The booming shipping network

Click to see full six-pages graphic

Not since 1956, when a North Carolina truck driver named Malcom McLean created a standard-size container for cargo, has global shipping seen such radical change. Carriers are bigger than ever, ports are becoming automated, and routes are shifting. The volume of goods that move between ports in Asia now accounts for 13% of all seaborne trade, up nearly a third from a decade ago. Routes through the ice-free far north now beckon. While global shipping volumes rose 6.2% in 2011 and port operators were profitable, owners of container ships were hit hard by overcapacity and falling cargo rates. In the latest issue of Fortune magazine..

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

Stricter auto emissions standards announced

President Barack Obama announced new standards Tuesday to curb vehicle carbon dioxide emissions by about one-third by 2016. A great occasion to use the excellent data from Purdue University. Under the Vulcan Project, they calculated carbon emissions per source, and made it available for a variety of geographic levels.

This first picture just use color coded county areas. the amount shown is the yearly total.

Then, I decided to study the differences between the total emissions, and the per capita emissions, to see if it would highlight differences due to legislation. For example, one can see that california emissions are not that dramatic, when seen per capita, due to their more drastic regulations. Click maps for higher resolution, and click here to see Beth Davidz flash interactive.

End of fire season

This year was not the worst when it comes to fires in California. Typically, January marks the end of the fire season in the south. A good time to have a look back at the 2007 season, where fires were burning strong.  This graphic has been made in Adobe Illustrator, ArcGIS, and Cinema 4D. 

Click to see larger JPEG and alternative version

Dark areas show places burnt earlier in the year, red active fires. If you click the image, you can see another version of this graphic where I used Census data to show population density. Translated in spanish by Tina Garcia.

Election night

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The Election night is traditionally a big night for the AP, primary provider of results data. The template for the print graphics are ready and tagged weeks in advance. Our key developer for that application is John Balestrieri who is our Election guru since 2002. Carrie Osgood was working with him this year on designing the hundreds of graphics moving before, after, and during the night. In attachment, this is the centerpiece graphic, a 6-col graphic I designed with them. Published also during the night was a popular Flash application. Troy Thibodeaux in charge of the back-end, Beth Davidz for the front-end. Of course, many other people contributed to the final results and thanks to their efforts, the night went on smoothly for on-line as well as for the newspapers print version.

Iraq displaced population

An interesting investigative project I worked on with Lynn Dombek and John Parsons from our research department. You can clearly see how Iraqis found refuge in different locations depending of their religion.

Click to see larger picture