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The content of the project aside (which is very exciting but early stage), I'm really impressed with the author's overview for how others can take up the project and move it forward. I've seen too many projects die because when the authors move onto other things they just leave an incomplete git repo and no clear plan for what happens next. It'd be great of course if there were someone lined up to take the reins, but the crucial thing is that in this case someone could ascertain the project's state and possible next steps even months after maleadt is out of the picture.

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation - Seattle, WA

The gist: We've been doing cutting edge data science to advance global health for the past 7 years.

Official blurb: "The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent global health research center at the University of Washington that provides rigorous and comparable measurement of the world's most important health problems and evaluates the strategies used to address them. IHME makes this information freely available so that policymakers have the evidence they need to make informed decisions about how to allocate resources to best improve population health."

Jobs: http://www.healthdata.org/get-involved/careers We have several positions posted for data scientists, javascript developers, project officers (PMs) and systems analysts. Also newly in need of a great developer with experience in building scientific/statistical software, email me for details.

Governmental health records and survey data. A lot of the really big stuff we use requires academic licenses, but there's still a lot of publicly accessible data.

For the U.S. try

- CDC's National Center for Health Statistics: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/

- CDC WONDER: http://wonder.cdc.gov/

- NIH's Unified Medical Language System: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/

And for global try the Global Health Data Exchange: http://ghdx.healthdata.org

Maybe not in restaurants, but just frying up some string cheese is indeed the easiest way to make your own at home. Tip: freeze them on a cookie sheet after (double-)breading them, that way they won't melt as soon as you throw them in the fryer.

Always glad to see these skills put to uses besides selling products and eyeballs!

Here's another fellowship using data science towards non-commercial goals (global health research): http://www.healthdata.org/get-involved/fellowships

Full disclosure: I participated in the fellowship in 2008.