Al Shaw is a Senior News Application Developer at ProPublica. He uses data and interactive graphics to cover environmental issues, natural disasters and politics.
A year before Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston, Shaw was part of a team that produced “Hell and High Water,” which warned of the region's vulnerability to coastal storms. The project won a Peabody Award in 2017. Shaw's project, “Losing Ground,” about the century-long erosion of Louisiana's coast won a Gold Medal from the Society for News Design. His interactive maps surrounding FEMA's response to Hurricane Sandy were honored with the Society of Professional Journalists’ Sigma Delta Chi award. Before joining ProPublica, Shaw was a designer/developer at the political news website Talking Points Memo.
The chemical can trigger health problems and causes more cancer than any other toxic air pollutant. Our reporters traveled around New York City and New Jersey with equipment to measure its presence. The results proved concerning.
In most of the country, formaldehyde contributes more to outdoor cancer risk than any other toxic air pollutant. Look up your address to see risks from the chemical on your block and where it comes from.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s attempts to reckon with formaldehyde have been repeatedly thwarted by the companies that rely on it. If the past is any guide, even modest steps toward reform are all but guaranteed to hit a dead end under Trump.
ProPublica spent months teaching a computer to analyze past Ebola outbreaks linked to deforestation. What we found reveals a weakness in the way that governments and public health experts are preparing for future pandemics.
ProPublica borrowed machine learning methods from academic research to better understand links between forest loss and spillover risk. The results were surprising, but led us to a story we wouldn’t have found otherwise.
The forests around the epicenter of the world’s worst Ebola outbreak are getting patchier. The next pandemic could emerge from the edges around these patches, where wildlife and humans mix.
Research links deforestation to outbreaks. Combining two peer-reviewed models and the latest satellite images of tree loss, we discovered that the sites of five previous outbreaks have a greater chance of facing Ebola again.
Making data public isn’t enough when it’s incomprehensible to the people it affects. ProPublica set out to decode a complex EPA data set to expose hot spots of industrial air pollution across the U.S.
Nadie le dijo a la familia de Yaneli Ortiz que la fábrica cerca de la que vivían emitía óxido de etileno. No les dijeron cuando en la EPA se descubrió que causa cáncer. Tampoco cuando le diagnosticaron leucemia.
Nobody told Yaneli Ortiz’s family that the factory they lived near emitted ethylene oxide. Not when the EPA found it causes cancer. Not when she was diagnosed with leukemia. And not when Texas moved to allow polluters to emit more of the chemical.
La EPA permite a los contaminadores que conviertan barrios en “zonas de sacrificio” donde los residentes respiran carcinógenos. ProPublica revela dónde están esos lugares en un mapa, el primero de este tipo, y con análisis de datos.
Utilizamos información de la EPA para trazar un mapa de las emisiones atmosféricas industriales que causan cáncer hasta el nivel de los barrios. Busque su casa para ver si usted y sus seres queridos están viviendo en un lugar peligroso.
Si usted vive cerca de ciertas instalaciones industriales, puede tener un riesgo estimado de cáncer más alto. Aquí hay respuestas a preguntas comunes, datos producto de una colaboración participativa y cómo compartir su experiencia.
Using the EPA’s data, we mapped the spread of cancer-causing industrial air emissions down to the neighborhood level. Look up your home to see if you and your loved ones are living in a hot spot.
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