The madoff scandal

My blog was supposed to be about my various travels throughout the world. But, alas as things usually go, plans and reality diverge.

I’ve been reading about the Madoff scandal with some incredulity — what kind of people would hand over so much money, and a carte blanche to an investment advisor they’d never even met?
A conversation this morning, and a pointer to a legal brief led me to create a visualization of the data. Where are the people from? Well now you can see it here: Madoff victims by geography.
Things to fix:
  • The raw data were unstructured, so I wrote a really ugly python script to parse it. Since I wrote it in about 20 minutes, I misinterpret things like “1987 trust for children” as an address, so I’m missing some victims. 
  • My javascript fu is atrocious. So things don’t work so well. Zooming out doesn’t refresh. When zoomed out, points should be clustered, not all displayed at once, overwhelming the browser
  • Get info on how much each person lost and make a heatmap

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