Comments on: Information is Beautiful. Visualizing the Evidence for Health Supplements.

By: Silly Saturday #22 – A Picture is Worth a 1000 Words. « Laika’s MedLibLog

Sat, 17 Apr 2010 16:16:24 +0000

[...] a ral fan of Information is Beautiful with its beautiful visualizations. See previous post on evidence for health [...]

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 19:27:14 +0000

Thanks for this informative post about health supplements. The graphics are awesome! Being able to “see snake oil . . . intuitively” made it easy for me to understand which supplements might be more valuable to our health than others. I was surprised to see Vitamin “E” as having only “Slight” evidence of being beneficial to human health; that is, high in popularity yet low in terms of health benefits. I work for sportaid [link removed] where this type of graphical representation might be of value in showing our high ratings for customer satisfaction. Thanks again!

By: epicsystems

epicsystems — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 13:40:33 +0000

Dear Sir,

I have the pleasure to brief on our Data Visualization software
“Trend Compass”.

TC is a new concept in viewing statistics and trends in an animated
way by displaying 5 axis (X, Y, Time, Bubble size & Bubble color)
instead of just the traditional X and Y axis. It could be used in
analysis, research, presentation etc. In the banking sector, we have
Deutsche Bank New York as our client.

This a link [removed link] on weather data :

epicsyst.com/test/v2/aims/

This is a bank link to compare Deposits, Withdrawals and numbers of
Customers for different branches over time ( all in 1 Chart) :

epicsyst.com/test/v2/bank-trx/

Misc Examples :

epicsyst.com/test/v2/airline/
epicsyst.com/test/v2/stockmarket1/
epicsyst.com/test/v2/tax/
epicsyst.com/test/v2/football/
epicsyst.com/test/v2/swinefludaily/
epicsyst.com/test/v2/flu/
epicsyst.com/test/v2/babyboomers/
epicsyst.com/test/v2/bank-trx/
epicsyst.com/test/v2/advertising/

This is a project we did with Princeton University on US unemployment :
epicsyst.com/main3.swf

A 3 minutes video presentation of above by Professor Alan Krueger
Bendheim Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton
University and currently Chief Economist at the US Treasury using
Trend Compass :
http://epicsyst.com/trendcompass/princeton.aspx?home=1

Latest financial links on the Central Bank of Egypt:
[removed]

I hope you could evaluate it and give me your comments. So many ideas
are there.

You can download a trial version. It has a feature to export
EXE,PPS,HTML and AVI files. The most impressive is the AVI since you
can record Audio/Video for the charts you create.

http://epicsyst.com/trendcompass/FreeVersion/TrendCompassv1.2_DotNet.zip

All the best.

Epic Systems
[removed]

By: Bram Hengeveld

Bram Hengeveld — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 17:41:08 +0000

That would be truly wonderful indeed. Right now, I personally wouldn’t advise to use the suppl. balloon race as a good overview of available evidence. They hint a bit at the way they found the research in the accompanying text:

“We only considered large, human, randomized placebo-controlled trials in our data scrape – wherever possible. No animal trials. No cell studies. Many of the health claims made by the $23 billion supplements industry are based on non-human trials. We wanted to cut through that.

This piece was doggedly researched by myself, and researchers Pearl Doughty-White and Alexia Wdowski. We looked at the abstracts of over 1500 studies on PubMed (run by US National Library Of Medicine) and Cochrane.org (which hosts meta-studies of scientific research). It took us several months to seek out the evidence – or lack of.”

That’s quite a lot of abstracts of course, but I believe – tiny me – that’s not enough. Nevertheless: McCandless would be my instant-hero if he made the code for the visual available in the open source community.

And thanks for mentioning my blog (though not interesting to non-Dutch readers), but it’s actually called ‘Ars GeriatriCare’