Visualizing the Senate social graph, revisited

How the addition of animation and interactivity improved a visualization.

"Beautiful Visualization" releases in print next week. In putting together the book, Julie Steele and Noah Iliinsky asked a range of visualization experts like Nick Bilton, Fernanda Viega and Martin Wattenberg, as well as enthusiasts (like me), to critique a visualization they'd created.

My chapter, which was inspired by Chris Wilson's article The Senate Social Network, uses graph visualization and data from govtrack.us to show how voting patterns in the U.S. Senate have evolved since 1991. For example, one of the most stark revelations in the visualization is the way that cross-party voting (as Wilson defined it, which was when two Senators voted together across a session over 65% of the time) completely disappears during the 104th session (the period of the so called "Republican Revolution").

While this isn't exactly unexpected, it was fascinating to see how clearly these events are reflected in the visualization. The structure of the graph went from a fairly oblong shape with many cross connections between parties to two completely separate, tight party clusters. This Ignite presentation describes the key findings in more detail:

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From Apache to Health and Human Services

Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf discusses the CONNECT health data project.

Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache web server project and the CollabNet cooperative software development company, is contracting now with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on the CONNECT software project. CONNECT helps hospitals and agencies exchange medical data, which gives doctors critical information to improve patient care.

Behlendorf, along with project leader David Riley, will speak at OSCON about the importance of CONNECT and the way they and their colleagues built a robust community of government staff, volunteers, and healthcare IT vendors around it.

Behlendorf discusses the following in this 18-minute podcast:

• The role of health data in promoting quality care, in improving our knowledge of what works, and in reducing healthcare costs.
• How HHS is trying to improve the exchange of patient data for hospitals and doctors, agencies monitoring quality of care, and eventually patients themselves.
• How, with Behlendorf's help, HHS opened up the CONNECT project, attracted both volunteers and vendors to improve it, and created a community with a sense of ownership.

Four short links: 17 June 2010

Statistical Jeopardy Wins, Mobile Taxonomy, Geodata Mystery, and Machine Learning Blog

1. What is IBM's Watson? (NY Times) -- IBM joining the big data machine learning race, and hatching a Blue Gene system that can answer Jeopardy questions. Does good, not great, and is getting better.
2. Google Lays Out its Mobile Strategy (InformationWeek) -- notable to me for Rechis said that Google breaks down mobile users into three behavior groups: A. "Repetitive now" B. "Bored now" C. "Urgent now", a useful way to look at it. (via Tim)
3. BP GIS and the Mysteriously Vanishing Letter -- intrigue in the geodata world. This post makes it sound as though cleanup data is going into a box behind BP's firewall, and the folks who said "um, the government should be the depot, because it needs to know it has a guaranteed-untampered and guaranteed-able-to-access copy of this data" were fired. For more info, including on the data that is available, see the geowanking thread.
4. Streamhacker -- a blog talking about text mining and other good things, with nltk code you can run. (via heraldxchaos on Delicious)

NASA technology leads to better medical decisions

NASA's Chris Mattmann discusses object-oriented data and health IT.

Can a data-sharing technology developed at NASA'S Jet Propulsion Laboratory create better outcomes for medicine?

In fact, it already is.

In this podcast, Chris Mattmann, a senior computer scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks with me about objected-oriented data technology (OODT) and health IT.

Mattman dives in to the following questions:

• What is object-oriented data technology (OODT) and how does it relate to health IT?
• How did NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory get involved with applying OODT to health IT?
• What's it been like for a NASA project to work within the Apache Incubator and the open source community?
• What is the Virtual Pediatric Intensive Care Unit?
• How will data-driven tools help doctors, researchers and patients make better medical decisions?

Chris Mattmann will speak about grid software and healthcare IT in the health track at next month's OSCON conference.

Four short links: 16 June 2010

Consulting, Idea-Gathering, Understanding Git, and Javascript Libraries

1. So You Want to Be A Consultant -- absolutely spot-on tips for understanding the true business of a consultant. (via Hacker News)
2. BBYIDX -- a free and open source idea-gathering application written in Ruby, [...] the basis of the Best Buy IdeaX website.
3. The Git Parable -- The following parable will take you on a journey through the creation of a Git-like system from the ground up. Understanding the concepts presented here will be the most valuable thing you can do to prepare yourself to harness the full power of Git. The concepts themselves are quite simple, but allow for an amazing wealth of functionality to spring into existence. (via Pete Warden)
4. Ext JS + jQTouch + Raphael = Sencha -- merging some touch and rich graphics libraries and developers. We’re setting up a foundation called Sencha Labs that will hold the copyright and trademarks for all the non-commercial projects affiliated with Sencha. Our license of choice for these projects is, and will continue to be, the MIT license. We will fund maintainers for our non-commercial projects with contributions from Sencha and the communities of these projects. (via bjepson on Twitter)

Gov 2.0 Hero Day

A tip of the hat to GovFresh founder Luke Fretwell.

June 15 is Gov 2.0 Hero Day and I'm using it to highlight the work of GovFresh founder Luke Fretwell. Luke started GovFresh a little more than a year ago, and his passion for open government has been a driving force in the Gov 2.0 world.

Luke has been adept at using social media to highlight the progress of the Government 2.0 movement. Now, he's using those same social media skills to promote Gov 2.0 Hero Day on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. The idea has certainly caught on, with folks from Australia to Washington D.C. to Europe recognizing the heroes of open government.

My hero this year is Luke himself. He's toiled quietly, and he's shown us all that by following our passions and working on things that matter, we can make a difference in our world.

Watch below as Luke tells a bit of his story.

Four short links: 15 June 2010

Bookmarking, Open Notebook Science, Starbucks, and Documentation

1. On Bookmarking: Dogears and Marginalia -- asking the question "how do you bookmark in real life?". I'm interested because I have recently begun obsessively collecting the good quotes and references from books I read, thanks to Amazon Kindle app's highlights. (via titine on Delicious)
2. Systems for Open Electronic Lab Notebooks -- question from a very respected scientist (Jonathan Eisen, king of the phylogenetic tree and "phylogenomics" on Twitter) about tools and software for open lab notebooks. Turns out it's by no means a solved problem, so a good hacker working with such a lab could do some good things for science.
3. Starbucks, Wifi, Paid Content (ReadWriteWeb) -- Starbucks announced free wifi, from which customers can access content they'd otherwise have to pay for (e.g., WSJ). Interesting to me for several reasons: libraries also offer access to information you'd otherwise not have access to; and Starbucks are turning the physical store into a virtual one as well.
4. Writing Great Documentation (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- it's all true, read it and write.

A constellation you should know

A look at Chicago's i.c.stars educational program.

This blog post has been sitting on my computer’s desktop for a few weeks now.... I’m finally getting around to telling you about a great week I had at the end of May. It started off with a brief trip to Northern California with stops at Dale’s amazing Maker Faire (equally impressive were his sprinting skills as he leapt into action when a tent nearly blew over), various technology companies and a local high school to visit friends and business colleagues. I even had the opportunity to meet my fellow Edu 2.0 bloggers, Betsy and Marie, for an Afghani dinner and conversation before heading back to Chicago on a red-eye flight. I left Silicon Valley, inspired as always by innovation and ideas, and admittedly, a little envious of general Northern California life.

At the end of that week, though, I had an experience that made me realize that there’s innovation happening in my Chicago backyard, too. Invited by executive director Sandee Kastrul, I participated in a weekly high tea ritual at i.c.stars, a work force readiness program that prepares young people for IT careers in business. My subsequent visit really got me thinking about how we’re supporting adults’ education needs.

I first met Sandee this spring when we both were presenters for a TEDx event at the National School Boards Association Conference in Chicago. As a former science classroom teacher with a background in theatre, Sandee artfully told the compelling story of her journey to create i.c.stars. She basically started her organization after seeing the limited opportunities her high school students upon graduation. Call me jaded, but I’ve grown skeptical of educational programs in general as some seem to pay lip service to notions about affecting change. I was intrigued Sandee’s story, and when she consequently invited me to high tea at i.c.stars, I saw this as an opportunity to see if her work was the real deal.

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Four short links: 14 June 2010

Open Data, Open PCR, Open Sara Winge, and Open Source Big Graph Mining

1. Learning from Libraries: the Literacy Challenge of Open Data (David Eaves) -- a powerful continuation of the theme from my Rethinking Open Data post. David observes that dumping data over the fence isn't enough, we must help citizens engage. We have a model for that help, in the form of libraries: We didn’t build libraries for an already literate citizenry. We built libraries to help citizens become literate. Today we build open data portals not because we have a data or public policy literate citizenry, we build them so that citizens may become literate in data, visualization, coding and public policy.
2. OpenPCR on Kickstarter -- In 1983, Kary Mullis first developed PCR, for which he later received a Nobel Prize. But the tool is still expensive, even though the technology is almost 30 years old. If computing grew at the same pace, we would all still be paying $2,000+ for a 1 MHz Apple II computer. Innovation in biotech needs a kick start!
3. Wingeing It -- profile of O'Reilly's wonderful Sara Winge by the ever fabulous Quinn Norton.
4. PEGASUS -- petascale graph mining toolkit from CMU. See their most recent publication. (via univerself on Delicious)

Makers versus Sponges

School tech should start with a simple question: Will students absorb others' ideas or make their own?

The rumbling debate over whether technology helps or hurts us -- and our kids -- is growing louder. The ever articulate writer, Nicholas Carr, stoked debate with his new book, "The Shallows." (Yes, he believes, Google makes you dumb.) Last Monday, the New York Times worried that technology may be reshaping our brains. Also last week, neurobiologist Steven Pinker weighed in on the New York Times op-ed pages today with a piece that waves away those concerns. (Everything rewires our brains, he notes.) If that seems like too many quick links, the New York Times' Bits blog recaps some of the debate here.

On the education side, the Washington Post took theses questions to the classroom in a piece entitled, "Some educators question if whiteboards, other high-tech tools raise achievement."

I keep wondering why we lump all "technology" into the same basket. By doing so, we ignore the most important distinction of all: whether we are sponges for absorbing other people's ideas, or whether we're making our own.

O'Reilly has long been a champion of the "Maker" movement so perhaps this amounts to singing to the choir. But here's one slice through the technologies organized according to their potential relationship to kids:

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Gov 2.0 Week in Review

Closing the IT gap, looking back at PDF, considering cloud computing and looking ahead to DC Week.

As usual, there's no shortage of news in the government 2.0 world. There has been one watershed event since our last Gov 2.0 Week in Review, however: the early results of the decision to open up community health data. Here come the healthcare apps. Will the Department of Health and Human Services make community health information as useful as weather data? Will the innovation and associated business value match that unlocked by GPS and NOAA weather data?

An even more pressing question is whether information technology can help close the yawning gap in federal and state government budgets. "Budget director Peter Orszag's speech, Closing the IT Gap, explains what we're about with Gov 2.0 Events," tweeted Tim O'Reilly earlier this week. Peter R. Orszag, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, spoke at length at the Center for American Progress on a "significant IT gap" that has developed between the public and private sector. Orzag cited this IT gap as a big part of the productivity divide between the two.

"Closing this IT gap is key to boost efficiency and make government more open and responsive to the wants and needs of the public," wrote Orzag at WhiteHouse.gov, where he linked to budget guidance for agencies and a memo that instructs them to identify "their bottom 5 percent performing programs."

One of the ways that the federal government plans to save some taxpayer dollars will be through data center consolidation. Another will be through bread and butter IT, like the green data center in the House of Representatives that I reported on last year. A third will likely be cloud computing, given the millions that Los Angeles saved in IT costs or estimated $750,000 saved though moving Recovery.gov to Amazon's cloud, though serious questions will persist about what government sites or services can be moved to public clouds. A new European Union project on economic effects of open government data may shed light upon whether that approach offers cost savings as well.

More on the past week, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum and Twitter in government, after the jump.

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European Union starts project about economic effects of open government data

Earlier this week I talked to writer and open source advocate Marco Fioretti, who has just announced the start of a study on open data for the European Union. Fioretti is a long-time supporter of open source software, which he wrote about in a chapter of the O'Reilly book Open Government. Fioretti also held a seminar about open and prorietary formats at Pisa's Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, a major European college in the field of economics.

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Recent Posts

• Here come the healthcare apps | by Alex Howard on June 11, 2010
• Four short links: 11 June 2010 | by Nat Torkington on June 11, 2010
• Can privacy, social media and business get along? | by Mac Slocum on June 10, 2010
• Four short links: 10 June 2010 | by Nat Torkington on June 10, 2010
• Streamlining craft in digital video | by Jim Stogdill on June 9, 2010
• Cloud computing saves L.A. millions in IT costs | by Alex Howard on June 9, 2010
• Four short links: 9 June 2010 | by Nat Torkington on June 9, 2010
• Should the U.S. support Internet freedom through technology? | by Alex Howard on June 8, 2010
• Technology for Internet freedom and innovation at the State Department | by Alex Howard on June 8, 2010
• Don't get stuck in Edu 2010 | by Marie Bjerede on June 8, 2010
• Four short links: 8 June 2010 | by Nat Torkington on June 8, 2010
• Ignite NYC IX This Wednesday, 6/9 | by Brady Forrest on June 7, 2010