Take Advantage of Web-Based Tools to Present Complex Data

/ Katja Reuter

Research to Action published a great overview article that highlights an “ever-growing open-data source for development statistics in the fields of economics, healthcare, education, social science, technology,” and more.

Including data and statistics within research findings can enhance their impact, however, large tables or spreadsheets of numbers take time to decipher and sometimes the true meaning behind the data itself can be misinterpreted.

Here are some of the tools that the article points out:

  • StatPlanet: browser-based interactive data visualization and mapping application to create a wide range of visualizations, from simple Flash maps to more advanced infogrpahics.
  • Xtimeline:  to create your own timelines of data.
  • Gap Minder: to upload data and create an interactive motion charts and graphs.
  • Creately:  to use Online Diagramming software – purpose built for team collaboration.
  • Google Chart Tools: lets you include constantly changing research data sourced online. Google has also released Fusion Tables where you can share, discuss and track your charts and graphs with specific people online.
  • Tagcrowd: to upload texts and highlight the most common concepts. The clouds can be exported as images and inserted in a website or power point presentation.
  • Wordle: similar to tagcloud; lets you create images out of key phrases and words relevant to your research, great for using in PowerPoint presentations.
  • Tableau: a free Windows-only software for creating colourful data visualisations.

View all and read the original article

Open data projects should start with user needs

/ Anirvan Chatterjee

Open data projects need to cross a utility/relevance chasm before they gain uptake. Tom Steinberg of MySociety, a prominent UK civic app development team, argues that app contests and hack days aren’t enough—you need to focus on concrete projects, laser-focused on real user needs.

Why is a user focus critical?

“What people never, ever do is wake up thinking, ‘Today I need to do something civic,’ or, ‘Today I will explore some interesting data via an attractive visualisation.’ MySociety has always been unashamed about packaging civic services in a way that appeals directly to real people with real, everyday needs. I gleefully delete the two or three emails a year that land in our inbox suggesting that FixMyStreet should be renamed to FixOurStreet. No, dude, when I’m pissed it’s definitely my street, which is why people have borrowed the name around the world.

“We learned this lesson most vividly from Pledgebank, a sputtering site with occasional amazing successes and lots and lots of “meh.” The reason it never took off was because, unlike the later (and brilliant) Kickstarter, we didn’t make it specific enough. We didn’t say “use this site to raise money for your first album,” or “use this site to organise a march.” We said it was a platform for “getting things done,” and the users walked away in confusion. That’s why our new site is called FixMyTransport, even though it’s actually the first instance of a general civic-problem-fixing platform that could handle nearly any kind of local campaigning.”

That might mean, Tom argues, that it makes sense to bet bigger on fewer horses:

“MySociety got lucky…its second ever grant was for…about a quarter of a million dollars. It was amazing luck for a small organisation with no track record…Those days are gone…but governments everywhere should note that that funding of this scale got us right through our first couple of years, until sites like WriteToThem were mature and had proved their public value (and picked up an award or two).

“In the subsequent few years, we saw the ‘thousand flowers bloom’ mentality really take over the world of public-good digital funding, and we saw it go way beyond what was sensible. Time and again, we’d see two good ideas get funding and eight bad ones at the same time because of the sense that it was necessary to spread the money around. It would be great if someone could make the case to public grant funders that good tech ideas — and the teams that can implement them — are vanishingly rare. There is nothing to be ashamed about dividing the pot up two or three ways if there are only a few ideas or proposals or hacks that justify the money. The larger amounts this would produce wouldn’t mean champagne parties for grantees, it would mean the best ideas surviving long enough to grow meaningful traffic and learn how to make money other ways. After a long road supported by public grant funding, mySociety is now 50% commercially funded and 50% private-grant funded, but we’d never have arrived there without being 100% public-grant funded for the first couple of years.” (source)

Read more:

How to run a hack day

/ Anirvan Chatterjee / 1 Comment
Science Hack Day San Francisco

Science Hack Day San Francisco 2010

We’re considering running a half-day event for campus developers and webmaster to learn about and tinker with UCSF Profiles’ open APIs and OpenSocial development platform. Whether you call it a hack day, a hackathon, a code-a-thon, or a developer day, the idea’s the same—bringing together technologists to learn, experiment, create, and share.

So how do you run a hack day? Here are some essential hackathon to-dos from my friend Sumana Harihareswara, based on work done for the Wikimedia Foundation:

  • A public wiki page stating the date, time, and venue, and specifying that everyone is welcome. Also tell people what to bring (laptop and power cord), ask them for topic ideas, and ask them to put their names down — no obligation.
  • Outreach/publicity drive, starting at least six weeks in advance, to relevant communities. Ideally you’d get the word out to technical interest groups, local user groups, consultants and other businesses in the industry, individuals whom you want to attend, professors and colleges and universities and technical schools and trainers, email lists, and (if relevant to your audience) newspapers.
  • Some experienced developers. I don’t know the exact ratio, but perhaps a fifth of your participants should be people who have had some experience in developing Wikimedia/MediaWiki stuff, loosely defined. You need some seeds.
  • Documentation tools & some people who will take notes with them (more below).
  • Lightweight tracking. At some point, somehow, at the event, get every participant’s name and email address. That way you can follow up and continue encouraging them after the event.

Because this would be our first time sharing our UCSF Profiles APIs with a wide internal audience, we’ll also need to get our own house in order, to make sure we’re ready to share:

  • Document every API that will be presented, and ensure that it’s comprehensible to our target audience
  • Develop sample “hello world” applications, so our audience can get started quickly, and pull apart working examples
  • Finalize policies around API licensing and data reuse, so developers aren’t left in the lurch if they want to build on our work

Read more:

Too many websites?

/ Anirvan Chatterjee / 2 Comments

Sometimes it feels like UCSF has way too many separate websites, but we’re not the only ones with that problem. The US federal government’s .gov Task Force has identified 1,759 distinct federal websites, most operating under the .gov domain. The .gov Task Force is cracking down on confusing duplicative content, e.g. www.invasivespecies.gov and www.invasivespeciesinfo.gov, or redundant websites like www.centennialofflight.gov, untouched since 2003.

How are they dealing with out-of-control namespace and content?

  • there’s now a freeze on the issuance of new executive branch .gov domains, up till the end of 2011
  • 25% of executive branch .gov domain websites must be eliminated or redirected by the end of September 2011
  • 50% of executive branch .gov domain websites must be eliminated or redirectd by July 2012

Harsh, but effective.

Read more:

How to analyze internal site search stats

/ Anirvan Chatterjee / 1 Comment


Web analytics guru Avinash Kaushik outlines a five-step process to understand data about internal search engine usage on A List Apart.

Why is this important?

“Now when people show up at a website, many of them ignore our lovingly crafted navigational elements and jump to the site search box.…All the search and clickstream data you have (from Google Analytics, Omniture, WebTrends, etc.) is missing one key ingredient: Customer intent. You have all the clicks, the pages people viewed, and where they bailed, but not why people came to the site, except where your referral logs contain information from search engines. For example, you can look at the “top ten pages viewed” report in your web analytics tool and know what people saw, but how do you know what they wanted to see? Your internal site-search data contains that missing ingredient: intent. Internal search queries contain, in your customers’ own words, what they want and why they’re there. Once you understand intent, you can easily figure out whether your website has the content your users need, and, if it does, where they can actually find it.”

Read more:

Health 2.0 code-a-thons in DC, SF

/ Anirvan Chatterjee

Andy Oram writes about his first Health 2.0 code-a-thon, held in Washington, DC. He discusses the setup, and how five teams of biomedical health technologists competed to build a quick and dirty system over the course of a day. The winning project:

“Team Avanade, the quietly intense team whose activity was totally opaque to me, pulled off a stunningly deft feat of programming. They are trying to improve patient compliance by using SMS text messaging to help the patient stay in contact with the physician and remain conscious of his own role in his treatment. A patient registers his cell phone number (or is registered by his doctor) and can then enter relevant information, such as a daily glucose reading, which the tool displays in a graph.”

There will be a Health 2.0 code-a-thon in San Francisco September 24-25. Anyone interested?

Read more:

Mining internal search engine data

/ Anirvan Chatterjee

We do some limited of search terms on CTSI web properties, but this is a big gap, per user experience author Lou Rosenfeld in his new book Search Analytics for Your Site. Rosenfeld’s the author of the seminal Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, so when he speaks, I tend to pay attention. An interview in O’Reilly Radar digs into the details of what analyzing search data in internal search engines and systems:

“[Site search isn’t] necessarily overlooked by users, but definitely by site owners who assume it’s a simple application that gets set up and left alone. But the search engine is only one piece of a much larger puzzle that includes the design of the search interface and the results themselves, as well as content and tagging. So search requires ongoing testing and tuning to ensure that it will actually work.

“[Site search analytics Does SSA reveal user intent better than other forms of analytics?
I think so, as the data is far more semantically rich. While you might learn something about users’ information needs by analyzing their navigational paths, you’d be guessing far less if you studied what they’d actually searched for. Again, site search data is the best example of users telling us what they want in their own words. Site search analytics is a great tool for closing this feedback loop. Without it, the dialog between our users and ourselves — via our sites — is broken.”

Read more:

Mayo Clinic Finds Social Media Valuable Tool to Recruit Study Participants for Rare Diseases

/ Katja Reuter

Recently, a researcher told me that he’d be interested in learning more about using social media and networking sites to recruit participants for research studies. Here is an example that the Mayo Clinic shared this week.

Through patient-run websites dedicated to heart conditions and women’s heart health, a team of cardiologists is reaching out to survivors of spontaneous coronary artery dissection, also known as SCAD, a poorly understood heart condition that affects just a few thousand Americans every year.

The study landed 18 participants in less than a week, six more than could participate in this pilot of 12 patients. The remaining volunteers are eligible to participate in a new, larger study based on the initial study’s success.

The new research seeks patients through conventional and social media outlets and aims to build a virtual registry and DNA biobank of up to 400 SCAD survivors and their relatives. The database will help physicians conduct more detailed analyses of treatment strategies and factors that affect prognosis and better understand the possible genetic basis of some SCAD cases.

“Patient leadership in this is huge,” says study co-author Lee Aase, director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Social Media. “Designing research protocols to study rare diseases and then recruiting enough patients to participate is extremely difficult for busy physicians, but patients with rare diseases are highly motivated to see research happen.”

Keep reading

Is outsourcing experiments “the future of research”?

/ John Daigre / 1 Comment

Palo Alto-based Science Exchange, which bills itself as “an online marketplace for science experiments”, thinks so.

According to their website: “Our goal is to make it easier for researchers to access core resources across institutions. Our first product, ScienceExchange.com brings together research scientists looking to outsource experiments with other scientists at core facilities of major research universities who have the capacity to conduct the experiments. By dealing with all the paying/billing administration, quality assurance and dispute resolution, ScienceExchange.com makes outsourcing experiments easy.”

Algorithms for diagnosis

/ Anirvan Chatterjee

According to O’Reilly Radar, Predictive Medical Systems is touting algorithms it has developed which can reportedly predict cardiac arrest and respiratory failure in an ICU setting, based on analysis of electronic medical record data. They’re currently running a validation trial, and working towards a formal FDA trial.

Read more: