Here’s a sample of a few of the speakers that will be on hand:

• Vaibhav Bhandari from Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group. Vaibhav is going to be talking about HealthVault, medical ontologies, and untangling the various HealthCare IT standards.
• John Brownstein from Harvard Children’s Hospital. John is an epidemiologist who has studied diseases as varied as malaria, dengue, HIV, West Nile virus, Lyme disease, RSV and influenza. He’s going to be speaking about his work with HealthMap, a site that brings together a variety of data to provide a comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health.
• Greg Borenstein from NYU’s ITP school. He’s going to be talking about how to hack the Kinect using Processing and Open Frameworks, and how it can be applied to health.
• John Luciani from Wiblock. John is going to be walking through how to use the various goodies MAKE is supplying for the event: arduinos, sensor, modules, and so forth. He’s also got some code demos teams can use for their projects.
• Far McKon from Bug Labs. Far is bringing some really cool gear — 5 complete bug bundles. The heart of the kit it is the ‘Bug Base’ which has built in wifi, bluetooth, and battery. Each kit has a general IO module (the Von Hippel), GPS, and a camera + accelerometer module. And sample code to use all of them, naturally.

Huge thanks to the MAKE team (particularly Dan Woods at the Maker Shed), Microsoft, and Bug Labs for their support for the event.

As a teaser, check out Greg’s demonstration code that uses OSCeleton Processing MotionCapture3D to convert data from the Kinect into 3D coordinates representing each of the joints of the body.

Kinect and OSCeleton controlling a camera in 3D space in Processing from Greg Borenstein on Vimeo.

He’s written the project up on Skeleton Tracking with Kinect and Processing, and posted the code on github as controlling a 3d camera via gestures with kinect in Processing. His talk about the demo, and his assistance in getting teams set up, should be the basis for a lot of fun projects.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

The day will bring together developers, designers, researchers, care providers, patients, and anyone else interested in improving healthcare by building new applications and tools.

Here’s a sampling of some of the open challenges that have been submitted by public and private organization (you can see the full list at the challenge site):

• WWHI / VAi2 Veterans Health Wireless Innovation Challenge. Issued by the West Wireless Health Institute and VAi2, the challenge is to design a wireless device or application targeting a problem specific to the Department of Veterans Affairs regarding care for our veteran population.
• Enabling Community Use of Data for Cancer Prevention and Control. Issued by the National Cancer Institute, the challenge is to use data available through the NCI to prototype web and/or mobile communication technology applications to enable communities use of population data for cancer prevention and control.
• Food Find: Putting Healthy Food Choices in the Path of Everyday Life. Sponsored by the American Heart Association, the challenge is to design applications to help communities put healthy food choices in the path of everyday life.

To support this great cause, O’Reilly’s Maker Media division will be co-sponsoring the Boston event by bringing some open source hardware (Arduinos, sensors, etc), experts, and maybe even a Kinect or two to the teams participating in the Veterans Health Wireless Innovation Challenge. (More details to come as we get closer to the event.)

Strata: Making Data Work, being held Feb. 1-3, 2011 in Santa Clara, Calif., will focus on the business and practice of data. The conference will provide three days of training, breakout sessions, and plenary discussions — along with an Executive Summit, a Sponsor Pavilion, and other events showcasing the new data ecosystem.

Save 30% off registration with the code STR11RAD

I recently caught up with Indu Subaiya (@bluetopaz), the co-founder of Health 2.0 and the director of the developer challenge, to ask a few questions about code-a-thons and data (Indu is also speaking on the Healthcare and Medicine panel at Strata).

Why should developers care about health and health care?

Indu Subaiya: I think there’s a unique opportunity now with light-weight, cloud-based tools
and people getting more and more engaged with self-tracking and wanting to
play an active role in their own health to really make a difference.
Technology in health care is ripe for disruption — while things are getting
better, the state of play is stuff that’s still too clunky, expensive and
designed with no sentient being in mind! Also, now more than ever, you
don’t have to be from the business to build something that’s going to make
sense for users, because health is everyone’s business.

Walk us through a typical code-a-thon. What should someone expect?

Indu Subaiya: You roll in not too early — a healthy breakfast is laid out by 8:30, but you can
filter in by 9:00/9:30. Maybe you come with some concrete ideas or maybe
you’re a blank slate and just curious. People with ideas will pitch them
informally to the group. past codeathons have generated about a dozen ideas
in the morning. E.g., “I want to build a mobile app that reminds me to take
my meds” or “I’m really interested in helping track my weight or what I
eat.” Those get written up on a pieces of paper hanging around the room and
people sign up and join groups based on their interest.

You meet with your group and start brainstorming and planning. You might draw sketches, make wireframes, if you’re lucky, recruit a graphics or UI designer, you might
start perusing the datasets that have been made available, and soon you’ll
start coding. The room gets pretty quiet actually. It’s a sea of laptops and
whiteboards. We provide lunch and snacks, coffee, juice … so you can take
frequent breaks. And in one corner of the room, there are a series of 15-20
minute talks going on: people sharing APIs, giving an overview of a dataset
or sharing some specialized technical or design knowledge. By about 6 in the
evening, you could have a basic, live app up and you present that to a panel
of judges. Winners could walk away with $500 and advance to a future round
with bigger prizes. The judges feedback tends to be really helpful too and
a lot of teams iterate over the next few days based on it.

What are some of the applications that have been created through the
developer challenge?

Indu Subaiya: More than 100 submissions have come through over the
past few months, here are some of the winners of the online challenges that
people worked on:

• An interface to view your medical data in a really easy to sort, visual way from Adobe.
• A mobile app to chart your walking or running trails from Happy Feet.
• A hacked weight scale that connects to an electronic medical record from Critical Systems.
• A mobile app that you point at a house you’re thinking of buying that then displays the health rankings of that neighborhood

How important is data in healthcare?

Indu Subaiya: It’s at the heart of everything. We think of data in healthcare
as individual (from user-reported to data in medical records), population
data (like community health rankings), reference data (like drug and
nutrition databases). Now with the open gov movement pushing for a lot of
data to be released that was previously unavailable to the public, the
explosion of consumer devices that help track health data, and also with
tech platform companies opening up APIs there is a huge opportunity to build
pretty sophisticated apps that capture and integrate different types of data
and present very rich user experiences.

The big Data.gov winner so far? The Department of the Interior’s “Worldwide M1+ Earthquakes, Past 7 Days” data set. My guess is that there is some great app or visualization out there making daily use of this file — if you know what it it is, report it in the comments.

The top 10 data sets by download count are:

1. Worldwide M1+ Earthquakes, Past 7 Days. 122,888 downloads. Real-time, worldwide earthquake list for the past 7 days. Department of the Interior.
2. Latest Volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States. 10,090 downloads. The feed for the latest ten volumes of the official historical documentary record of U.S. foreign policy in the Foreign Relations of the United States series. Department of State.
3. U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants (Greenbook). 6,670 downloads. These data are U.S Economic and Military Assistance by country from 1946 to the present. US Agency for International Development.

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Interested in making sense of your data, or teaching others how? The O’Reilly Stata Conference: The Business of Data, is happening 1-3 February, 2011, in Santa Clara, CA.

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4. Child-Related Product Recalls. 2,784 downloads. Lists recalls from CPSC, the agency charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of serious injury or death from thousands of types of consumer products. US Consumer Product Safety Commission.
5. Airline On-Time Performance and Causes of Flight Delays. 2,716 downloads. On-time arrival data for non-stop domestic flights by major air carriers, as well as additional items, such as departure and arrival delays, origin and destination airports, flight numbers, scheduled and actual departure and arrival times, cancelled or diverted flights, taxi-out and taxi-in times, air time, and non-stop distance. Department of Transportation.
6. 2005 Toxics Release Inventory data for American Samoa. 2,628 downloads. The Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) is a publicly available EPA database that contains information on toxic chemical releases and waste management activities reported annually by certain industries as well as federal facilities. Environmental Protection Agency.
7. OSHA Data Initiative – Establishment Specific Injury and Illness Rates. 2,588 downloads. The data used by OSHA to calculate establishment-specific injury and illness incidence rates. Department of Labor.
8. 2001 Federal Register in XML. 2,506 downloads. The official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents. National Archives and Records Administration.
9. 2007 National RCRA Hazardous Waste Biennial Report Data Files. 2,266 downloads. Data on the generation of hazardous waste from large-quantity generators and on waste management practices from treatment, storage, and disposal facilities. Environmental Protection Agency.
10. Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) Files, All Data, 2005 2,000 Downloads. Data on the use of energy in residential housing units including physical housing unit types, appliances utilized, demographics, fuels, and other energy-use information from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), which is conducted every four years. Department of Energy.

Here’s a breakdown of the contributions by agency:

Finally, here’s a link to the data.gov catalog that includes the number of times the set has been downloaded. (If you’re interested in how this was done, check out Use BeautifulSoup to parse data.gov over on O’Reilly Answers).

Congrats to everyone at data.gov for creating this incredible resource for developers-at-large.

Adrian Holovaty’s chicagocrime.org (now part of EveryBlock) is one of the original, and perhaps still the best, examples of visualization as journalism. In case you’re unfamiliar with it, chicagocrime took data from publicly available sources in the Chicago area and plotted it on a map. While there was nothing there that didn’t already appear in the local paper, seeing the data superimposed on a map made it much more accessible and engaging. The project won a variety awards and inspired similar data-driven projects at Washingtonpost.com and NYTimes.com.

Consequently, I’ve often found it useful to think through the hallmarks of good journalism when looking at a new visualization. First, is it accurate: do the underlying facts (or data) map to reality? Second, is it objective: has the storyteller kept an objective view of the data and presented it dispassionately? Third, since individual pieces often fall into a broader story, how does it fit within the larger informational context?

As an example, consider this recent visualization called Your New Health Care System from the minority members of the U.S. Senate’s Joint Economic Committee, led by Republican U.S Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas.

(Click for larger version or download PDF)

As a pure piece of design, it’s incredibly effective. Every element — shape, color, size, orientation, typography, and layout — conveys a sense of bewildering complexity and raises an unstated message of “See how complex this is? It can’t possibly work.”

As much as I admire this from an information design standpoint, it raises questions from a journalistic standpoint:

• How accurately are the connections depicted? The accompanying article doesn’t provide any insight into where the connections come from or why they were drawn that way.
• The design choices are simply too suspicious for this to be a completely neutral schematic. For example, note how the IRS is portrayed in an eye-catching, scary bold font, and how the “Physicians” and “Patients” elements are as far apart as possible across the bottom. (I’ve even had several debates with people about whether the choice of a 7-pointed, yellow star for “Patients” was an intentional choice to evoke references to the Holocaust, and while most people think that’s a reach, I still wonder.)
• Finally, considering the larger context of lockstep Republican opposition to health reform and the source of the visualization, it’s hard not to conclude that this is a piece of advocacy journalism intended to guide the viewer toward a preordained conclusion, rather than a neutral schematic that accurately depicts a complex system.

Of course, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with taking a strong position, assuming the underlying data and facts are accurate. (This is a really good reason we need open data.) However, it’s important for the audience to recognize it as advocacy, not as science, even when it comes wrapped in a really cool visualization.

Related:

• Visualizing the Senate social graph, revisited
• Data visualization primer: What they are and why they’re important
• What is data science?
• Data science democratized
• A data science cheat sheet

… don’t invest in [app development] today … Put your creativity and investment into the real money opportunities, remember Pop Idol simple SMS votes earning half a billion dollars in USA this year alone …

He comes to this conclusion after observing that the vast majority of apps will lose money, while only a tiny handful generate significant revenue. Consequently, the logical response is for developers (and businesses) to instead focus their attentions on more lucrative opportunities. In other words, the only way to win is not to play the game.

While his numbers are sobering, they’re not all that surprising. Consider publishing — people have long known that the vast majority of authors slave away on projects that will never make any money, while a very few stars (think J.K. Rowling) make a killing. Whatever you call it — the long tail, the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule — this simply appears to be the brutal truth of most media industries, from publishing to movies to music.

What I think he overlooks — or is bemoaning — is the important role the App store is playing in lowering the barriers to market entry for developers.  He cites the big money opportunities as “SMS, MMS, and WAP” (seriously, WAP?).  But, good luck trying to get a biz dev deal there. Only a few, really well-connected organizations are going to get those. When you compare the costs of hiring some kid out of college who can’t believe he’s actually getting paid to write apps to the cost of building the kind of highly skilled (and highly compensated!) sales force required to put these deals together, an app investment suddenly doesn’t look so bad.

No, the bigger story is that the App Store has exposed incumbents in the mobile industry to the same sort of asymmetric competition that has reshaped the media industry over the past decade. Developers are responding in droves to the economic incentives that lower barriers to entry create, as well as the fact that the App Store has generated $1 billion in royalty payments in just a few years (by Ahonen’s estimates). By way of comparison, the entire US tech book market is roughly $250 million gross, and it’s been around for decades.

A single developer, or a small group of two or three developers, doesn’t need to make a killing. What would be a rounding error in a big development deal is a huge win for these people. Or, they may simply be in it for the fun, and the money is totally secondary. Or, it could be that they’ve whipped something together quickly and put it up to see if anyone bites. (If you’re interested, Mac Slocum is running a poll on Answers where you can chime in on other reasons people write apps.)

What the App Store did brilliantly is create a marketplace that anyone with the appropriate skills can enter. The development tools are free, the membership dues are cheap, and Apple’s 30 percent take seems pretty reasonable when you consider the frictionless access to a global marketplace they’re providing. This seems like a way better deal to the average developer than trying to get a development deal with phone manufacturers.

Related:

• Poll: Why do you develop mobile apps?

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:

In revisiting the visualization for the book, I found a number of areas for improvement, such as:

• Adding interactivity. Graphviz is a great quick tool, but it produces a static output. A better approach would allow the viewer to interact with the data more meaningfully.
• More effective labeling. I used simple numeric labels to identify each senator. Unless you had a magnifying glass, the small font made it difficult to quickly identify a particular senator.
• Presenting more meaningful transitions between periods. This area in particular needed more work. Although the diagrams effectively present the overall patterns, people were more often interested in how a particular senator moved over time.

So, this post presents a Processing visualization that addresses many of these deficiencies:

• Rather than static images, senators are represented by animated figures. As you move through the sessions using the left and right arrow keys, the senators “walk” from their positions in one graph to their new position in the next graph. (Or, if they have just been voted in or out, they come in from the top and bottom.)
• Mousing over the senator displays his or her name. Clicking on the senator makes the label stay on between transitions so you can track them across sessions.

While this revised visualization shows the same information as the original static version, the addition of interactivity and animated transitions makes this a much more engaging way to explore the senatorial voting patterns.

(Note: You must click your mouse somewhere inside the Applet area in order for this to work. Then use the right and left arrow keys to move between sessions.)

/* <![CDATA[ */

var attributes = { code:'senate_viz_animated6.class',
archive: 'http://cdn.oreilly.com/radar/odewahn/senate_viz/senate_viz_animated6.jar',
width:640, height:480 } ;
var parameters = { };
var version = '1.5';
deployJava.runApplet(attributes, parameters, version);

/* ]]> */

If you want to know more about how this visualization works, you can find all the code and data in this O’Reilly Answers post: “Create animated graph visualizations with Processing.

Related:

• Data visualization primer: What they are and why they’re important
• How to get started with Processing
• Mathematica’s hidden abilities: Music, programming and visualizations

As in most tag clouds, the largest categories (“Online,” “Business”, “News,” and “Management”) are not nearly as interesting as the smaller ones. For example:

• Words like “storage,” “data,” and “hosting” reinforce the importance of operational competence. (And why we run the Velocity Conference).
• “Search,” “advertising,” and “marketing” illustrate some of the business models in play, and “banking,” “equity,” and “venture” represent some of the investors.
• “Content” makes a strong showing, with “Video” beating out “book” by a wide margin. This idea of the changing nature of content is also explored in next February’s Tools of Change conference.
• Rich internet application themes emerges from words like “design,” “interactive,” and “usability.”
• At least a few Radar trends, including “biology” emerged. (Of course, so did “baby,” so there’s obviously only so far this type of tool can go!)
• The diversity of people and companies also emerged, with tags like “insurance,” “movies,” “art,” “travel,” “investing,” “music,” and “science” woven throughout the larger ideas.

So, in all, it looks like many of the themes outlined in the orginal What is Web 2.0 article are still alive and well, but are now reflecting the content types, business models, and interests of a maturing online media universe. Should be a fascinating few days!