Jack -

This brings to mind Edward Tufte's work. He has a fairly new humorous critique of Microsoft PowerPoint and the dumbing down of information presentation: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint

"The rate of information transfer is asymptotically approaching zero."

Here are some interesting articles on Tufte's paper.

http://contactsheet.org/articles/2003/08/28/the_cognitive_style_of_powerpoin t.html http://www.textism.com/article/732/ http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000931 http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/group/powerpt.html

Paul Choate DDS Data Extraction (916) 654-2160

-----Original Message----- From: SAS(r) Discussion [mailto:SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of Jack Hamilton Sent: Tuesday, November 02, 2004 6:09 PM To: SAS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Subject: Election results

I don't know what they are yet, of course, and even though I'm not planning to watch TV tonight, I hope that the networks at least occasionally use cartograms (maps with state areas proportional to population) rather than standard maps.

SAS/Graph can't produce them automatically, alas. They're not trivial, either computationally or esthetically.

There's some info about cartograms at <http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/Cartogram_Central/index.html>; the page is about 2 years ago, and perhaps there are new features in ESRI software to create cartograms.

I have gotten the impression, by the way, that SAS Institute is de-emphasizing SAS/GIS in favor of their partnership with ESRI. That's probably a wise move.

-- JackHamilton@FirstHealth.com Manager, Technical Development Metrics Department, First Health West Sacramento, California USA