The Miracle of Vaccinations

  

This interactive graphics from the Wall Street Journal multimedia editors Tynan DeBold and Dov Friedman shows the miracle of vaccinations for the US over the last 80 years. Horizontally, are years from 1928 through to 2012. Vertically, are placed the states, plus DC. A vertical line down the center shows when vaccinations for measles were introduced, in 1963. Each year-state block is heat-coded: red indicating many infections down to dark blue (and even lower light blue and white) with few to no infections. Before 1963, the many years of infections produce a very colorful pattern suitable for a nice beach shirt. After 1963, and measles vaccination, we have a basic blue dress shirt. Here boring is the goal. Basic blue is to be sought. The message is remarkable. Vaccinations are amazingly effective. You can see many more of these vaccination success plots here. These plots have won best visualizations awards for 2015.

Time Series Heat Map in R

The Revolutions blog gives information on the statistical programming language R. Heat maps are shown in a recent post. A calendar is displayed horizontally with days of the week in rows and months arranged in jagged columns (since not all months have the same number of days). A color is plotted on each month's day for the magnitude of a time series variable (in this case the stock price for Microsoft) over several years of calendars. The site gives R code developed by Paul Bleicher, MD PhD, Chief Medical Officer at Humedica for producing these plots.