Country clustering applied to the water and sanitation sector: A new tool with potential applications in research and policy

The fields of global health and international development commonly cluster countries by geography and income to target resources and describe progress. For any given sector of interest, a range of relevant indicators can serve as a more appropriate basis for classification. We create a new typology of country clusters specific to the water and sanitation (WatSan) sector based on similarities across multiple WatSan-related indicators. After a literature review and consultation with experts in the WatSan sector, nine indicators were selected. Indicator selection was based on relevance to and suggested influence on national water and sanitation service delivery, and to maximize data availability across as many countries as possible. A hierarchical clustering method and a gap statistic analysis were used to group countries into a natural number of relevant clusters. Two stages of clustering resulted in five clusters, representing 156 countries or 6.75 billion people. The five clusters were not well explained by income or geography, and were unique from existing country clusters used in international development. Analysis of these five clusters revealed that they were more compact and well separated than United Nations and World Bank country clusters. This analysis and resulting country typology suggest that previous geography- or income-based country groupings can be improved upon for applications in the WatSan sector by utilizing globally available WatSan-related indicators. Potential applications include guiding and discussing research, informing policy, improving resource targeting, describing sector progress, and identifying critical knowledge gaps in the WatSan sector

Visual Analytics: A Method to Explore Natural Histories of Oral Epithelial Dysplasia

Risk assessment and follow-up of oral potentially malignant disorders in patients with mild or moderate oral epithelial dysplasia is an ongoing challenge for improved oral cancer prevention. Part of the challenge is a lack of understanding of how observable features of such dysplasia, gathered as data by clinicians during follow-up, relate to underlying biological processes driving progression. Current research is at an exploratory phase where the precise questions to ask are not known. While traditional statistical and the newer machine learning and artificial intelligence methods are effective in well-defined problem spaces with large datasets, these are not the circumstances we face currently. We argue that the field is in need of exploratory methods that can better integrate clinical and scientific knowledge into analysis to iteratively generate viable hypotheses. In this perspective, we propose that visual analytics presents a set of methods well-suited to these needs. We illustrate how visual analytics excels at generating viable research hypotheses by describing our experiences using visual analytics to explore temporal shifts in the clinical presentation of epithelial dysplasia. Visual analytics complements existing methods and fulfills a critical and at-present neglected need in the formative stages of inquiry we are facing

Translating the Human Right to Water and Sanitation into Public Policy Reform

Abstract The development of a human right to water and sanitation under international law has created an imperative to implement human rights in water and sanitation policy. Through forty-three interviews with informants in international institutions, national governments, and non-governmental organizations, this research examines interpretations of this new human right in global governance, national policy, and local practice. Exploring obstacles to the implementation of rights-based water and sanitation policy, the authors analyze the limitations of translating international human rights into local water and sanitation practice, concluding that system operators, utilities, and management boards remain largely unaffected by the changing public policy landscape for human rights realization. To understand the relevance of human rights standards to water and sanitatio

Perceptual and interpretative properties of motion for information visualization

Visualizing information in user interfaces to complex, large-scale systems is difficult due to an enormous amount of dynamic data distributed across multiple displays. While graphical representation techniques can reduce some of the cognitive overhead associated with comprehension, current interfaces suffer from the over-use of such representation techniques and exceed the human’s perceptual capacity to efficiently interpret them. New display dimensions are required to support the user in information visualization. Three major issues which are problematic in complex system UI design are identified: representing the nature of change, supporting the cognitive integration of data across disparate displays, and conveying the nature of relationships between data and/ or events. Advances in technology have made animation a viable alternative to static representations. Motion holds promise as a perceptually rich and efficient display dimension but little is known about its attributes for information display. This paper proposes that motion may prove useful in visualizing complex information because of its preattentive and interpretative perceptual properties. A review of animation in current user interface and visualization design and research indicates that, while there is strong intuition about the “usefulness ” of motion to communicate, ther