How a cab driver makes money
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, cab drivers and chauffeurs make a median salary of $22,400 per year, or $10.79 an hour. (I believe that's not including tips.) Using about three months of fare data from a single driver, Alvin Chang for The Boston Globe showed how a driver makes a living day-to-day.
Time runs left to right, and each column represents fares collected in a day. A driver starts each day in the red when he or she leases a cab for $125, which includes gas, and then works into the blue.
After an animation plays out over a few seconds, you can click to zoom in and see specific fares. I expected to drag left and right once zoom, but the chart just zooms back out. I suspect the interaction is mostly there for people on mobile devices. I also wanted to scrub the vertical line that indicates time to see details for spikes or days no fares were collected.
So there's still a bit to be desired here, but the data itself is interesting, which makes it worth a look.
Vega: A visualization grammar to create without programming
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.
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