I'm a writer and editor at Forbes, covering all things quantitative through long-form articles, infographics and interactive applications.
I also manage some of the internal data that goes into our big editorial efforts like the Forbes 400 and Best Places, and I've dabbled in content management systems as well, getting familiar with PHP and the WordPress API to help build Forbes' contributor platform during the summer and fall of 2010.
See my recent work or visit my Forbes blog for more.
Forbes published my new map of Chinese overseas investments last night, and I’ve been pleased with its reception so far. It’s the first map I’ve made that involves animation, and it’s also the first map that I’ve built from scratch using nothing but ActionScript and Python. That turned out to be tricky in a neat, hackerish sort of way.
In the past, I’ve made all of my interactive maps using Avenza’s excellent MAPublisher software. MAPublisher handles geocoding and projections, which leaves me free to faff about with color schemes and callouts.
When you code your own map from scratch like this, though, you have to write something to geocode points and then project them (unless you’re partial to maps where Canada, Greenland and Russia seem to be taking over the world). There are less math-intensive solutions to this, like creating a map in Illustrator and then moving it to Flash (recommended for choropleth maps), but I wanted maximum programmatic control over the map (and the thrill of coding my own solution).
Geocoding was fairly easy in this case; I just derived centroids for each country using ArcGIS and merged those coordinates into the dataset from Heritage’s Derek Scissors using Stata. The data for each country now included deal value, acquirer, target, target’s country, latitude, and longitude.
Now for the projection: simply sizing down the latitude and longitude coordinates linearly by enough to make them represent pixel locations would result in a so-called ‘unprojected’ map that’s a dishonest representation of shapes and relative sizes. Unprojected maps also tend to waste a great deal of space by making the highest and lowest latitudes enormous and the middle latitudes small–a general problem for Web layouts like ours, where maps can’t be more than 768 pixels wide, and for this map specifically, because a great deal of Chinese investment has taken place in parts of Africa and South Asia that are near the equator. READ MORE >
Of JFK Airport’s many faults, which include Odyssian distance from Manhattan and staggering politician-induced flight delays, none is quite as aggravating as the condition of Delta’s terminal complex.
Terminal 3, which opened in the 1960s as the Pan Am Worldport and managed to escape the following five decades with only minimal improvement, is now festooned with kite-like leak catchers and a complicated system (series?) of rubber tubes that divert rainwater from the terminal’s crumbling ceiling (a couple of them are shown in the photo below).
Terminal 2, which is connected to Delta’s other building by a sequence of broken moving walkways, has likewise avoided any major upgrades since it was built for some other long-defunct carrier in the middle of the last century (Eastern Airlines? I’m writing this on my phone from a worn seat in a threadbarely-carpeted waiting area, so research is difficult).
Over the last decade, JFK has gone through an impressive modernization process; the pleasant-enough Airtrain whisks me to the airport from the thrillingly-rebuilt Jamaica Station in less time than it takes a bored TSA agent to find a rogue yogurt container. The airport’s other terminals have been rebuilt: first the terminals that serve a motley assortment of foreign airlines, then American’s complex, and then JetBlue’s. If LOT Polish Airlines gets to use a terminal that’s not an embarrassment to New York City, why can’t one of the airport’s hub carriers (and now the largest airline in the world) have one that’s somewhere above Soviet bloc standards?
Nowhere is David Paterson’s impossible election situation better illustrated than in the Google results for his name (left). His campaign’s site is the seventh hit for “David Paterson,” well below several negative pages. Add search engine optimization to the long list of things that New York State’s elected officials can’t seem to get right.
At the top of his results page are two news articles detailing his latest scandal (in which he apparently contacted a woman who lodged a domestic abuse complaint against his aide).
Below those news headlines are Paterson’s Wikipedia article, the last section of which documents his moribund gubernatorial campaign, and his state government website. Then come two headlines from the Huffington Post, one questioning whether Paterson will resign and another announcing the resignation of the aide involved in the domestic dispute.
Finally, right before Paterson’s campaign website comes a Business Insider article about the rumors that circulated in Albany over the New York Times’s investigation into the governor’s aides.
Things do not look good for David Paterson.