US Heart Disease Maps
I chose to map the number of deaths by heart disease by State in the US. This information can be very useful if there is a sudden peak of heart disease in a certain area in the United States, we can track it and see if there is a specific cause for it. The information for these maps were taken from The Disaster Center website. It seems to be pretty reliable and updated, so this date should be accurate to a certain extent.
There are 2 maps attached, the first one shows death by heart disease with just different colors to show the different numbers of deaths. The second one shows the same data, but with a different type of map. With this map, it shows how many deaths there are and raises or lowers the state due to their number compared to other states. The taller states have more deaths while the lower states have less deaths. The first one could be used to see which part of the US has more deaths by heart disease than the others. The second one can be used to tell how much more deaths there are in a certain state than the other, it puts it in a very good perspective by making the states taller or shorter depending on how many deaths they have.
Shao4's Blog 
I like the way how you represent the distribution of the rate of death by heart diseases across United States using the prism map, as it gives a kind of 3d representation by making use of elevation. Also I had never thought of the idea before if the difference in elevation between the different states in the prism map can actually help to determine a ratio between the number of deaths between 2 states. However coming to think of it, this is a really cool way =). But, I still wonder if using the prism map would take away some of the clarity away from the map especially if there were more features to be represented on the map. California and some far north eastern states get really distorted in the map. Also, one more interesting thing to note regarding the trend of the deaths is that the higher concentration of the deaths is in the eastern part of United States as compared to the western part. I cant help but wonder, if this problem is related to the difference in the diet, heart awareness or other such factors, Or if it is something to do with the availability and the affordability of heart care facilities. It would be interesting to do a study on this idea to get to the core of such a prominent difference between the east and the west.
That is a very interesting effect with the different elevated states. Although the previous commentor is right about the obscuring problem, I realized that that type of map might be surprisingly useful, because instead of grouping the states together into generalized color shades, each state has its own individual height. That sort of avoids a type of “ecological fallacy” (although I know that is not the proper application of the term! This is more of a generalization/uncertainty thing I suppose.)
My other comment just had to do with your data… perhaps it would have been more useful if the data was heart attack deaths per capita instead of absolute number of deaths? Of course, that just has to do with the type of data on the CDC website.