Last week, we read Chien et al, Efficient mapping and geographic disparities in breast cancer mortality at the county-level by race and age in the U.S. I’ve been very interested in these sort of “small-areas” spatial statistical methods recently, so it was good to see what is out there as the state of the art. I think I’ve got something to contribute along these lines some day soon.
Maps in small multiples look just lovely, too:
Healthy Algorithms 
Cool paper! Those maps really show the perils of drawing dark boundaries on a county level map though – the eastern half of the US is substantially darker than the west because of the smaller county size, making it nearly impossible to compare values.