From: andyrose@netcom.com (San Francisco Fractal Factory)
Newsgroups: comp.graphics.visualization
Subject: Vis'92sounds_great!Where's social vis?
Date: 14 Aug 92 18:21:45 GMT
Article-I.D.: netcom.4z6mwdm.andyrose
Organization: Netcom - Online Communication Services  (408 241-9760 guest)


Vis '92 sounds great (I mean terrific).  All those cool applications for
turbulance vis and big science and everything.  Even multi-user 
distributed work environments.  Boy, people, now you really can
GET THINGS DONE.

I noted a session particularly interesting to me, that of Jeff
Bedow and Cliff Beshers on multi-variable visual analysis.  I think
this is watershed stuff and let me tell you why.  Steve Caldwell,
most able prof of sociology at Cornell, once explained to me
that he believed more can be learned from existing data (regarding
public policy, social spending, etc) than we have learned.  The censuses
from the 60s 70s 80s and 90s reveal at least a geographic shift
and economic shift in the status of aggregates.  His problem of
course was he was doing all his number crunching (regressions,
I think) on a 286.  I think he's got a 386 by now.  These are low-end
IBM PC setups, with B&W text graphics.  

Thinking of peeling away the onion of greed and corruption, I imagined
a sort of big screen display of the US with a patchwork of diversity
being shifted and colored over time to represent various motions of
groups in economics, health, incarceration, education, etc.  This
would be cool.  Imagine, some government body needs a plan (any plan)
and would really like to see what's failed before, because they 
forgot or never knew or didn't care.  There, we could have it, plain
as day, just who you are pushing around with that stick of yours (Mr.
Uncle Sam).  

I am lead to see that prison reform specifically is one way to effectively 
improve the quality of life here.  A society can be judged (got that?)
on how it treats its weak and infirm, its old, its crazy, its children,
its slaves, and its elite.  We do well for our elite here but (you know
the situation).  It is simply not enough to count on somebody to "pick
themselves up by the bootstraps" when countless times that person has been
told that they are worthless (because they are poor), stupid or worse,
lazy (because they are poor), stopped from opportunity by a bullet
or jail or drugs, and generally malnourished physically, educationally,
and emotionally.    

So how does America (pardon me, the United States) deal?  With fear,
incarceration, division, hate-education, alcohol, rape, and murder.
Not a pretty picture.  There were lots of pretty pictures in
Chicago this summer (SIGGRAPH was wonderful!) but none down SouthSide.
Vis '92 in Boston? Racial division, crack infested, but you won't see
it, you'll be inside.  NOTE: I got nothing against staying inside.  Ya'll
may actually WANT to go outside sometime, though.

Back to the subject: Visualize this; SF Bay Area 100-110,000 people
in jails and prisons.  Disproportionate representation from
minorites (indicates discrimination in sentencing? I think so),
RAMPANT drug use (indicates corruption? I think so), food waste
(hundreds of pounds of chickens thrown out daily), and no GED
(high school equivalency), no computers, no textbooks, etc.
Note also that it is my focus on SYSTEMIC problems rather than
personal.  Sure prisoners have rights not to be beat up or to
hot food or no overcrowding, but all that misses the point
which is PEOPLE ARE FREE.  Limiting people's freedom makes
them nuts.  For me it is a short road.  Other's may toil their
lives under the hand of another, perhaps without even knowing it,
and even, maybe liking it.  I mean, I take orders sure, who doesn't?

Sticky points:  Prisons are BIG business.  Enough said? 
35K for a prisoner/year?  Who's kidding who? That's more than Cornell.
  Digression: Cornell: two in a dorm room, starchy food, expensive,
  can't leave till they say so, write programs for no pay, waste food,
  rampant drug use, disproportionate representation of minorites, etc.
Guards make big bucks and may not wan't to switch jobs when the prison closes.
People are afraid and think prisons make them safer (what
they actually do is keep people scared, which they already
are).  There are some people who do not see the inequity
of limiting someone's freedom, and who are too insensitive 
to realize how limiting another's freedom limits their own.
You build a prison, you got to guard it.  You make a threat,
you got to back it up, etc.

So I would be interested in putting some hardware together for
SOCIAL VISUALIZATION.  This would kick back new methods in
data analysis for super-large social data sets i.e. Census,
including multivariate methods, C++ classes, archiving and
distribution techniques, educational programs (Video), data
collection and statistical techniques.  Areas of study would
initially focus on visualizing government spending to 
reveal the complicated history behind profligate waste.

---
Lighter side of Siggraph:
Very funny lady who writes for some Tech journal kept calling
SGI Silicon Valley Graphics.  I thought this was hilarious.  This
followed Jim Clark's vision of SGI as not "arrogant."
Bob Lucky couldn't figure out what to do with a gigabit
network, or at least how to make money from it.
Mitch Kapor showed up from somewhere in Connecticutt via
PictureTel picture phone at what had to be the best panel:
Progress Report from the Global Village, where Marc Canter spoke
of leaving MacroMind (or whatever) behind to make rock videos.
I understand this is in reference to Lofgren, Rundgren, Starr
tour.    I have to side with Kapor on the ISDN vs fiber debate.
ISDN is all you need for now, it's available, and cheaper by
FAR than this super hi-tech gigabit network which would only
be available to people who read this.

Karl Sims: greatest animator alive (!?)
Larry Yaeger presented supurb work in artificial life, neural-
network stuff, really beautiful.  I asked him if these
organisms exhibited "social" behavior, and he said he was thinking
of adding functionality so they could _pick_up_food, NOT_EAT_IT,
carry_food, and give_it_away.  I think this is great.  See
how sharing makes a community stronger (!!)

An Object-Oriented 3D Graphics Toolkit, Strauss, Carey
was TERRIFIC.  The "simple scene graph" is a hell of an idea.
Hats off to SGI Inventor group, especially Dave
Immell.  Widget-contraption-gadget-thingamajig-etc.  The object oriented
thing is cool to talk about.  About that: OOD is easy if
you remember that every child must have a sibling.  It's
like my second grade teacher telling me that a subheading
of an outline entry must have a companion or the concept
needn't be seperate from the heading.  So if you design a 
class which inherits from a base class, see if you can design
an "alternative" class which also inherits from the bass class
but is different from the one you are making.  If you can't,
modify the bass class.  This will keep your trees healthy.
Computing (to use a cognitive metaphor) the "alternative"
is also an incredible memory trick.  Enough said.

Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz really is a living fractal :}

Kajiya, Snyder, Generative Modeling: A Symbolic System
for Geometric Modeling, was great as was Brown U. Using
Deformations to Explore 3D Widget Design.  Now that's the way things
ought to work.


Through the Lens Camera Control, Gleicher and Witkin
CMU is awesome.  Every animation package should have this.

Witkin, Baraff, Dynamic Simulation of Non-penetrating Flexible
Bodies was some serious jello for sure (dude).

The hair and clothing stuff was really good.  Especially the
muscle contractions re: Marilyn Monroe's calves, thighs, etc.

Wavefront clearly had the best booth, especially the cappacino
(sp?) and espresso.  IPA (Independent Producers Assoc) threw
a great party for the Wavefront gang.  SoftImage had a cool
body suit demo where an actor (real human) was inputting
PreView channels by walking around.  Should make character
animation much cheaper (in time) and more prevalent.

Best new product to the guys from MIT with the spinning
circuit board covered with LEDs.  The display was synchronized
to the RPMs so an apparent 3D volume was displayed.  You
could walk around the box and see all sides.  Major cool.  They
said RGB triples in two years.  They've built a 60" board
which shakes a lot.  Maybe they should look into a fuzzy logic
vibration damping system.

The movie was great, words don't do justice.  

There were some fractals going around, but none of the 
quality.  MandelSplat was funny.  This was a zoom into the
set with motorcycle sound track until the "resolution wall"
is hit.  UCSD.


OK.  Have a nice day. 
-- 
Andrew Rose andyrose@netcom.com FAX 4155537756 When peace rules the planet