Month: November 2013

Creating presentations with non-WYSIWYG tools

I work in a company that shifted from being R&D-driven to being project-driven. It is official since this 2013 but we saw it coming: the main pieces of memory are Powerpoint slides since a few years.

Everything is in Powerpoint, from agendas, discussions, presentations to minutes. Even when modelers want to show some results, they put them on a slide deck first …

For presentations I used to use Beamer but installing the LaTeX toolchain on a restricted, company-owned Windows laptop was a long and cumbersome process. I made a first presentation in Reveal.js this week. And I love it!

I prefer Beamer, Reveal.js and similar tools because a) it forces you to think of your message and its structure first and b) it forces you to reuse material that is already produced (rather than creating new things in / for the presentation medium). Therefore the presentation is a real presentation of something that really exists, that was really thought outside of the context of the presentation (and before it!).

The additional benefit (IMHO) of Reveal.js is that you just need a text editor and a browser. All restricted company laptops provide you with these tools.

The memory of my projects remains in my models, my notes and reports. The context, next steps and consequences are there. The project evolution is better understood (in reviews, audits and simple chats with colleagues).

Belgium doesn’t score well in the Open Data Index (not speaking about health!)

The Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) released the Open Data Index, along with details on how their methodology. The index contains 70 countries, with UK having the best score and Cyprus the worst score. In fact the first places are trusted by the UK, the USA and the Northern European countries (Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden).

And Belgium? Well, Belgium did not score very well: 265 / 1,000. The figure below shows its aggregated score (with green: yes, red: no, blue: unsure).

Open Data Index - Belgium

The issue with this graph is that you may first think it’s a kind of progress bar. For instance, in transport timetables, it seems Belgium reached 60% of a maximum. But the truth is that each bar represents the answer to a specific question. So the 9 questions are, from left to right:

  1. Does the data exist?
  2. Is it in digital form?
  3. Is it publicly available?
  4. Is it free of charge?
  5. Is it online?
  6. Is it machine readable (e.g. spreadsheet, not PDF)?
  7. Is it available in bulk?
  8. Is it open licensed?
  9. Is it up-to-date?

With the notable exceptions of government spending and postcodes/zipcodes, nearly all Belgian data is available in a way or another. That’s already a start – but … None of them are available in bulk nor machine readable nor openly licenced and only few of them are up to date. Be sure to read the information bubbles on the right of the table if you are interested in more details.

The national statistics category leads to a page of tbe Belgian National Bank. And here is one improvement that the OKF could bring to this index: there should be a category about health data. For Belgium we are stuck with some financial data from the INAMI (in PDF, not at all useful as is) but otherwise we have to rely on specific databases or the WHO, the OECD or the World Bank. The painful point is that these supranational bodies often rely on statistics from states themselves – but Belgium doesn’t publish these data by itself!

If you are interested in the topic, three researchers from the Belgian Scientific Institute of Public Health published a study about health indicators in publicly available databases, 2 years ago [1]. Their conclusions were already that Belgium should improve on Belgian mortality and health status data. And the conclusion goes on about politically created issues for data collection, case definition, data presentation, etc.

I was recently in a developping country (Vietnam) where we try to improve data collection: without reliable data collection it is difficult to know what are the issues and to track potential improvements. In the end, this is also applicable in Belgium: we feel proud of our healthcare system ; but on the other hand it is difficult to find health-related data in an uniform way. It is therefore difficult to track trends or improvements.

[1] Vanthomme K, Walckiers D, Van Oyen H. Belgian health-related data in three international databases. Arch Public Health. 2011 Nov 1;69(1):6.