The end of the contact form

Contact forms are a terminally broken technology. Humans who fill them out have little faith that anyone will receive or answer them. As a result, they often don’t fill out the form and take to some other medium like Twitter or Instagram or TikTok or the current social flavor of the day. Or worse, they […]

Organic Design for Command & Control

Col. John Boyd’s “Organic Design for Command & Control” came up in conversation today so I figured I would put my copy up and make it available. As usual I’ll probably add to this over time. Feel free to use the comments below to ask questions, I’m going back to old school comments-enabled writing. Audio […]

Syndromic Surveillance & Covid-19 Caveats

This article is part of the Syndromic Surveillance and Covid-19 collection on Thoughtfaucet. There are caveats to all data projects. I do not believe any of these undermine the work and thinking. But they are important to note (and I hope you mention other caveats as well–it improves the project) and discuss if necessary. But […]

Syndromic Surveillance: Tracking Covid-19 via Respiratory ER Visits

The above graph uses the NYC Health EpiQuery data (Respiratory case counts) as of 11:50pm EST March 27, 2020 and the NYC Health & Mental Hygiene’s 2019 Novel Coronavirus (Covid-19) Daily Data Summary (tested positive Covid-19 and Covid-19 deaths) as of 4:00pm March 27, 2020. This page is updated regularly with new data as it […]

Syndromic Surveillance & Covid-19 Resources

This article is part of the Syndromic Surveillance and Covid-19 collection on Thoughtfaucet. In the process of developing the Syndromic Surveillance Covid-19 NYC graph I gathered and read a variety of resources. Some of these are for specialist audiences and others are for more general audiences. This page is an annotated bibliography of the medical […]

Loadband, an information design pattern for showing intensity of real world factors

This article is part of the Syndromic Surveillance and Covid-19 collection on Thoughtfaucet. While working on my “Estimating Future ER Load” information design I wanted a way to show how many cases of influenza-like illness an emergency department was capable of handling over a given time.