In this folder, you will find the userman.pjd project, which contains all the examples shown in the User's Manual, as well as the usmap.pjd project, which contains all the views shown in the Getting Started manual. Refer to these manuals for a detailed description of each view, how it was produced, and what it shows.

About the Data

The "usmap" data was distributed to interested ASA (American Sociological Association) members so that they could apply contemporary data analysis methods and present the results in a poster session at the ASA annual conference. Latitude and longitude have been added by Paul Tukey. The data presented herein was compiled in the 1980s, and therefore represents past socio-economic trends. More recent data can be found on the US Census Bureau Web site.

This data set is taken from the Places Rated Almanac, by Richard Boyer and David Savageau, copyrighted and published by Rand McNally. This book order (ISBN) number is 0-528-88008-X, and it retails for $14.95. Data is reproduced on disk by kind permission of the publisher, and with the request that the copyright notice of Rand McNally and the names of the authors appear in any paper or presentation using this data.

The nine rating criteria used by Places Rated Almanac are:

• Climate & Terrain: Very hot and very cold months, seasonal temperature variation, heating- and cooling-degree days, freezing days, zero-degree days, ninety-degree days.
• Housing: Utility bills, property taxes, mortgage payments.
• Health Care & Environment: Per capita physicians, teaching hospitals, medical schools, cardiac rehabilitation centers, comprehensive cancer treatment centers, hospices, insurance/hospitalization costs index, fluoridation of drinking water, air pollution.
• Crime: Violent crime rate, property crime rate.
• Transportation: Daily commute, public transportation, interstate highways, air service, passenger rail service.
• Education: Pupil/teacher ratio in the public K-12 system, effort index in K-12, academic options in higher education.
• The Arts: Museums, fine arts and public radio stations, public television stations, universities offering a degree or degrees in the arts, symphony orchestras, theatres, opera companies, dance companies, public libraries.
• Recreation: Good restaurants, public golf courses, certified lanes for tenpin bowling, movie theatres, zoos, aquariums, family theme parks, sanctioned automobile race tracks, pari-mutuel betting attractions, major- and minor- league professional sports teams, NCAA Division I football and basketball teams, miles of ocean or Great Lakes coastline, inland water, national forests, national parks, or national wildlife refuges, Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area access.
• Economics: Average household income adjusted for taxes and living costs, income growth, job growth.

For all of the above criteria, the higher the score, the better. The scores are computed using the components statistics described for each criterion (see the Places Rated Almanac for details).

Up to Data Sets.