More mischief in map coloring

Sam Cook was nice enough to mention Junk Charts on her and Andrew Gelman's blog today.  She provided another example of mischievous use of colors and shading in data maps, showing that sometimes we statisticians are no better than the rest. The effect is quite innocently hilarious and is a must-see!

Instead of assigning each level to a different color/shade, the geographical pattern of Amstat meetings is more clearly revealed if a different shade was used for 0, 1-2, 3-5, 7.  Thus:
 

Comments

[Andrew Gelman]

Even better, I think, would be just to display a dot for the location of each meeting. Since they're in cities, not states. If there are 2 in the same city, just jitter the 2 dots slightly.

[Kaiser]

And even better would be to have both city and state data on the same map. This would then look like the Wi-fi nation map I talked about a while ago.

Wifi Nation