Rajiv Narayan

@us
Your point about the missing file is well taken. However I dont think it would have been optimal to bundle the dataset with each submission. While one can argue whether file exchange is the best repository for this code, I dont think comparing the contest entries to regular file exchange submissions is valid. Moreover I feel that there is definitely something to gain from examining the entries in this contest. I certainly have.

@Doug
Thats a nice idea. In the spirit of over-engineering things, I extended your idea further to actually do the download and extract the dataset.

% GET_CONTEST_DATA Download dataset for the Data visualization contest 2009
% GET_CONTEST_DATA(WD) Downloads the data to the folder WD
function get_contest_data(cwd)
url='http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23509?controller=file_infos&download=true';
if (exist (cwd, 'dir'))
try
    td=tempname;
    outfile = fullfile(td,'entry1.zip');
    datafile = fullfile(td,'contest_data.mat');
    mkdir (td);
    urlwrite(url,outfile);
    unzip (outfile, td);
    movefile(datafile, cwd);
    rmdir(td,'s');
catch
    err=lasterror;
    disp(err.message)
end
else
     error('Folder %s not found', cwd)
end

Very cool entry! Well commented code and lots of neat GUI techniques.

wow, I learnt a lot from you guys...

The rules said "The thing you will be judging is the HTML document resulting from the published M-file"... so the main objective of a publish m file is still to generate the cleanest looking HTML. So adding these codes may not help the case... well, at least this is the direction I was heading towards. :)

To answer the question of using data not normally on the MATLAB path, I offer the following modification.
 
if ~exist('contest_data.mat','file')
    warning ('This was an entry to the MATLAB programming contest (http://www.mathworks.com/contest/datavis/home.html). Please load the contest data and unzip it to place contest_data.mat on your MATLAB path.')
    web('http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/23509?controller=file_infos&download=true')
end