This visualization shows a choropleth map of U.S. census PUMA boundaries created with Matplotlib’s Basemap toolkit, plotting shapefile geometries from the `tl_2013_{0}_puma10` dataset. The map renders state boundaries using `readshapefile()` with `drawbounds=True`, but the script crashes when decoding attribute records from the shapefile. Specifically, the `shapefile.py` module attempts to decode a byte (`0xf1`) as UTF-8, raising a `UnicodeDecodeError` at position 2. The failure occurs inside Basemap’s `shapeRecords()` method, preventing any map output. The code relies on Python 3.4 and the Basemap library’s built-in shapefile reader.