Here's the Amazon link to Few's new book: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantitative Analysis

Stephen Few is the author of Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, and the monthly Visual Business Intelligence newsletter. He has worked for more than 25 years as an information technology innovator, teacher, and consultant. As the principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, he focuses on practical uses of data visualization to explore, analyze, and present quantitative business information. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Product Description
This companion to Show Me the Numbers teaches the fundamental principles and practices of quantitative data analysis. Employing a methodology that is primarily learning by example and “thinking with our eyes,” this manual features graphs and practical analytical techniques that can be applied to a broad range of data analysis tools—including the most commonly used Microsoft Excel. This approach is particularly valuable to those who need to make sense of quantitative business data by discerning meaningful patterns, trends, relationships, and exceptions that reveal business performance, potential problems and opportunities, and hints about the future. It provides practical skills that are useful to managers at all levels and to those interested in keeping a keen eye on their business.

For those of us familiar with San Franciso, its bay and its famous bridge, The Golden Gate, this is a compelling infographic. Fundamental in its data and a fine mix of data and representation of geography. Once again, thanks to Nathan at Flowing Data.

Suicides by Location on the Golden Gate Bridge

This graphic from SF Gate is a good four years old, well before I knew what an infographic was, but just because it's old doesn't mean it's not interesting. Here we see San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and the “sad tally” of 1,218 known suicides by location. Each black square represents a person who has taken his or her life and 128 light poles are used as reference points.

The east side of the bridge, where most of the suicides occurred, has a pedestrian walkway. The first suicide was just 10 weeks after the bridge opened in 1937.

gheat is, as its promo line says, a nifty tool to turn a Google pin map into a heat map.  (Or should we be calling that a “Heat” map?)

Here's what the page looks like, but drill down into the examples.  I especially like the map of Davis, Calif. bike accidents.

Star this project

Code license:	MIT License
Labels:	gmaps, heatmap, python, wsgi, aspen, geo

Show all Featured downloads:

gheat-0.2.tbz gheat-0.2.zip

Links:	DOCUMENTATION Screencast Ruby starting-point (thanks David :^) other software from Zeta
Blogs:	http://blag.whit537.org/…/gheat
Feeds:	Project feeds
Groups:	gheat@googlegroups.com

People details

Project owners:
	whit537
Project committers:
	endtwist, dav…@brconsulting.com.au

Google Maps gives you API for adding additional map layers. This software implements a map tile server for a heatmap layer.

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Examples

Please tell me (chad@zetaweb.com) if you'd like a link here.

The Anglican Church in North America is using gheat on their homepage to show their parishes.

VisTrac is using gheat to visualize clicks on web pages.

Russell Neches is using gheat to visualize auto and bike accidents in Davis, CA. The data is parsed from about 10,000 raw police reports.

The Australian Honeynet Project is using gheat to visualize the origin of spam that gets caught in their SensorNET honeypots.

The Conficker Working Group is using gheat to track the spread of the Conficker worm.

This is an animated heatmap of the conficker botnet as found in Australia (one frame a day, unique IPs per frame, with data from the end of January through June, 2009). This was produced using a heavily modified gheat. Here's a Flash example.

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Thanks to Michael Corey over on NICAR-L

Random find today for the geographically inclined:
http://finder.geocommons.com/
Library of spatial data, and the ability to convert it all to and from
Shapefile, KML and CSV.

They also produce http://maker.geocommons.com/, a quick way to build
visually appealing maps with all that data. Haven't experimented with it
much yet to know the limitations/features

Sidenote: Anyone using QGIS? How intimidating is installing all the
necessary frameworks if you don't already have them?

Thanks,

Michael Corey
Digital Projects Editor
DesMoinesRegister.com
515.284.8076
mcorey@dmreg.com