New storm tracker

A new storm tracker, courtesy of programers/designers John Balestrieri and Siobhan Dooley. Some little design glitches are still in the work.

Click to see tracker in pop-up window

Wildcat offenses

Simple and clean work from Merrill Sherman and Eddie Degasero.

Economic Stress Index

A series of  maps tracking the state and change of economic indicators by county. The Economic Stress index is a combination of these results. Carrie Osgood designed the flash interface, Troy Thibodeaux and John Balestrieri on the back-end of the application. Data displayed are unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcy in addition to the Index itself. (Click on the map to see interactive)

Obama 100 days

An interactive looking at the Obama administration’s major initiatives during its first 100 days. Developed by Kevin Vineys with data compiled by NRC, the AP research center.

Click to see Flash interactive

Most cities post gain in graduation rate

Just over half of students in the principal school systems of the country’s 50 largest cities complete high school with a diploma. That rate remains well below the national graduation rate of about 71 percent, as only three of these 50 principal districts reach or exceed it.
The interesting fact about this chart is that it allows to navigate from coast to coast, rather than navigate a list classified by rate size or alphabetical order. See that as a kind of U.S. map that would be vertically shrank to the extreme. You can see the print graphic here. AP members also have a more traditional chart available here.

Stats are from the EPE Research Center.

Immigrants in jail

Through a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to the Department of Homeland Security, we were able to get the population in immigration detention center across the country for a specific time. Striking findings show that there were 32,000 detainees on the night of January 25, 2009. Of those, more than half had no criminal conviction. A Chinese citizen has been held with no conviction for over four years. Maps created in ArcView by Phil Holm for print and Flash platforms. Great stats that tells the story.

Click here to see Flash app

Tracking the financial sector bailout

Since November, I have been tracking the money going into the financial bailout. The data is coming from AP reporting and from Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, specialists in financial services. I started compiling the data in an Excel spreadsheet, and then, when the list kept growing, got help from our research department where Lynn Dombek and John Parsons decided to devote time to develop a Ruby on Rail application facilitating greatly the data entry:

Click to see Flash application

Click to for larger view of the print graphic

Thanks to this interface, AP reporters can use the constantly updated data in their reporting.

Coming back to my story. Week after week I have been entering data, hoping we will be able to use it for print graphics and web applications. This is just the beginning, but we have been able to publish a Flash interface allowing viewers to check on their banks. This is the Flash app, developed by Sean McDade, receiving an update twice a day from the Ruby on Rail application. We also were able to distribute the first graphics created with the database stats. More creative visualization to come, as I hope to have more time to use the diverse side information I fed the database.

Inauguration day

Here are some highlights of the AP multimedia production on Inauguration day.

Click to see a panorama of the event

Bernadette Tuazon acted as a technical advisor on this panorama and many others, working with photographer Susan Walsh to take and stitching pictures together. I used a modified version of an open source panorama player, PanoSalado to publish it.

Here is a 3-D rendering of the inauguration parade route, realized by Merrill Sherman with Jaime Holguin help.

A title card for AP video live on the web, featuring 3-D work of Peter Hamlin and editing from Jaime. AP staffers use Cinema 4D for 3-D rendering.

And finally, our inauguration widget, thanks to Matt Ford’s hard work.