Winter day for stats

It is a crisp blue winter day. The trees, denuded, show strange shapes; the buildings stand taller, more revealed, and carry old fading signs of businesses long gone; the skyline is sharper and shadows long. The air, light and mood is of Santa Fe in January long ago before the mystic studios became shops.

Check out the distorterd maps that depict world trends. For example, how is Research and Development distributed in the world in spending and in employment, and what is the distribution of patents granted? This should provide plenty of problems for computational geometers. The methods behind these maps are from the work of Mark Newman.