  In every country, public and private agencies allocate extensive funding to
collect large-scale statistical data, which in turn are studied and analyzed in
order to determine local, regional, national, and international policies
regarding all aspects relevant to the welfare of society. One important aspect
of that process is the visualization of statistical data with embedded
geographical information, which most often relies on archaic methods such as
maps colored according to graded scales. In this work, we apply non-standard
visualization techniques based on physical principles. We illustrate the method
with recent statistics on homicide rates in Brazil and their correlation to
other publicly available data. This physics-based approach provides a novel
tool that can be used by interdisciplinary teams investigating statistics and
model projections in a variety of fields such as economics and gross domestic
product research, public health and epidemiology, socio-demographics, political
science, business and marketing, and many others.
