Four short links: 8 January 2010

Healthcare Data, GNU Econometrics Library, Visualizing Changes, View Source Under Attack

  1. Testing, Testing — at the end of an interesting article on health care reform comes this: The poverty of our health-care information is an embarrassment. At the end of each month, we have county-by-county data on unemployment, and we have prompt and detailed data on the price of goods and commodities; we can use these indicators to guide our economic policies. But try to look up information on your community’s medical costs and utilization—or simply try to find out how many people died from heart attacks or pneumonia or surgical complications—and you will discover that the most recent data are at least three years old, if they exist at all, and aren’t broken down to a county level that communities can learn from. It’s like driving a car with a speedometer that tells you only how fast all cars were driving, on average, three years ago.. (via auchmill on Twitter)
  2. Gretl: The GNU Regression, Econometrics, and Time-Series Library — GPLed cross-platform software package for econometric analysis, written in the C programming language. (via Hacker News)
  3. 11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time (Flowing Data) — just what it says. (via mattb on Delicious)
  4. View Source is Good? Discuss (Alex Russell) — fantastic post, mandatory reading. View-source was necessary (but not sufficient) to make HTML the dominant application platform of our times. I also hold that it is under attack — not least of all from within — and that losing view-source poses a significant danger to the overall health of the web.
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