I'm getting faster at these maps. This is an interactive map that uses the CDC's Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) dataset for 2008-2010. It is a massive amount of data. However their maps seemed a bit archaic to me, and tedious to use. So this is my attempt at a more user-friendly/faster version of their data. This isn't a criticism of their efforts though.

To do this, I started by downloading their data. You probably notice that the data has that geography teacher's nightmare, Alaska and Hawaii where Mexico should be. On a side note, I remember looking at mental maps drawn by US students. They were required to draw a map of the US from memory. Some put Alasak and Hawaii in Mexico...Instead I used state boundary data from Natural Earth. This data was perfect because it was generalized and looked good. The second step was to convert the data to a KML file which Google Fusion Tables allow you to import. By using the Simple Field tags in the KML file, fusion tables can use this information to populate the columns as well as pull the geometry information. Pretty slick. I tried this using QGIS but for some reason the simple fields were miss aligned, so I wrote my own converter using C# and DotSpatial. This allowed me to also create the classifications I needed to make a choropleth map. I chose to use Natural Breaks with 5 classifications (fusion tables only allow five classfications, which is sufficient for most things). Luckily Oren Gal was nice enough to post his code for this, and I didn't need to make any modfications.

My main goal was speed, so to do this I stored all the fusion table queries and styles in a "metadata" table. I'm pretty amazed at the speed in which the data renders through the Fusion Tables and Google Maps. I think this has little to do with any of my own programming skills. Although setting up everything beforehand helps a little...I hope.

Here is the interactive map. If you want acess to the data it is available in public fusion tables. For 2010: data and metadata. For 2009: data and metadata. For 2008: data and metadata.