Today’s New York Times has a story on regional variation in the availability and cost of health care. The story is accompanied by a “multimedia interactive graphic” — that is, a Flash visualization that chartsvariables on a U.S. map …For each mapped variable, mousing over the displayed hospital referral regions yields the local, state, and national values for that variable.

It’s nicely done. There’s no question that, as of mid-2007, this is cutting-edge data interactivity for the mainstream. But times are changing fast. The Times sourced this data from the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. It took me five minutes to download the surgical data, upload it to Dabble DB, and publish a similar map along with a complete tabular dump.

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