Distorting election results ...

The states are colored red or blue to indicate the majority of their voters that voted for Republican John McCain or Democrat Barack Obama. Looking at the map it would seem that the Republicans won when, as we all know, Barack Obama is our President. The error in the map is that is does not account for population density. The Blue Areas may be smaller, but it accounts for a much larger size in population density.

Using a cartogram (right)the map distorts to take into account the population density as well. Now the acreage of the physical space is no longer valid and is replaced with population size.

Music From the Brain

There is a new computer program which lets your brain turn a MRI machine into a musical instrument. The program assigns notes to an active region of the cortex.

A MRI can be used to track changes in brain activity by lighting up in different colors and intensities as the brain processes information. By assigning each area of the brain a note, and each level of intensity a volume allows the data derived from the brain to produce music. A computer analyzes the movements of the functional MRI's and creating musical pieces that correspond to the changes.

Schizophrenic Brains Meets Beethoven

During the work of philosopher Dan Lloyd, he discovered that scans of patients with dementia and schizophrenia make audibly different music than those of people with normal brains. People with dementia have more erratic rhythms and less bright notes, while people with schizophrenia have more complex patterns in the music created by their brains.

NASA - Sea Surface Temperature

Sea surface temperatures give scientist information about ocean currents, climate, climate change, and how a hurricane may evolve. NASA has their own website that has frequent updates on the ocean temperatures. There are two primary types of sea surface temperature data thata NASA scientists use:

- actual temperature readings from the oceans surface.

- sea surface temperature anomaly.

The color graphics that are shown at the left are generated from data collected from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E). This data is plays a vital role for climatologist to monitor and forecast hurricanes. And to forecast the frequency and intensity of hurricanes in all oceans.

Ocean Gravity Map

The surface of the ocean bulges outward and inward mimicking the topography of the ocean floor. The bumps, too small to be seen, can be measured by a radar altimeter aboard a satellite. Over the past year, data collected by the European Space Agency ERS-1 altimeter along with recently declassified data from the US Navy Geosat altimeter have provided detailed measurements of sea surface height over the oceans. These data provide the first view of the ocean floor structures in many remote areas of the Earth. For scientific applications, the Geosat and ERS-1 altimeter data are comparable in value to the radar altimeter data recently collected by the Magellan spacecraft during its systematic mapping of Venus.

LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging)

Imaging and mapping models today are formed from amalgams of radar images, yet a more advanced technology does exist. LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) utilizes shorter wavelengths of light than typical radar pulses such that it is more sensitive to dissipated objects like clouds and gases. LiDAR is highly effective on all terrain, and its application can be seen in forming image and data models from bathymetric charts to above-sea terrain mapping, to atmospheric and meteorological research. A brief sampling of our capabilities includes geodatabase design, field mapping, spatial modeling, and web-based mapping.

ColorMap

A colormap is an m-by-3 matrix of real numbers between 0.0 and 1.0. Each row is an RGB vector that defines one color. The kth row of the colormap defines the kth color, where map(k,:) = [r(k) g(k) b(k)]) specifies the intensity of red, green, and blue.

colormap(map) sets the colormap to the matrix map. If any values in map are outside the interval [0 1], you receive the error Colormap must have values in [0,1].

colormap('default') sets the current colormap to the default colormap.

cmap = colormap retrieves the current colormap. The values returned are in the interval [0 1].

colormap(ax,...) uses the figure corresponding to axes ax instead of the current figure.

Essentially, colormap uses colors to map z-axis information - if the x and y-axes are assumed to be in their traditional orientation. The image above is a fuel map utilizing the "jet" colormap. What I find interesting is the use of color to show information in two dimensions that actually represents three dimensions in real-world testing. Colormap is interesting in its flexibility and breadth of data-set representations.