We are finally able to think about something besides snow here in Arlington. Here are a few things we’ve been learning about.

As my World Cup Feature surely indicates, I’m rather a big fan of what the non-American world calls “football.” So it was that, yesterday, I had the ESPN feed for the Juventus-Dortmund game up alongside my work.

As the news has spread in all directions we have discovered that the 2014 Ebola outbreak represents not only a healthcare crisis with global impact, but also an information crisis. Even highly respected news outlets can have conflicting information on a single event, so that the stories are confusing and hard to trust. Hours spent poring over the NIH and CDC and WHO sites revealed the common threads of truth, but the details were scattered. There was no straightforward way to get a complete picture.

So, we decided to create a single source of graphical information that could become an international resource. Something that could compliment the Wikipedia page. Clean lines, a classic readable font, with unambiguous colors and icons. Headers in black and white, red for critical information, gray text to let pictures do the talking. Easy to scan and locate the topics before reading closely for details.

Yesterday at the New England Health Datapalooza, held at the DCU Center in Worcester, Mass., judges Pierce Graham-Jones, Innovator in Residence at the US Department of Health and Human Services; John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Group; and Manu Tandon, CIO of the MA Department of HHS, selected hGraph, an open system for visualizing personal health metrics designed by Involution Studios, as the second place finisher in the regional competition.

On the world stage of the 2012 London Olympic games, in today's hyper-competitive athletic environment, there's no doubt that any advantage, no matter how small, can make a difference.

On Tuesday, Involution Studios Creative Director, Juhan Sonin challenged infovis guru Edward Tufte to engage more fully in the discussion regarding our nation's greatest problems, including education, energy, finance, and health, among others, during a segment on The Digital Life podcast.