Elastic lists are an open-sourced navigation user interface method which allows users to navigate multi-dimensional infomation spaces with just a few clicks, while providing real-time feedback which ensures that only options leading to meaningful results are displayed. They also visualize weight proportions, provide animated transitions, and provide emphasis of characteristic values through sparkline visualizations. The demo below provides a summary of other infothestic articles over the last 5 years, to demonstrate the utility of this approach for browsing large data spaces.

The term health care reform has diverse meanings for the many stakeholders involved in the US health care system. The underlying issues associated with implementing such reforms are quite complex, but pressures for reform are high. In this context, such reforms are similar in nature to many large improvement initiatives which are pursued within large businesses (though these are each dramatically different in scale).

In 2005 alone, the United States spent more than two trillion dollars on health care, or over $7,100 per person, and are growing at over twice the rate of growth of our overall economy. Government and private insurance fund about 80 percent of those costs, and the rest largely comes directly (rather than indirectly) out of our pockets. About a third of these expenditures occur within hospitals; clinicians get another third, and the rest is spread across nursing homes, prescription drugs, and the costs of administering our insurance system. Read more »

Spin is the process of selectively interpretting a situation in a biased way, in order to drive a particular agenda. When a particular data measurement value or trend is not well defined, in business or government, this can be particularly dangerous. This is because such spin drives decisions based upon one perception of the world, when in fact another reality may be actually occurring. For a particularly troubling example, consider this alternative view of the current economic situation. For another, consider the many financial institutions that maintained excellent credit ratings, despite large portfolios of Subprime lending.

The underlying elements which enable such spin are: Read more »

We often wish, after going to the trouble of standardizing our work, and training our people, that we will see consistent outcomes as the fruit of our labors. In practice, variation prevails until we can eliminate its causes. Consider the picture on the right, which is an artist's depiction of the frequency and position of urban crimes in South London, Manchester, East London, and Eindhoven. Each individual incident of violent crimes in each area adds to the height of the model at that location. The result forms a mountainous terrain of the variation of these crime incidents by location. Such variation is the nature of populations, and a challenge to solution designers who must deal with those populations.

For an example drawn from our health care domain, consider this situation, from Health Dialog: Read more »