Digital Roam

Uncle Fester in space

I was talking with astronomer Ron Marzke the other day about "looking". After all, who is better at taking in massive amounts of visual data and making sense of it than the people trying to understand the structure of the universe? The ONLY input they have available to them is light, and from understanding the nuances of light alone have they been able to figure out the age of the universe (13.7 Billion years), its shape (flat) and where we sit in it (not in the center).

Ron's particular area of interest is in "large structures", which to the layperson means "galaxies". They are large: Galaxy M31 (a.k.a. Andromeda) is about 110,000 light years across. The spaces between galaxies are even larger: Andromeda is our nearest neighbor, and it still took the light we see of it more than 2 million years to reach us.

An interesting aspect of galaxies is that they travel in families: galaxies come in clusters with mama galaxies, papa galaxies, sister galaxies... and like many families, there's the occasional weird uncle galaxy. Such is the case with Andromeda. See that bright spot just below the main disk? That's M32.

What makes M32 unique is that it is a "Compact Elliptical Galaxy", relatively small, tightly compact and structurally unique. Although M32 was the first CEG to be discovered, many have been found since. But here's what makes M32 truly odd: M32 is the ONLY Compact Elliptical Galaxy known that is a companion to a spiral galaxy. Meet the Uncle Fester of the cosmos.

And this is what kind of pisses off astronomers: since the Cosmological Principle states that the universe has no center, why is it that the ONLY spiral companion CEG is right next to us!?

This is one of Ron's burning questions, and he's now looking for other CEGs. Talk about needing to be good at "looking": out of his initial sample size of about 100,000,000 celestial objects, he's hypothesizing that he might be able to find about 20.

Talk about looking for a needle in a haystack.

Astronomy, Galaxy M32, Andromeda

Moon dust in your eyes

July 20, 1969, Mission Time: 102:45:40. One hundred and twenty feet above the surface of the moon and with less than thirty seconds of fuel remaining in the tanks, Neil Armstrong sees a sea of boulders covering the Lunar Module Eagle’s landing spot. He does what any wide-awake driver does when a pot-hole appears in the freeway just ahead: stomping on the gas, he swerves hard to the side and drives that puppy full-bore towards the nearest open spot. After finally – softly – touching down on the moon’s surface, Apollo 11 mission control can only say, “You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We're breathing again. Thanks a lot”

Next time we land on the moon, Mary “Missy” Cummings is going to make sure it won’t be anywhere near that hairy. Not that Missy isn’t used to hairy landings: as one of the first women Naval aviators to be cleared for combat flight, Missy landed her A-4 Skyhawk countless times on heaving carrier decks. Now that she runs MIT’s Humans and Automation Lab, she gets the chance to put her academic career (Ph.D in Systems Engineering with a focus on Cognitive Engineering) and first-hand piloting experience into practice. Her most recent area of focus: designing the visual displays that the next lunar astronauts will use when they land on the moon.

As Missy told me: “As instrumentation designers, one of our big challenges is deciding how much information not to show, and how to best trick people into perceiving what we most want them to see. We do this through multivariate instrument optimization, which is a fancy way of describing the process of layering many visual inputs together to create a single, rapidly-perceived display. In a time-critical task like a moon landing, the key is combining precise information about height and vertical speed in such a way that the pilot senses their position and speed before they even know that they’ve thought about it.”

1960’s era Apollo astronauts’ eyes had to jump repeatedly across many instruments to get this sense of situational awareness. They had to burn several “cognitive cycles” merging these multiple visual inputs and mentally making the calculations they needed to land. Eliminating such time-consuming cognition tasks (even if the time is counted in tenths-of-seconds) is one of the main goals of new cockpit instrumentation designs.

The new VAVI (Vertical Altitude and Velocity Indicator) Missy’s team designed is a perfect example. By combining “ecological perception” (seeing both the environment and its embedded clues that show what actions to take) with “emergent features” (features produced by the interaction of individual graphical elements), this instrument’s “waving arms” make the astronaut visually feel how quickly they are going up or down. Her team has tested their VAVI in a Harrier jump-jet with great success, and looks forward to pushing it out into the commercial aviation market.

Missy knows the VAVI design works: “In academia, many tools are invented purely based on theoretical research, which can be great. But in this case, I can literally say that with all my flying that I’ve ‘been there, done that’… and wished I’d had something like this instrument when I did.”

moon landing, ecological perception, dashboard design

Anti-social network analysis

When the Men in Black came calling, Dan Haught was ready. He knew that they didn’t know what they needed to know about who knows who in the global network of terror, so he wasn’t surprised by the knock on his company’s door. Ever since 9-11, Dan and his colleagues at FMS Advanced Systems Group had been testing their advanced social networking analysis software by mapping contacts among members of Al Qaeda. Their website trackingthethreat.com had already become popular with the media and he knew the intelligence services couldn’t be far behind.

Back while still watching the Pentagon burn, Dan had began to search for clues to who these terrorists were by looking at every news and information source he could find, and was appalled at the lack of connected knowledge he could find. Names would come up associated with other names, but not connected to other names that showed up in other connections. It was classic network analysis paralysis, and Dan knew he could do better.

As a self-professed data jockey (going back to his first 1K Timex Sinclair), Dan had been working for years on a stealth project designed to highlight the connections that exist in standard data tables but that are usually obscured by the endless rows and columns. His tool – which eventually became the Sentinel TMS Threat Management System – uses proprietary algorithms to parse the data and draw it up in charts where the connections visibly rise to the surface.

While this is standard social network analysis stuff in many ways, the real breakthrough came in applying this academic domain to the analysis of what Dan refers to as Anti-social networks: groups who intentionally keep a low profile, who generally eschew publicity and who absolutely positively don’t want to be found out. Using the SNA basics of “closeness”, “between-ness” and “recursivity”, he and his colleagues have only just begun to explore the murky world of the who’s-whos who don’t want you-know-who to know.

Although he can’t openly cite either most of his TMS sources or clients, Dan says it’s not really all that hard to construct insightful social network diagrams from commonly available information. “Give me a copy of your Outlook pst’s and I can give you a map of your network in no time. Sure, knowing who you send e-mails to tells me a lot, but who you BCC’d is where the real juicy stuff appears.”

Hmm... I think I’d better pass. Any takers?

social network analysis, men in black, threat management

Taking visualization to an entirely new level

There was something about how SFPD forensic artist Sgt. Stansberry was able to help crime witnesses calm their minds that reminded me of the Buddhist meditation I had studied many years ago. To check on some ideas, I yesterday visited with Lama Lodu Rinpoche of the San Francisco Tibetan Buddhist Center.

In particular, I was curious about the role of visualization in Tibetan (or Vajrayana) Buddhist practice. Lama Lodu patiently described for me some of the ways in which Tibetan monks use visualization as a meditative practice, in particular the mental and physical creation of mandalas (circle-based images of palaces and deities).

According to Lama Lodu, meditation is practiced in all types of Buddhism for many reasons, primarily as a way of gaining wisdom through the calming of the mind. Much of this wisdom leads the practitioner to the enlightening realization that the ego is an illusion, as impermanent as grains of sand in the wind. For this reason, the practice of creating intricate sand mandalas and then destroying them is a core teaching in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries in India and around the world.

Lama Lodu explained that while an advanced student of meditation can achieve remarkable levels of clarity -- including clairvoyance and the ability to heal physical wounds -- visualization serves as both a training and practice ground. "Once the mind is calm", he said, "it is possible to focus the mind's eye in infinite detail. We practice the visualization of the celestial palace of deities as a way to locate ourselves within the framework of the universe and to understand many religious concepts."

I recall that when I studied Buddhism and meditation in Thailand twenty-five years ago, I was able after much practice to calm my mind enough to mentally see details of my family home that I had no idea I even knew. When I explained this to Lama Lodu, he was nonplussed. "I am not impressed with that as you are", he said with a smile, "of course you could see such detail -- with a little practice you can easily visualize anything that you cling to." He paused. "The better goal, you know, is to stop the clinging."

(Mandala images from http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/george/mandala.html)

meditation, mandala, tibetan buddhism

Look ma: no equations!

Tatsu Takeuchi says teaching theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory are a lot like standup comedy: you never know what's right until the audience starts laughing. But Tatsu doesn't just get physics students to laugh, he mainly gets them to see.

An Associate Professor of Physics at Virginia Tech, Tatsu teaches Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity with pictures: spacetime diagrams, to be precise. His lecture notes for an introductory class on "relativity for poets" cover the key concepts of relativity without the need for written equations. These notes are truly a model of clear thinking made visible.

Tatsu started taking physics because it he had trouble with it. "I was a bit of an arrogant young man and thought I understood everything... except physics. It annoyed me, so I thought I'd study it for a couple years, figure it out, and move on." That was twenty years, a Bachelors, Masters and PhD ago. "Now I still don't completely understand physics, but little things are starting to become clear."

For Tatsu, creating the diagrams was a breakthrough. "Coming up with visual explanations for something complex doesn't just help your audience 'get it' -- it helps you understand it better yourself."

Even with the clarity of his drawings, some students still struggle... not with the physics as much as their belief in a picture. Tatsu draws an analogy to students learning to read. When he taught reading to young children, the biggest breakthrough came when the kids made the conceptual leap that a scribble on a piece of paper could represent a sound. With spacetime diagrams the leap is to believe that several scribbles on a piece of paper can represent actions over time.

For those who speak Japanese, Tatsu has published a book covering the entire special theory of relativity, again without relying on any equations. I've ordered a copy and am anxious to see how much I can get out of it, language barrier be damned. Pictures are pictures, after all, regardless of language.

theory of relativity, spacetime diagram, physics visualization

Harvey balls? Harvey who?

In the consulting business, it's a rare day that one does not come across several instances of Harvey Balls. Easy to use, cognitively immediate and highly scannable, these little open and closed iconlets provide a rapid way to assess an otherwise unreadable set of table data. Talk to anyone in consulting and they'll know all about these ubiquitous little symbols. Except for one thing: nobody knows why they're called "Harvey Balls".

With forensic webwork, a couple calls to former consulting colleagues, and a little stalking of a Long Island High School's 50 year reunion, I finally managed to track down the originator and spoke to him at some length. Former Booz Allen Hamilton consultant Harvey Poppel created the first balls way back in the '70's as a way to summarize long columns of numeric data for internal project documents. Mr. Poppel was known as the go-to guy when it came to increasing office productivity, and these balls struck him as a time saver. They were such a hit that quickly all Booz consultants were using them, and the rest is history.

Outside of the PowerPoint decks that are the perennial deliverable of consultancies everywhere, the most likely place to spot Harvey Balls in action is at Consumer Reports. CR has become so attached to these iconlets that they've even added one ot their logo.

Should you feel like making your tables more scannable, here's a good place to download some nice ones. They're free. This day, Mr. Poppel has yet to receive a dime for his visual invention.

data visualization, Harvey Balls

History is beautiful

Henry Ford was wrong: history isn't bunk. Thanks to Larry Gormley and Bill Younker, history is beautiful.

I had a great call a couple days ago with Larry of historyshots.com. Larry told me about how he and his business partner Bill have spent most of the past five years striving to make history look better. And have they ever succeeded.

Their collection of "Information-intense graphics posters" takes history buffs on visually spectacular tours of eras from the American Civil War to WWII, from the PGA tour to the moon race (my personal favorite -- my scary hobby site shows why), and from the long, slow ascent of Mount Everest to the long, slow descent of American political parties. With eight posters available for sale online now, and four more in the pipeline, their shop is aiming straight at the intersection of history, mapping, information design and art. It's beautiful work.

Improving history takes a long time: Larry said that it takes up to nine months to create each chart, and given the detail in them, that is not surprising. Research takes much of that time, and the rest is spent on working through enough design solution options to: 1) make sure the story is being told in the clearest way they can find; 2) layer the maximum amount of data possible; and 3) remove just the right amount to keep things legible.

For Larry, the holy grail of information design (this won't come as a surprise to anyone working with complex data presentation challenges) is how to present multiple information dimensions within a single image without overwhelming the viewer. They've tried a couple different approaches in their posters, and (in my opinion) some work better than others. In their WWII image, chronology, geography and quantity are superimposed wonderfully. In the Everest chart though, I find it takes a while to figure out what's going on, and even then it feels like a potentially clearer presentation model is right around the corner. On the other hand, this is one of the most visually unique of all the charts -- and that intrigued me enough to take the effort to grok it.

Note: Having myself drunk the ET Kool-Aid, I was glad to hear that Larry was also inspired by Minard's iconic information display masterpiece. Even after looking at it from a million different angles, it is still the perfect chart.

visual thinking, historyshots , information visualization