Science indicators make for compulsive reading in the research community, where scientists pore over them like fans analysing the latest football results. Conventional mapping of indicators can make interpretation tricky, so Nature has generated a series of cartograms that reveal the United States distorted in proportion to a variable other than area - such as state spending on R&D. The maps here were made using data from the State Indicators chapter of the 2008 edition of the US National Science Foundations (NSF's) Science and Technology Indicators . For simplicity, the cartograms use a base map of the 48 contiguous mainland states and the District of Columbia.
展开▼
