Shark Angels conservation video

Eric Cheng just posted a new video from the Shark Angels, a shark protection activist group. The video shows with impressiv footage the threats that sharks face today.

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Perfect Dev Environment now with VirtualBox 2.2.0

VirtualBox 2.2.0 was released a week ago with a neat feature, that I really missed although I really like woking with VirtualBox. Now VirtualBox comes with a virtual Host interface called host-only interface, that enables the communication between the host and the guest even when no physical cable is connected to the machine, which happens a lot when you are on the road and would like to do some development.

Reference

• http://www.virtualbox.org/

Integration of Simile Timeplot into ScientificCommons

Simile Timeplot and Simile Timeline from MIT SIMILE project Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments are handy libraries to visualize time depending data.
ScientificCommons.org gathers now for more than 2 years data from several hundred repositories worldwide. That means that there is plenty of data for time series visualization. I just started to add graphs for the publication activity of each repository on the repository summary page. Here are some example pages:

• http://en.scientificcommons.org/repository/e-lis
• http://en.scientificcommons.org/repository/qut__eprints_archive

Reference

• http://simile.mit.edu/timeplot/

James Nachtwey on XDRTB:

Reknowed photojournalist James Nachtwey did a journey to document a rather unknown disease and returned with a documentary that is alarming. He has been working on the project on the thanks of a TED grant. Watch the trailer:

"XDRTB.org is an extraordinary effort to tell the story of extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB) and TB through powerful photographs taken by James Nachtwey. XDR-TB, or extremely drug-resistant tuberculosis, is a new and deadly mutation of tuberculosis. Similar in creation to multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) but more extreme in its manifestation, it arises when common tuberculosis goes untreated or standard TB drugs are misused. James’ photographs represent these varying strains. Learn more about TB, MDR-TB and XDR-TB, and learn how you can take action to stop this deadly disease."

Reference

• http://xdrtb.org/

Foresighting Color Photography

In an remarkable effort the russian photographer Prokudin-Gorskii build a camera that was able to capture three black and white images on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. He then presented these images in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system [right] involving the same three filters.
The images are now being digitalized by the library of congress for the exhibition "The empire that was Russia". For the digital process, the original tri-part glass negative is scanned with an overhead digital camera in grayscale mode. Image-editing software converts the scan of the entire plate from negative to positive form. The entire plate is then reduced to 8-bit grayscale mode. Under magnification, the quality of each image on the plate is reviewed for contrast, degree of color separation, extent of damage to the emulsion, and any other details that might affect the final color composite.
The resulting images look amazing...
 

Reference

• http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/