”

The image does pretty well, too, except I have some nagging issues with it. Of course, the little circles with vertical lines suggest polarization to the initiated (although they also remind me of those glasses Chris Lowe wore back in the late 80s that I wanted so much), but I fear that visual shorthand is lost on a large percentage of the audience. And even if you get it, why does the little circle moving over the image change the color of the entire image? It would be much better if only the part inside the circle changed color. A little Photoshop work would make this image much, much clearer.

So how’s that for succinct?

(BTW, in nosing around for a link to “polarized light,” I ran across Polarization.com, which suggests to me that there really is a website for just about everything.)

Date: Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007, at 20:24 Subject: Back to Jupiter Security: Public Location: San Francisco, California Music: Spiritualized Tags: diagram, dipole, jupiter, magnetosphere, swri

I know that I just blogged about the Jovian magnetosphere, but here I go again. And it’s another press release from SwRI, of all things. There’s a lot going on in this diagram! First off, kudos on getting the dipole to look right, but then things get a little confusing…

The profusion of orbit lines and magnetic field lines (or tubes, I guess, if I look at the high-resolution version of the image) might make sense to a well-informed viewer, but they seem confusing for the uninitiated. I’m also wondering why the faint structure that connects the moon Io to Jupiter, which indicates ionized gases trapped in Jupiter’s magnetic field, doesn’t actually follow a magnetic field line. Yeah, they got the dipole bit correct, but then garbled the message! And the Io torus, which also looks somewhat tubular in this depiction, doesn’t seem to lie in the same plane as the orbit lines. All very odd.

Here’s the image caption, BTW: “About [one] ton of volcanic gases are spewed out by Jupiter’s moon Io every second. When ionized, these gases become trapped in Jupiter’s strong magnetic field (shown in blue) and form a vast ring (shown in red) around the planet with Jupiter’s 10-hour spin period. Jupiter’s strong magnetic, rapid rotation and Io’s prodigious source of material result in a giant magnetosphere whose dynamics are very different from the Earth.” Not such a bad explanation, really, although it helps to know that the ionized material rotates along with Jupiter’s 10-hour period, whereas Io orbits more slowly, so the stuff gets smeared out along the length of the moon’s orbit.

If you’re interested in a bit more on the topic, you can also check out an actual image of the Io torus and even see its rotation with Jupiter (the latter page actually has a much better description of the torus than the above as well). Um, did I mention I almost did a Master’s project looking at the Io torus…?

Date: Wednesday, October 10th, 2007, at 01:23 Subject: Preaching to the Choir Security: Public Location: Athens, Greece Music: Holst Tags: diagram, jupiter, magnetosphere, new horizons, pseudocolor

A press release from the Southwest Research Institute describes observations made of Jupiter’s magnetosphere by the New Horizons spacecraft. The above image (sorry, it’s quite low-res, and to take a closer look, you’ll need to open up the huge version linked from the above) summarizes some of the results. To summarize my response: it would work quite well in a scientific publication, but it just doesn’t cut it for public use.

I admit that it’s nice to see actual data represented—and nice to see an attempt at providing context for them—but the context in which the data fails to help much; furthermore, it really only conveys the context for an expert viewer—one who knows about the solar wind, magnetic fields, and such. In a previous post, I complained about depictions of Earth’s magnetosphere; I won’t bother reiterating my gripes, but they can be applied to the top portion of the above image. Honestly, some version of the schematic portion of the image would probably have sufficed for a press release, but it would have required significant work to be made more comprehensible.

Also, we’re given no hint as to how to read the spectrograms below the schematic diagram, and furthermore, they utilize opaque units such as “Energy/Q [eV/q]” and “DOY 2007 [UT].” Oh, yeah, and pseudocolor. ’Nuff said.

Making matters worse, the picture’s caption incorporates a trult impressive quantity of jargon. To call it “incomprehensible,” at least for public audiences, would be kind. The press release is better, but not by much. The only audience I can imagine picking up on this story is a quite sophistication publication such as Scientific American. I guess that’s all well and good (better than nothing), but a little more effort could make this result more accessible to broader audiences.

(I’ll just add that the New Horizons folks actually produced a spiffy press kit that describes the fly-by, with some decent diagrams, too.)

BTW, I’m in Athens attending the Communicating Astronomy with the Public conference. Fun stuff! And I finally achieved my goal of presenting a PowerPoint using no bullet point slides. A personal victory.

Date: Friday, September 28th, 2007, at 16:21 Subject: More Abstraction Security: Public Location: San Francisco, California Music: Bloc Party Tags: diagram, nanotechnology, nanowire, pseudocolor

Okay, I give up.

No, not with the blog, in spite of my lousy track record posting lately. I give up trying to figure out the image above…

I mean, it’s pretty and all, but what does it mean? I’m so baffled that I won’t even complain about the pseudocolor (indeed, I’m quite fond of orange). I read through the press release and the accompanying caption (which seems to have been removed recently), but… Huh?

Here’s the caption, BTW: “Spectroscopic image showing the microwave-frequency magnetic resonances of an array of parallel, metallic thin film nanowires (‘stripes’). The peak in the center is due to resonances occurring at the stripe edges while the strong horizontal bar is due to resonances in the body of the stripes.”

Since I’m trained in astronomy, my tendency is to read frequency along the horizontal axis, which would imply a peak of some sort at a particular frequency, but that doesn’t feel right, somehow. Maybe it’s actually a spectrogram of some sort, with the horizontal axis representing the spatial extent of the nanowires?

Whatever the image tries to show, the real question is: why confuse people with it?

Date: Tuesday, August 28th, 2007, at 16:55 Subject: Ball and Stick, Apple and Orange Security: Public Location: San Francisco, California Music: Belle & Sebastian Tags: diagram, nanotechnology, nanotube, rice university

Today,
Science Daily reported on research from Rice University that had actually appeared in a press release from Rice last week. Go figure. The new article includes the above image, however, which could be perceived as an improvement (or not) over the text-only copy from Rice.

A quick glance at the image caused a sudden nag, and I started to browse on before I figured out what was bothering me.

The nanotube should be made of atoms, right? Presumably those little grey shiny balls in the molecular model above. But interior to the nanotube, we see brightly-colored (one might be tempted to call them radioactive-looking) blobs that look like a scanning-electron micrograph of something-or-other. But these are supposed to be atoms! Specifically, astatine atoms, which should be a fair bit bigger than shown here.

This isn’t a big deal, I suppose, but it's oddly distracting. First off, they use different visual vocabulary to represent the same kind of thing: atoms are shown in two distinctly different ways in the above image. Secondly (and I know I’m going out on a limb here), the image they choose perhaps even vaguely suggests cancerous cells… And given that the press release concerns using nanotubes to treat cancer, that’s potentially problematic.

Date: Thursday, August 23rd, 2007, at 15:36 Subject: Holy CMB, Batman! Security: Public Location: San Francisco, California Music: Paul van Dyk Tags: cmb, diagram, lossless compression, wmap

A press release from NRAO announces, “Astronomers Find Enormous Hole in the Universe.” Hmmm. I’ll refrain from commenting on the overzealous word choice (except insofar as I just did) and focus on the image above.

I have to admit that the first thing I thought of when I saw the diagram was a poorly-rendered traffic cone—with a circular base, executed with an acute lack of graphical perspective.

The caption reads: “Illustration of the effect of intervening matter in the cosmos on the cosmic microwave background (CMB). On the right, the CMB is released shortly after the Big Bang, with tiny ripples in temperature due to fluctuations in the early Universe. As this radiation traverses the Universe, filled with a web of galaxies, clusters, superclusters and voids, it experiences slight perturbations. In the direction of the giant newly-discovered void, the WMAP satellite (top left) sees a cold spot, while the VLA (bottom left) sees fewer radio galaxies.”

The viewer (i.e., astronomers with their WMAP satellite and radio telescopes) is off to the left of the image, and it would probably be worth continuing the sides of the traffic cone until they meet—at Earth! Otherwise, it really doesn’t make much sense. Given its opacity and apparent solidity, the traffic cone looks like a structure, and truncating it simply exacerbates the problem.

Plus, the pictures of the two telescopes distract from what’s going on and further confuse things. They hover there by the tip of the cone, as if they belong there. But the radio telescope wasn’t even part of the observation depicted by the diagram: radio observations supplied confirming evidence.

I admit that I don’t have an immedite solution on how to depict the observations better, although the above image could be improved by making the cone appear more transparent, more a part of some continuous medium affecting the observations, and more connected to an observation point to the left of the image. Oh, and more appropriate in its perspective.

Curiously, the image is offered as a 73KB JPEG, a 278KB JPEG, and… a 34.3 MB TIFF! Now, I’m all about lossless compression of images, and I noticed that the giant TIFF had no compression whatsoever. So, just for kicks, I saved it out with LZW compression and it shrunk to 9.1MB. Yeah, disk space is cheap, but c’mon, let’s be sensible.

Date: Sunday, July 8th, 2007, at 14:51 Subject: Stellar Tiramisu? Security: Public Location: Boston, Massachusetts Music: Postal Service Tags: convection, diagram, exoplanet, extrasolar planet, iron enrichment, main sequence, red giant, star, stellar structure

The press release from ESO compares a red giant to tiramisu—because, as Luca Pasquini puts it, “There is cocoa powder only on the top!” Hmmm.

(The cocoa powder analogy has to do with the distribution of heavy elements in stars with planets. We know that extrasolar planets are preferentially seen around stars with high iron content, but do the planets form around stars with a lot of iron distributed throughout, or do planets sprinkle iron, cocoa-like, on the stars’ surfaces?)

The image above does a bang-up job, I must say. It possesses clarity, first and foremost, comparing apples to apples and balancing the diagrammatic and the photorealistic with aplomb. I like the clear labels (with caveats to be addressed below), and the two stars even show limb darkening. Most especially, I must express my deepest appreciation for the inclusion of a small figure (in the lower right) to communicate scale! Yes! Fantastic! Super! Well done!

I would not go so far as to suggest that the diagram is flawless in its execution, however. Aside from a slight irrelevance to the topic at hand, the main liability I can detect is the inconsistency between the left- and right-hand images: “radiative zone” gets labelled only on the left, while ”burning shell” appears on the right. Something of a fumble in the home stretch…

Date: Monday, July 2nd, 2007, at 16:35 Subject: Biochemical Art Security: Public Location: Smithfield, Rhode Island Music: Magnetic Fields Tags: biochemistry, biomolecule, blood serum, diagram, illustration, molecule

I’m attending the Gordon Conference on Visualization in Science and Education, and this morning, we had a chance to hear (and see) David Goodsell from the Scripps Institute. Goodsell complements his research work with significant and influential dabbling in artwork. Above, you can see an image of blood serum taken from a collection of images he created for Biosite. His website describes the image as follows:

“Blood serum is shown in the picture, with many Y-shaped antibodies, large circular low density lipoproteins, and lots of small albumin molecules. The large fibrous structure at lower left is von Willebrand factor and the long molecules in red are fibrinogen, both of which are involved in blood clotting. The blue object is poliovirus.”

Goodsell preserves the shapes and relative sizes of the molecules while flattening the typical three-dimensional representations of molecules. He also represents the structures in cross section, using orthographic rendering to allow depicting large areas (large, that is, relative to the size of the molecules).

All of Goodsell’s images make good use of color, and I find the above image a particularly striking example. The poliovirus sticks out like a sore thumb (attractively composed asymmetrically within the frame), as of course it should. And it’s exceedingly pleasant to see depictions of molecules freed from the garish pseudocolor rainbow that seems to dominate the medium. Goodsell’s galleries include many more examples…

Evidently, Goodsell is also responsible for the “Molecule of the Month” at the RCSB Protein Data Bank (PDB). I haven’t taken a close look yet, but I plan to!

BTW, my home institution just started including me in a new category for the “Science in Action” podcast. Take a listen! I’ll have two more podcasts this week, mostly talking about the conference.

Date: Thursday, June 21st, 2007, at 16:55 Subject: Molecular Dominoes Security: Public Location: San Francisco, California Music: Pet Shop Boys Tags: diagram, nanotechnology

A press release from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) uses the above image to describe “the growth of a layer of molecules as they gradually cover the surface of a small silicon rectangle.” Unfortunately, the image doesn’t seem to illustrate much at all.

As usual, I’ll quote the entire caption… “Schematic of the monolayer self-assembly process studied by the NIST/NCSU team. The silicon substrate is approximately 1 x 5 cm in dimensions. The source (left) is a mixture of organosilane (OS) molecules and parafin oil (to control the evaporation rate.) The whole system is enclosed in a Petri dish. The concentration of OS molecules is higher near the source and the ordering process initiates near this region. Molecules behind the advancing self-assembly front are relatively ordered, while molecules ahead of the front are engulfed and incorporated as the front reaches them. The molecules at the leading edge of the front are less ordered and this region becomes broader as the front advances—this is the key phenomenon measured in the experiment.”

Um, right.

Basically, to illustrate such a phenomenon, you’re probably better off using a series (i.e., at least a pair) of images to show, for example, an “advancing self-assembly front.” As it stands (or, in the case of the molecules on the right-hand side, leans), the image doesn’t really reveal the process very well.

Furthermore, if you read the accompanying press release, you find that the actual observations show irregularities in the advancing front, with variations in density that the simple model does not explain. So although the illustration receives top billing with the press release, it doesn’t actually show us what’s interesting about the press release!

An AVI available with the release claims to show “a mean field reaction-diffusion model of the monolayer self-assembly process,” but I couldn’t get the movie to play on my Macintosh.

Date: Monday, June 18th, 2007, at 18:45 Subject: Pull My Finger Security: Public Location: San Francisco, California Music: Kinky Tags: diagram, sexual orientation, statistical correlation

New York Magazine recently posted “The Science of Gaydar” to its site, which uses the above figure to illustrate one of various physical attributes that are statistically correlated with sexual orientation (straight on the left, gay on the right, by the way). Others include fingerprint density, hair whorl direction, and handedness. With minimal captioning and added text, the magazine’s designers have created a sequence of simple, easy-to-understand images. Admittedly, it’s not exactly rocket science, but clarity and elegance go a long way in my book.

For example, note how the type in the above image guides you toward seeing which digit is longer. Placing the text above and below the dotted line gives you a tiny bit more information than you would otherwise have, and the result is both aesthetically pleasing and impressively lucid. Great work!

FYI, my index finger is indeed longer than my ring finger. Go figure.

Date: Thursday, June 14th, 2007, at 17:00 Subject: Colorbar Confusion Security: Public Location: Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico Music: mariachi Tags: climate change, comparison, diagram, false color

A press release from Purdue University describes the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on “heat stress,” using the diagram above to illustrate the difference in effect between accelerated emissions (top) and decelerated emissions (bottom). A description from the web page:

“This image illustrates heat stress in the 21st century for two greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. The top panel shows the expected intensification of the severity of extreme hot days given accelerating increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. The bottom panel shows the expected decrease in intensification associated with decelerated increases in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

(I apologize for the nearly illegible size… The Purdue website offers up the diagram in the teeny-tiny size above, or print quality, which I assumed would be excessive.)

There are a couple of things I find odd (and counterintuitive and frankly counterproductive) about the diagram…

Firstly, the color spectrum used in this false-color representation of the data feels wrong to me, since it ranges from cool blues through warm oranges and reds and thence to… The beginnings of a cool violet? Particularly since we’re talking about temperature (well, sort of) here, and most people have grown accustomed to weather maps colored by temperature. Stopping at red gives you plenty of color resolution. (And maybe next time, you can choose something other than the garish rainbow colors?)

A more egregious error permeates the diagram, however. Perhaps we can simply call this the “apples and oranges&rduo; issue: two images, side-by-side, offered up for comparison, need to share enough to allow for easy comparison. I last blogged about this in relation to an NCAR visualization of Hurricane Katrina, but the idea is simple enough: don’t ask the viewer to do unnecessary work in interpreting your imagery, because unnecessary work leads to unnecessary risk of miscommunication. In the case of the two images above, the color bars are flipped for no apparent reason, so increasing values get warmer (in hue) on the top and cooler (in hue) on the bottom. Why? Also, the scale of the two color bars changes, running from 3 to 8 on top and from –3 to 0 on the bottom. Why? Why? Why?

(Well, okay, I can acknowledge one drawback in this particular case. Since the two datasets do not overlap, coming up with a single colorbar would be a little tricky; indeed, you’d almost need to insert an intermediate model showing, say, no change in greenhouse admissions, which would presumably result in values in between. But the issue of inverting the colorbar still stands: “red on top bad, red on bottom goooood” simply leads to confusion.)

I find behavior of this sort annoying when watching a scientist presenting data in a talk, but as part of a press release, it just saddens me. My fear is that the folks in the university press offices don’t even try to fix these problems… Perhaps because they don’t care, but perhaps because they don’t even think the data should be easily understood.

Hmmm. Maybe it’s time for a Tufte-like “Graphics 101” for science types? I looked for such a thing just now, but I didn’t find anything. Anyone reading know of such a thing?

Date: Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007, at 18:41 Subject: Inscrutible Ice Cube Security: Public Location: San Francisco, California Music: Arcade Fire Tags: animation, annotation, antarctica, detector, diagram, particle physics, physics

A press release from the University of Delaware uses the above image as a stand-in for a Flash animation (provided without explanation) elsewhere on their site. The caption (surprise, surprise) is utterly useless: “How does the IceCube telescope work? Click here to launch the animation, courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.” Um, thanks.

The thing is, it’s actually a nice enough animation. I like the little Eiffel Tower for scale, and the iconography is relatively clear, except for the color of the dots changing along the path… But it could certainly use some added text or something. And ironically, if you browse down the animations page and look at the very next option, you find a nicely-annotated Flash animation that actually clears up most of the confusion of the previous animation. The colors of the dots remain unexplained, but otherwise, it’s rather spiffy! (If you prefer, you can take a look at the annotated Flash in Swedish, too.)

So what gives? I hope it wasn't a conscious decision to eschew the animation with text and supporting verbiage! “Oooh, it looks so cluttered that way.”) But the alternative explanation is plain sloppiness. Hmmm.