We’re already more than halfway through the year. Time…moving…too…fast. Is there a pause button somewhere? In case you missed them, here are the most popular post from the last month:

1. Largest data breaches of all time
2. Organizational charts in major tech
3. All roads lead to philosophy, on Wikipedia
4. Most common iPhone passcodes
5. Long-exposure air traffic
6. Gender and time comparisons on Twitter
7. Flowchart to decide if you should share that pic of your privates
8. DataBot mouse makes larger files physically harder to move
9. Anatomy of a computer virus explained
10. Analysis of passwords in Sony security breach

As usual, thanks for sharing, tweeting, and liking. Every little bit helps FlowingData reach a wider audience.

Whenever I post a Sankey diagram (for example, here, here, and here), someone always asks how they can make their own. I’m always surprised that so many people have data where the chart type applies, but in any case, I’ve never had a good answer other than open up Illustrator and do it by hand. DensityDesign tries to make Sankey diagram creation easier with Fineo.
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If you’re a parent, most likely you want your children to go to the best schools available, but what if you found out that the school that they attend didn’t measure up to the school a couple miles away? Using previously unreleased federal education data, ProPublica helps you compare.
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Does more crime happen during the late hours of the night or in the middle of the afternoon? Trulia Insights uses small multiples to look at crime by hour in major cities, or rather, when it is reported, according to SpotCrime. There appears to be a dip during the 3 a.m. to 7 a.m. hours for all crime types, across all cities. Well, except for Indianapolis, which seems to report incidents with rounded off hours.
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A big thank you to the FlowingData sponsors. This little blog wouldn’t be what it is now without them. Check them out. They help you make sense of and communicate with data.

Tableau Software — Combines data exploration and visual analytics in an easy-to-use data analysis tool you can quickly master. It makes data analysis easy and fun. Customers are working 5 to 20 times faster using Tableau.

Column Five Media — Whether you are a startup that is just beginning to get the word out about your product, or a Fortune 500 company looking to be more social, they can help you create exciting visual content – and then ensure that people actually see it.

InstantAtlas — Enables information analysts and researchers to create highly-interactive online reporting solutions that combine statistics and map data to improve data visualization, enhance communication, and engage people in more informed decision making.

IDV Solutions Visual Fusion — Business intelligence software for building focused apps that unite data from virtually any data source in a visual, interactive context for better insight and understanding.

Want to sponsor FlowingData? Contact me at [email protected] for more details.

Design firm Berg rethinks the everyday sales receipt under the premise that registers nowadays are connected to a central system, which has access to data about sales, food, etc.
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In another reword of the pivotal scene in Der Untergang, Adolf Hitler learns topology. Still makes me laugh every time.
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Manu Cornet caricaturizes org charts of major tech companies, such as Amazon with its top-down structure and Google with its slightly less structured structure. Drop it like it’s hot.

[Organizational Charts | Thanks, Ian]

Till Nagel teaches you how to design custom maps in Processing with TileMill. Could come in handy one day. Saving for later. [via]

Whenever I’m out late at night with my bottle of black spray paint while climbing onto the highway overpass, I’m always like, “I wish there was an easier way to make pie charts on this street sign. There has to be a better way!” I am sure you can identify. Well fret no more. Golan Levin, an artist and educator, provides you with the open-source pie chart stencil.
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My pending thesis is on personal data collection (i.e. quantified self, personal informatics, self-surveillance, or whatever you wanna call it), so there’s a special place in my heart for projects with data about an individual, no matter who they are. It’s like taking a peek at part of someone’s journal that they’ve decided to make public.

Designer and architecture student Lauren Manning has documented her life for the past two years, and for her thesis project, she visualized a subset of that data — her food consumption in 2010 — with a variety of over 40 graphics. Instead of sticking with a single, optimized view of her data, she stood back and let the data fly to see what would happen.
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Files and folders on your computer look and feel the same regardless of how much space on your hard drive they take up. Delete a 5-gigabyte file or a 5-kilobyte file with a simple click and drag of the mouse. Sure, one might take a little longer to delete than the other, but there’s no change in effort on your part. In the real world, we know that’s not true. Otherwise, shipping would probably be free for everything (or at least a flat rate). Jan Barth and Roman Grasy experiment with this idea with DataBot.
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Motion designer Patrick Clair tells the story of Stuxnet, “a Microsoft Windows computer worm discovered in July 2010 that targets industrial software and equipment.” Unlike many viruses and worms, Stuxnet was designed with a specific target — Siemens Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems — and left any other systems unharmed. Stuxnet could then increase pressure in nuclear reactors and turn off oil pipelines, all the while showing monitors everything was fine.

Get the full skinny in Clair’s well done motion graphic video below.
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For several decades, Harvard Laboratory of Adult Development has chronicled the lives of hundreds of men from adolescence through adulthood for “an unprecedented database of life histories with which to view the dynamic character of the aging process.” Designer Laura Javier took ten of those cases and visualized them in the Elements of Happiness.
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Last year Stamen Design received a grant from the Knight News Challenge to design and implement Citytracking, a project to help people gather data about their cities and gain some kind of understanding about it. Dotspotting, the phase of the project, just launched. It makes it much easier to put dots on a map.
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The color of the sky changes through the day and into the night and there are subtle differences every day with clouds, pollution, etc. Mike Bodge use this idea in N SKY C, a project with a simple concept. Take a picture with a webcam of the New York City sky every five minutes, take the average color, and post it to the site. N SKY C is the result. Roll over grids to see the picture that was taken.
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As comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains, this is what happens when a powerful weapon falls into the wrong hands. Or when someone in power is just plain dumb.

[SMBC via @eagereyes]

While information graphics have been around for decades, their current form is brand new (or kind of old, if you’re counting in Internet years). Just like the Web, information and data graphics will continue to evolve in line with improving technology and growing amounts of data.

Sarah Slobin, of The Wall Street Journal, follows up on her previous article on successful infographics with an imagined future of what is to come in the next few decades.
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