Visualization online can be a challenge if you don’t know how to program. Analytics startup Trifacta just lightened the load with Vega, a “visualization grammar” that lets you create and share by editing a JSON file. Check out the demo live editor to see how this works. Select different chart types from the drop down menu on the top left, which you can render in HTML5 Canvas or SVG.

Of note: Vega is built on top of Data-Driven Documents.

To get right to the point: Vega is NOT intended as a “replacement” for D3. D3 is intentionally a low-level system. During the early design of D3, we even referred to it as a “visualization kernel” rather than a “toolkit” or “framework”. In addition to custom design, D3 is intended as a supporting layer for higher-level visualization tools. Vega is one such tool, and leverages D3 heavily within its implementation.

Gonna keep an eye on this one.

For the past few months, Stamen Design has been working with 3-D data from Nokia’s Here. Something pretty came out of the experiment.

For your viewing, embedding, linking, and otherwise internet-ing pleasure: http://here.stamen.com/ is live today. It uses 3D data from HERE for San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin to create city-wide 3D browsable maps, and it does this in the browser (though you’ll need a WebGL-enabled browser to see it). As in many of our other mapping projects, the urls change dynamically depending on location and other factors, and the data conforms, more or less, to the Tile Map Service specification. What this means, among other things, is that it’s not only possible to link to and embed these maps at specific locations and zoom levels, but that it’s easy—and as we’ve seen with Citytracking, easy is good.

There are a bunch of views to play with, and you should try all of them. My favorites though are the city-planning look in Pinstripe and the glowing aesthetic of the height view.

FlowingData reader Amir sent this along. In lieu of a list of coffee drinks, this place in in East London opted for ingredient breakdowns. I’m guessing there’s a standard menu outside the frame, because otherwise, coffee neophytes (like me) would have no clue what to do. Anyone care to fill in the blanks?

Spot any charts in the wild? You should email me a picture.

The shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was horrible, but there have been thousands of gun deaths since. Huffington Post is mapping them.

Circles represent the number of deaths in a city, and the larger a circle the higher the count. A bar chart on the bottom shows the data over time and serves as a navigation device. Click on a day or a location, and the names of victims appear on the right with a link to the related news story.

See also: Periscopic’s work on the topic, which now has filters and is updated in real-time.

Also: episodes 487 and 488 of This American Life, which focus on Harper High School in Chicago, where gang violence is a daily concern.

Metrico is a puzzle action game for PlayStation Vita that centers around charts and graphs. The creators call them infographics, but whatever.

The idea has been in our heads for a few years, and was born out of noticing how beautiful infographics can look as an art form. It was reinforced by seeing that infographics have become increasingly important in contemporary pop-culture. While they haven’t made their way to videogames yet, we think it’s a place where they can work exceptionally well. This is not just because of their pretty aesthetics as much as it is about actively changing data and how that can be visualized.

The teaser above shows a guy running on and jumping over bar and line charts, and the last sentence of the paragraph seems to suggest that these things will be based on actual data. I kind of doubt it though.

How about a SimCity-like game that uses real-time crime, traffic, and government data? Now that’d be something. They already kind of do that for sports games with injuries and starting lineups. [Thanks, Raphael]

When you go to one of the major sites to look up the weather, it’s often hard to find what you’re looking for. The sites feel dated, there isn’t much hierarchy to the information, and navigation gets buried in the show-as-much-information-as-possible-on-the-same-page approach. Forecast, a site by the makers of the Dark Sky app, hopes to improve that experience during those times you need more than the high and lows for the day from the nearest widget.

When you visit Forecast, you notice a difference right away. There’s a map with local, regional, and global views, the temperature in large print on the right, and there are descriptions about what to expect that are easy to understand.

From there, you get your daily forecasts below the map with details on demand. So you can get a lot of the same information that you get from larger sites, but you don’t get hit with a bunch of data at once, and when you request more information, you get it quickly.

There’s also an API. Forecast and the Dark Sky app both run on it, which is the cherry on top of the goodness.

I usually go to Matthew Ericson’s minimalist weather page when I’m figuring out when to ride my bike or mow the lawn. Forecast might be my new weather destination for a while.

Deputy editor at Ars Technica Nate Anderson was curious if he could learn to crack passwords in a day. Although there’s definitely a difference between advanced and beginner crackers, openly available software and resources make it easy to get started and do some damage.

After my day-long experiment, I remain unsettled. Password cracking is simply too easy, the tools too sophisticated, the CPUs and GPUs too powerful for me to believe that my own basic attempts at beefing up my passwords are a long-term solution. I’ve resisted password managers in the past over concerns about storing data in the cloud or about the hassle of syncing with other computers or about accessing passwords from a mobile device or because dropping $50 bucks never felt quite worth it—hacks only happen to other people, right?

But until other forms of authentication take root, the humble password will form a primary defense of our personal information. The time has come for me to find a better solution to generating, storing, and handling them.

I use 1Password.

Along the same lines as their NFL fan maps, Facebook had a closer look at March Madness fandom, based on likes for team pages. In the map below, each county is colored by the conference liked the most.

It’s hard to know the impact of drone attacks as outsiders looking in, because the United States government doesn’t disclose the information. Using data maintained by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which is estimates based on reports from the ground, Pitch Interactive sheds some light on every known drone attack in Pakistan.

Since 2004, the US has been practicing in a new kind of clandestine military operation. The justification for using drones to take out enemy targets is appealing because it removes the risk of losing American military, it’s much cheaper than deploying soldiers, it’s politically much easier to maneuver (i.e. flying a drone within Pakistan vs. sending troops) and it keeps the world in the dark about what is actually happening. It takes the conflict out of sight, out of mind. The success rate is extremely low and the cost on civilian lives and the general well-being of the population is very high. This project helps to bring light on the topic of drones. Not to speak for or against, but to inform and to allow you to see for yourself whether you can support drone usage or not.

Again, these are estimates, so the numbers might be higher or lower, but the point is that these attacks exist, and civilians and children are often involved.

As the publication of Data Points nears, I’m excited to hold it in my hands just like I was the first time. It feels weird to say that. In college, a 5-page report seemed like too much to handle, and I would hunt for fonts that took the most space and fiddled with margins to produce more pages, without making it look like I did. I guess a lot can happen in 10 years. Heck, a lot can happen in a few months.

I think the difference is that now I’m writing about something that’s interesting to me — topics that I immerse myself in for fun — which makes the book-writing process fun.

Sure, it can be challenging at times, but in the best way possible. Here’s my experience with Data Points.
Read More