In whites, rapid declines in stroke mortality in the Southeast have left West South Central states with relatively high mortality rates; this trend may continue as younger cohorts age. However, rates in the Southeast also remain high, especially for blacks.

If the influences of aging processes on gait are to be understood, gerontologists must become better versed in experimental methodology appropriate to locomotion research. They must also begin to conduct experiments that move beyond mere description. Systematic research efforts that are interdisciplinary in nature and that incorporate several types of gait analyses will be needed to discover the causes of adaptations and impairments of gait in the aged. Certainly, this will not be easy to accomplish; however, we hope that the work reported here demonstrates this approach is possible and worthwhile.

The National Center for Health Statistics, CDC, has produced an Atlas of United States Mortality which includes maps of rates for the leading causes of death in the United States for the period 1988–1992. As part of this project, many aspects of statistical mapping have been re‐examined to maximize the atlas's effectiveness in conveying accurate mortality patterns to epidemiologists and public health practitioners. Because recent cognitive research demonstrated that no one map style is optimal for answering many different map questions, maps and graphs of several different mortality statistics are included for each cause of death. New mixed effects models were developed to provide predicted rates and improved variance estimates. Results from these models were smoothed using a weighted head‐banging algorithm to produce maps of general spatial trends free of background noise. Maps of White female lung cancer rates from the new atlas are presented here to illustrate how this innovative combination of maps and graphs permits greater exploration of the underlying mortality data than is possible from previous single‐map atlas designs. Published in 1999 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the United States.

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