Here are a pair of data visualizations. First, a map of diabetes in the United States. Extremely cool. Diabetes is rife in the South, and in places where income is low. We knew that, but take a look at the way the numbers talk in this visualization. Credit to Annette Greiner.
Both of these maps are courtesy of Tableau Software, which says this on its web site about its free data visualization tools:
“Tableau Public is a free service that lets anyone publish interactive data to the web. Once on the web, anyone can interact with the data, download it, or create their own visualizations of it. No programming skills are required. Be sure to look at the gallery to see some of the things people have been doing with it.”
Here’s another chart, this one also awesome — about how much people spend for what diseases and conditions. The description of the graphs on the page where I found this map says: “Notice how many patients are affected by hypertension overall (the blue bar in the upper left graph), resulting in huge treatment costs (second bar graph), even though the per patient cost is relatively low (rightmost bar graph), and the patients’ portion of costs is near the middle (third bar graph), yet hypertension has little effect on the young (the two line graphs on the right).” Credit goes to Stephen Few on Perceptual Edge.
