This visualization (far less interactive than the word “interactive” implies, IMHO) attempts to display the quality of evidence connecting various nutritional supplements to the ailments they’re supposed to affect.
The list is pretty random, and there’s probably a need to investigate or at least share how the evidentiary grades are assigned.
But, I can see there being some value to this type of easily understood distillation of typically complex research papers. (Certainly the autism community could use this if only to collect the research in one place.) I see this as a neat add-on to the orphan idea proposal for evidence-based diets, one that ties to other diet-related projects.
Combining either the diet idea or this supplement one (and supplements makes more sense as an initial project because of the money actually involved) with some cost measures would facilitate integration with the benefits to be perhaps presented with a mindset like that in this predictive health intervention tool (again, fairly simple in this iteration but certainly susceptible of increased complexity).
Tagged as:
orphan ideas
This BoingBoing post by Cory Doctorow briefly introduces a site/tool created as a result of a tweet he sent just a few months ago.
Mekki and a friend ran with an idea I tweeted last October: “Who’s got a web-based service that will take a huge pastebomb (300K of text) and smarten all quotes, turn — into em-dash, etc?” They created something called Cleantext. I just pasted in the entire text of my next short story collection (written as plain ASCII in a text editor) and out came something that was beautifully formatted and ready to be pasted into a layout program for further massaging. I’m delighted by this — how useful!
I’m really excited by this: it shows that there are people who can execute on an idea and create something. I’m also very encouraged that Cory doesn’t seem interested in getting his “piece of the action.” Of course, given his writing and his recent approach to publishing his books as free ebooks, that’s about what you’d expect.
Congratulations to Cleantext and a hearty well-done to Cory for providing inspiration without no strings attached. Even better, he just gave this site scads of good great word of mouth.
Maybe I’ll finally break out my comp (fka Senior Comprehensive Project) or my not-quite-finished note from law school and give this a try.
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I started the orphan ideas category of posts because I wanted to accomplish three goals: first, get these ideas out of my mental baggage list, second, maybe give someone else a little spark, and third, maybe, just maybe, see something get built or done.
Tagged as:
blogging,
cool,
orphan ideas,
writing
