The Technology

Articles, graphics, and other projects that I’ve worked on recently:

• Where Americans are Moving An interactive map that uses IRS data to illustrate migration patterns. This one got pretty big (I discussed the map’s reception and gave a technical introduction here). The map’s popularity is a good illustration of how deep data can lead to universal appeal.
• China Widens its Reach An interactive, animated map of Chinese foreign investments. I described the map’s production process on this site, and it’s also been featured in a handful of infographics blogs like this one.
• America’s Bank Bust: How Bad Is It? An interactive comparison between the current financial crisis and the Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s. There were lots of failures in the 1980s, but the Washington Mutual collapse in September of 2008 was unprecedented, even on an inflation-adjusted basis.
• A Genius Blog for Mathematicians A profile of UCLA mathematician and Fields medalist Terence Tao and his blog. Ran in the November 16, 2009 issue of the magazine as “Blogarithms.”
• A Map of American Unemployment An interactive map of unemployment rates by county. Clicking on a county brings up an historical graph. This graphic carries my personal all-time record for data density: 744,180 data points are represented on this map (that’s 236 months of unemployment data plus a population count for each of the 3,140 U.S. counties).
• Where Next Year’s Jobs Will Be Another interactive job map, this one of forecast change in employment. This map was based on Moody’s Economy.com forecasts, which included some improbably accurate forecasts for counties with miniscule populations. To deal with that and to downplay large counties with small populations, I used a dot density scheme and didn’t show forecasts for counties with populations under 2,000. I also contributed graphics to an accompanying magazine package written by Chris Steiner and Josh Zumbrun.
• The World’s Dirtiest Power Plants An interactive map of the 200 highest-carbon power plants in the world. This one became a big thing on Digg for a while.
• Wall Street’s Year of Fear An interactive graphic illustrating the impact of the financial crisis on the stability of U.S. government debt. (The cost of insuring U.S. treasury securities went from infinitesimal to something several times infinitesimal.) I collaborated with Josh Zumbrun, who is now with Bloomberg, on this and an accompanying magazine article.