Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

The application of color could make or break a brand, website, brochure, logo, or even what we wear on a a first date or to a business meeting. The same goes for how we present data. The more complex the data, the more important color becomes in guiding the participant through its visualization.

Welcome to the 2nd issue of the UX Design & DataViz for Life. Find some of the latest UX design and data visualization news items from around the web. This month's roundup includes some exciting articles such as:

In this article we introduce an eight state system of technical debt, and analyze its behavior. According to an article by Frank Buschman, the term ”Technical Debt” was coined by Ward Cunningham and is defined as:

A few days ago I attended talks by Phil Bourne and John Wilbanks, both of whom are working on ways to make scientific data, including genetic information, more freely available for research purposes. Phil and John were speaking at an NIH conference called ‘Open Science: The Transparency Revolution’ (see agenda and videocast). Dr. Bourne is Associate Director for Data Science for NIH and Wilbanks is Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks. Bourne has only been in his position at NIH for about a month, so he outlined his goals, one of which was to create a data commons at the NIH where researchers could go to discover, access and analyze scientific data.

It can seem like biobanking is a ‘cold black box’ process. Samples are processed, labeled stored and retrieved. For many involved in biobanking, it is not clear that processing and storing a biospecimen must be based on core scientific principals in order for the biospecimen to be useful for downstream applications. Biobanking also requires in infrastructure: equipment, biospecimen management systems that may include labels, label readers, and information systems for linking important data about the biospecimen with the actual specimen.