If you are from The Netherlands, you might recognize this location?
Check out the github page for more information about the technique.
An Idea for Better Healthcare: Less Typing
I’m going to expand this post and this idea later on.
The basic idea is simple and very much inspired by Siri. I was very skeptical when I first heard about it. When I actually received an iPhone 4S and tried it myself, I was instantly sold. This is a game changer.
Because I’m simultaneously a software developer and a nurse (in training), I’ve been amazed several times by the depressing state of affairs regarding IT and automation in the hospital where I’m an intern. It’s so bad that most of the IT is still ‘shadowed’ on paper, simply because it’s not a trustworthy system: gruesome usability and interaction design, making stuff disappear for no reason, random disconnects, Citrix horror stories… ‘Welcome back in 1998’, was my first thought when I started the first day of internship here.
At one moment I found myself sitting in the nurses room with five other nurses, all fighting with their computers. Then it became really obvious: There’s more computer work going than at my other job in software development!
Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if things ‘just worked’ like in the visualization above? Automation and IT should make work easier, costs lower and quality higher, all in favor of the patients, right? Typing all day and fighting antique Windows systems doesn’t help, at all. Let’s restart IT in healthcare and restart innovating. Start with my idea above please ;)
End of March Linkdump
Perpetual Ocean
Perpetual Ocean shows ocean surface currents around the world during the period from June 2005 through Decmeber 2007. The visualization does not include a narration or annotations; the goal was to use ocean flow data to create a simple, visceral experience.
Elastic Search
Elastic Search is an opensource, distributed, RESTful searchengine on top of Apache Lucene. See Github.
QGIS basics for journalists
From the Knight Digital Media Center comes this excellent QGIS walkthrough. It covers projections, vector maps, simplification, analysis, exporting and some more.
Another interesting tutorial is this one on how to use Google Refine to export arbitrary data to JSON.
Raphael.js and D3.js used to visualize Global Agenda Survey 2011
Global Agenda Survey 2011 was built with Raphael.js and D3.js.
Inkscape and D3.js
D3.js and Inkscape are a powerful information visualization couple, and this tutorial explains some details of how to integrate them into a workflow.
Big-ish Data with node.js, SQLite, Redis and Polymaps
A presentation by Tom MacWright about using node.js, SQLite, Redis and Polymaps.
SQL.js
Not sure if I’ve covered this before but SQL.js is SQLite ported to Javascript using Emscriptem. Check out the demo.
Javascript Shapefile-to-GeoJSON
Convert Shapefiles and DBF to GeoJSON using JavaScript
This project allows a user to load Shapefiles and DBFs into the browser with JavaScript. Outputs as GeoJSON for use with other Mapping APIs such as OpenLayers.