'Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East' by Florence Nightingale -- click to enlarge. Image from Wikipedia/Wiki Commons.

It’s common knowledge that in 1854  Florence Nightingale identified poor hygiene practices as the major cause of mortality in army hospitals in the Crimea. (In fact, she thought the problem was a combination of poor nutrition and over-work. A separate Sanitary Commission arrived six months later to clean up the drainage, improve ventilation and reduce the occurrence of infectious diseases. Florence became a champion of hospital hygience after she returned to England.)

Another popular fact about Nightingale is that she didn’t believe in the new ‘germ theory’ about how infections spread. (Actually, in the early 1880s she wrote an article advocating strict precautions designed to kill germs.)

Florence Nightingale became the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society in 1858. She developed the ‘polar area diagram,’ a form of pie chart, and was a pioneer in the use of what we now call infographics — visual representations of data that can be understood by non-specialists.

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References:

• Wikipedia article
• Lesson plan from the UK National Archives
• Florence Nightingale Museum
• Royal Statistical Society

[Tip o' the hat to London Daily Photo blogger Ham who photographed a statue of Florence and linked to her infographic.]

Activity-independent nuclear position of cancer genes (green and purple) in cells of a model breast tumor. See footnote for details.

Sarah A Webb profiles Franziska Michor’s work in applying mathematical modelling to gain a better understanding of cancer.

Based at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, Michor is using mathematics, computer science, biology, and medicine to investigate the origins of cancer, relationships among cancer types and the emergence of drug-resistant tumors.

“While her work has attracted the attention of collaborators and funders, publishing her research has proved less straightforward, she says. Even though computational work can be done relatively quickly, Michor’s work relies on experiments done by her collaborators to verify that models are biologically or medically relevant. Because of these cross-disciplinary methods, a paper can include sequencing data, gene expression data, and growth data alongside the mathematical models. As with some other interdisciplinary fields, it’s often difficult to find the right journal or reviewers who can evaluate the combination of mathematics and biology as a cohesive whole rather than as individual components.” [my emphasis]

Consider how such a research paper could be published in an open-access repository along with original datasets and mathematical models. Identifying appropriate data storage, metadata and effective cross-linkages would be an interesting challenge.

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Footnote: The image above shows activity-independent nuclear position of cancer genes (green and purple) in cells of a model breast tumor. (JCB 180(1) TOC1) This image is available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licence. Reference: Meaburn and Misteli (2008) J. Cell Biol. 180:39-50. Published on: January 14, 2008. doi: 10.1083/jcb.200708204. Read the full article at: jcb.rupress.org/cgi/content/full/180/1/39 Image published on flickr.com by The JCB

If there really is an upward trend, how can we explain the result from Convenienceville? (Graph by Chris Lawson)

Chris Lawson demonstrates five ways to emphasise the positive.

The Book Seller - photo by flickr.com user dropscu, CC-licensed

Oddly hypnotic, this Book Depository mashup displays a flag on a world map each time somebody purchases a book online.

Watch for a few minutes as your gaze is directed to New Zealand, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Canada… feel a small rush of camaraderie when someone chooses one of your favorite books…

Photo, above: Secret Nuclear Bunker by flickr.com user Tim Ellis, CC-licensed

In its Top Secret America feature the Washington Post told a story:

“…not about criminal conspiracies or rogue elements or corruption in the usual sense. No one’s dedication to the cause of protecting America is questioned. The tale has no villains… It is an exposé about a secret world, but it exposes no secrets… Virtually all the data that the paper collected in the two years it took to prepare the series was already in the public record.

“And the bulk of the public record is no longer to be found in library stacks, dusty courthouse files, and microfilm rolls. Just as its subject is a new kind of bureaucratic enterprise, ‘Top Secret America‘ is a new kind of journalistic enterprise, pairing expert reporting of the traditional shoe-leather variety with the information-gathering power of the Internet.”

Read more of  Hendrik Hertzberg’s article in The New Yorker.

Blogging at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald predicted that  Top Secret America would be met with a notable lack of reaction. Distracted by the trivial and nonsensical melodrama that constitutes political reporting, he said, we would:

“…continue to fixate on the trappings and theater of government while The Real Government churns blissfully in the dark — bombing and detaining and abducting and spying and even assassinating — without much bother from anyone.”

Five days later Greenwald observed:

“After a one-day spate of television appearances for Dana Priest and William Arkin — most of which predictably focused on the bureaucratic waste they raised along with whether the Post had Endangered the Nation by writing about all of this — the story faded blissfully into the ether, never to be heard from again…”

The reason, Greenwald suggested, was that the current national security environment:

“…provides not only the ability to exercise vast power with no accountability, but also enables the transfer of massive amounts of public wealth to the private national security and surveillance corporations which own the Government.  Very few people with political power have the incentive to do anything about that.”

If that cynicism seems to be a product of the 21st century’s particular angst, think again. William Boyd has been re-reading John Le Carre’s classic novel, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. He describes it as a “superb, tough, highly sophisticated novel” that says something profound about the nature of humanity.

The action of the novel takes place 50 years ago, in a world entirely different from the one we know today. Nevertheless, Boyd argues the book’s unrelenting cynicism is completely modern:

“One forgets just how unsparing the book is, how the picture it paints of human motivations, human duplicities, human frailty seems presciently aware of all that we have learned and unlearned in the intervening decades.”

Photo, above: Steampunk Jewelry made by CatherinetteRings - image by Catherinette Rings Steampunk, CC-licensed

What futurists actually do:

“Even though we can’t predict exactly what will happen, we can make reasonable assumptions about what potential futures might look like, and in doing so we can begin to make choices today that can help us bring about the changes we hope to realize in the world.”

Managers of strategy and planning also do this.

Another thing we do is try to ask the right questions, ones that will help the business to be successful.

These are not the right questions:

Who is our customer?
What is our market?
What is our goal?
What problem does our product solve for the customer?

Those are hindsight questions: you need to know their answers in order to keep your business running, but they will not help you understand your particular situation and what needs to change.

Before you can answer formulaic questions like the ones above, you need to ask and answer some insight questions:

“…Real questions, useful questions, questions with promising attacks, are always motivated by the specific situation at hand.  They are often about situational anomalies and unusual patterns in data that you cannot explain based on your current mental model of the situation…  Real questions frame things in a way that creates a restless tension, by highlighting  the potentially important stuff that you don’t know. You cannot frame a painting without knowing its dimensions. You cannot frame a problem without knowing something about it. Frames must contain situational information.”

Instead of asking “How can I be happy?” try examining the factors that contribute to the state (or situation) of happiness. By answering the question “Are people with strong friendships happier than loners?” you identify a possible course of action.

Photo, above: Bar Graph by kevinzhengli, CC-licensed

Nifty tricks with Google Analytics:

• The Segmentable Funnel trick: find out which user groups follow a particular path through your web site
• The Corporate Memory trick: use annotations to record changes to your web site (so you can see how the changes affect your web traffic — or not)

Image, above: Radiation Infographic by byDavvi, CC-licensed

Marshall McLuhan was right: the medium is, in part, the message. That, says Jan Swafford, is why ebooks will never completely replace print:

“E-books won’t destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print.”

Some messages, of course, don’t require an emotional investment on the part of the reader.

Health of England - The New York Times iPad infographic -- click to see more images on Flickr

Known for the quality of its ‘infographics’ — visual representations of information that explain events or concepts — the New York Times is experimenting with new ways to present data. An ‘interactive infographic’ accompanied a recent NYT article on the north-south gap in England’s health care:

“The different ‘Health Wheels’ distil 32 different health indicators across 9 geographical regions. The wheels act as visual barometers for the health of each region, in order to provide users with an intuitive way of scanning through all the indicators. A map of England communicates the national perspective in response to the wheel, with a ‘traffic light’ colour code identifying which regions score ‘better than’, ‘worse than’ or ‘average’ compared to the national mean. For the regional view, segments on the wheel are color-coded according to the performance of each indicator.”

You don’t need an iPad to see it — the NYT published a video and Flickr set of photos to show the infographic’s development process and the final product.

Other online publications have also experimented with animated infographics to explain complex concepts.

Photo, above, by egor.gribanov, CC-licensed

Many IT companies and consultants define three ways to present business intelligence data.

In an ‘unstructured investigative’ environment you build a database of information that is available to specialist staff. These analysts use the data to answer one-off or infrequent business questions. Analysis techniques include visualisation, data mining and modelling. The quality of analysis often depends on the skills and business knowledge of the individual analyst.

‘Structured investigative’ systems use regular reports, scorecards or dashboards to provide answers to recurring business questions. This information is designed for business and service delivery managers. The information is updated periodically (weekly, monthly, quarterly etc) and enables monitoring of existing processes and systems.

The third category is often referred to as ‘embedded’ intelligence. This involves pushing tailored information directly to managers or other staff. The information is continuously updated so that product quality, service delivery and business performance can be measured against objectives. In a manufacturing or engineering business, embedded intelligence reports might be fed data directly from instruments on the production line or from the field. In white-collar service-delivery environments the link between activity and generation of intelligence data is sometimes less clear.

These delivery channels are closely linked to the type of data they present. In an organisation just starting to develop its business intelligence capability, it may be useful to focus on identifying which recurring business questions could be answered by regular reporting on key performance indicators. This type of structured investigative approach is more likley to deliver early benefits than the more specialised unstructured investigative environment; and it will probably be easier to implement than the embedded intelligence model.

Hat tip: I understand the names of the three categories — unstructured investigative, structured investigative and embedded — are used by IBM. I’m not familiar with that company’s work in this area, so am relying on another analyst for this bit of jargon. The three categories themselves, however, seem to be quite common in the BI literature.

In a short article for the LH Martin Institute, Peter Ewell proposes three reasons why performance funding often doesn’t work:

1. by directing resources to areas of strength, it leaves weaker areas unable to improve or grow
2. it works against the factors that motivate individuals most strongly (particularly in the higher education field)
3. the funding mechanisms tend to be complicated and poorly focused

Dr Peter Ewell is Vice-President at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, USA.