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This is a map I created recently for the Environmental Defense Fund. It shows buildings in New York City that burn dirty oil. The map contains information about 9000 buildings that burn either type 4 or type 6 oil. Both types are bad for the environment.

My biggest challenge with this map was the sheer amount of data it has to load, parse and plot. Fortunately, AS3 is fast. It is a pleasure to see the parser churns through thousands of lines almost instantly. Another factor that made my life much easier was the map framework I used. I want to thank the people at stamen.com and the developers of modest map for creating an amazing framework. With just a few tweaks I managed to plot thousands of points on a map.

It seems like the story got a lot of attention. It was mentioned by The New York Times and Daily News.

To view the map, please click here

Map, Programming

We learned and utilized many new technologies in this project. Unlike the Adversity index map where we didn’t have proper server-side tool to handle big data set and we had to use hacks, this project uses a brand new server-side tool to do the heavy lifting.

We built the server-side code using Django framework. This is the first time we are using this framework and it is awesome. It makes my life as a web developer much easier, especially when I was completely new to it.

For this project, we built a framework in AS3 that allows flash to communicate with the server and to make requests in real time. The framework makes it easy to parse responses from the server and deliver them to different parts of the application. With that, we are able to support deep linking, back button and breadcrumb.

Design, Map, Programming

I am particularly proud of the world map because we managed to create it from scratch in a day. Even better, I designed the code so that we could reuse the map again without any extra development time. That means editors can just plug in a new data set and the map is ready to go.

View the world map
View the U.S. map

Design, Map, Programming

I worked on this project a couple months ago. The data set was interesting and I had full control over how to design and implement it, which was a lot of fun. Because of the short deadline, I didn’t manage to implement all the little details for this map. But in the end, it turned out well.

Click here to view the map

Map, Programming

The data set shows very interesting patterns. The coastal states got hit hard by the housing crisis, so their unemployment rates are worse than the rest of the U.S. You will probably notice that Michigan, house of GM, Ford and Chrysler, is doing pretty bad. In fact, it has the highest unemployment rate as of October 2008. The only state that shares the same honor with Michigan is Rhode Island with 9.3 percent unemployment.

The coding part of the project took me about a day to write. Kriss Chaumont designed the layout and manipulated the data. We will keep updating the map every month when the new data comes out.

Click here to view the graphics

Design, Map, Programming

You can find details about this project here. The article was also featured on infosthetic.com.

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Programming

This map is the first version of a more ambitious project that I am working on. Right now, it works like a tool for editors to map interesting news and events. An editor can create a collection in Virtual Earth and use the rss feed generated from the collection to feed the map. The tool is interesting in a way, because it gives editors control over what they want to display. They do not have to come to us, the producers, to make changes on the map.

The editors used the tool in a few projects and they seemed to like it. At one point, we had 3 or 4 projects using this tool from various sections on the site.

I have to thank Phil Zepeda, a fellow producer from msnbc, for helping me with this project. We had only about 3 days to build this out from scratch. The project’s original intention was to accompany our bigger hurricane tracker map to cover the Hurricane Ike. It was supposed to be a one time interactive that is created to show the aftermath of the Hurricane Ike.

3D, Animation, Programming

This project came to me as a surprise from our Art Director Clay. Colin Hick was the original producer who was responsible for it, but he moved to a different team, so he ended up passing the project back to us, the interactive team. When it came to me, I was in the middle of building the polling map, so I fell like I didn’t give the project the attentions that it needed. However, I am quiet happy with how it turned out.

I spent about four solid days modelling different pieces using Maya. At one point I thought about textures, but after rendering a few scenes with the fake mental ray ambient occlusion material, I ended up liking the clean look more. I used the same technique for the Pummeling Cancer With Protons 3D project.

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Design, Programming

Golf’s four major tournaments offer competitors a more difficult test than the rest of the stops on tour. But while most players succumb to the tougher courses and heightened nerves, Tiger Woods shows less of a decline, especially in categories like greens in regulation and scrambling.

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