No more heatmaps that are just population maps! by Pete Warden.
From the post:
I'm pleased to announce that there's a brand new 0.50 version of the DSTK out! It has a lot of bug fixes, and a couple of major new features, and you can get it on Amazon's EC2 as ami-7b9df412, download the Vagrant box from http://static.datasciencetoolkit.org/dstk_0.50.box, or grab it as a BitTorrent stream from http://static.datasciencetoolkit.org/dstk_0.50.torrent
What are the new features?
The biggest is the integration of high resolution (sub km-squared) geostatistics for the entire globe. You can get population density, elevation, weather and more using the new coordinates2statistics API call. Why is this important? No more heatmaps that are just population maps, for the love of god! I'm using this extensively to normalize my data analysis so that I can actually tell which places actually have an unusually high occurrence of X, rather than just having more people.
If you use the DSTK (and you should), do send Pete a note of appreciation.
I can’t wait to start mapping tax dodgers!