The Canadian Cartographic Association today points us to another interesting application of data collecting, analysis and charting.  See: http://ccablog.blogspot.com/2006/03/index-of-economic-freedom.html

The
Index of Economic Freedom has been published every year for the past 12
years. It assesses each country’s economic freedom by evaluating a
country’s performance on a number of factors, including trade policy,
fiscal burden, government intervention, monetary policy and property
rights, among others. Using the latest results (available in Excel format), the index creators have also put together a map of the world (also in pdf format) that provides a quick overview of economic freedom throughout the world. Also interesting to view is a chart showing the correlation of per capita income and economic freedom. Individual country reports / analysis are also available.

The complete report, along with the methodology and process used, is available for download.

Marylaine Block, at Ex Libris: an E-Zine for Librarians and Other Information Junkies.
http://marylaine.com/exlibris/ tips us to another good blog for analytic journalists.  Click below to see what Charles Franklin has to say about presidential polls.

All of our readers are hip to Google Maps, but the folks at Directions Magazine offer up a concise introduction to GMaps and the component parts.  See:

We tend to comment more on analytic methods than news delivery techniques, but today we offer an interesting example of the latter.  Ifra, the European-based newspaper training — and R&D — organization, publishes something called newspaper techniques ePaper.  It is published IoP (ink-on-paper), but there is also an online version.  Check it out at the link below.  It is easier to read if you have a tablet PC with a vertical/portrait display mode.  (Someday, every screen will have an easy-to-rotate mode, we hope.)  Still, the quality of the delivered package here is better than anything we've seen coming out of the North American media or media association efforts.

This from today's Google Earth Blog:

“Arc2Earth Released

By FrankTaylor on Google Earth News

A new product specifically targeted for Google Earth and GIS professionals was released today called Arc2Earth. Arc2Earth is an application which allows GIS professionals using ESRI's ArcGISbeen blogging about the development of the product and shown us a number of cool screenshots of its capabilities.
products to convert their data for viewing within Google Earth. This
means serious GIS information can more easily be made available to the
many millions of Google Earth users in the world. Unique data and maps
can be overlayed onto the 3D terrain and satellite photos of Google
Earth to enhance visualizations and presentations. For some months now,
Brian Flood (one of the authors of the product) has

Now they have released the product with a new web site documenting the product and its features, screenshots, and a link to purchase two versions
standard ($99) and professional ($299). This looks like a serious
product and I'm sure the GIS folks will be publishing reviews soon.
Here's an example KMZ showing a simple vegetation analysis which illustrates how symbology is maintained for polygons and graphics.

Here's an interview
with the author by Stefan Geens at OgleEarth about Arc2Earth and Google
Earth's ability to handle a variety of data and geospatial formats.

By the way, there is also another product from an outfit in Russia called KMLer which has some of the same types of features for working with ESRI products.”