Here are three tools for making VR in the open web, whether or not you’re a developer.

Lots of everyday objects are designed to prevent errors—saving clumsy and forgetful humans from our own mistakes or protecting us from worst-case scenarios. Sometimes designers make it impossible for us to mess up, other times they build in a backup plan for when we inevitably do. But regardless, the solution is baked right into the design.

Typography is an aesthetic choice, but it’s also an interface element that can help keep drivers and astronauts safe—or put real people in danger.

A few of our favorite bits of thinking and linking around bots.

Chances are, you probably think your mind works pretty well. But, in reality, our brains fool us all the time with blind spots and biases. So what can we do about it? Let’s examine how graphics, including charts, interactives and other visual tools, can help show us the shortcomings of our own minds.

At NICAR 2015 I saw Al Shaw’s talk about how he worked with LANDSAT satellite imagery to build “Losing Ground.” Al described how he and his colleagues at ProPublica built a suite of custom tools to work with LANDSAT data to tell the story of the degradation of the Louisiana coastline. I was impressed and inspired by their work, and by Al’s reminder that the decades of data and imagery produced by NASA’s satellites and probes were a public-domain treasure trove that surely held many opportunities for storytelling.

Here’s a roundup of our favorite projects and pieces from the past couple of weeks, all worthy of another look.

In gearing up for NICAR, there’s a bunch more ways to participate such as pitching proposals to lightning talks and the conversations track. Plus, events all over the world this month.

With about 20,000 unlabeled audio files to classify, as part of a big breaking story, we created a process to help us focus on the files we actually needed.

Two weeks of highlights and bookmarks: projects and code that showed us new angles, got newsroom coders talking, and pointed toward better ways of working.

Ireland welcomes a chapter of ONA, meetups in NYC and Zurich, plus a few deadlines this week.

Multiple events in San Francisco this week, plus so many great opportunities just waiting for your application.

All of us have encountered a particularly emotionally charged news article, with every word betraying the author’s bias. But a single reader would have to be a dedicated follower of a news organization to really understand how much opinion is habitually betrayed in its work. To find out how carefully major news organizations moderate their language in articles on controversial topics, we at Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) used computational techniques to analyze millions of articles from 15 large news organizations in the U.S. Some agencies, we found, do not shy from emotion-laden and biased rhetoric—the Huffington Post and Washington Post, for example. But we also found that, on average, the use of highly emotional language is curbed, pointing to possible self-moderation.

“End the elections arms race” has become a rallying cry in American data journalism. Many newsrooms spend tremendous resources writing code to simply load and parse election data. It’s time we stopped worrying about the plumbing and started competing on the interesting parts. We decided it was time we put some code against our beliefs – our contribution is a tool we’re calling Elex. And it needs your help, too.

Whether in the Bay Area or elsewhere across the country, stories about gentrification tend to reduce the dynamics to one narrative. Newcomers displace longtime residents, erasing history, shifting the economy, and disrupting culture in the process. Focusing on West Oakland, the Youth Radio team behind West Side Stories wanted to surface the many nuanced and sometimes conflicting stories sparked by extreme neighborhood change. Here’s what they made.

Here’s a quick look at some cool projects, beautiful interactives, and other wonderful things that we lingered over this month, ICYMI.

Over the last several months, the New York Times R&D Lab has been thinking about the future of online communities, particularly those communities and conversations that form around news organizations and their journalism. When we think about community discussion, we typically think about comments sections below our articles, or outside forums that link to our content (Twitter, Reddit, etc.). But what comes after free-text comments? To explore this further, we developed Membrane, which is an experiment in permeable publishing. By permeable publishing, we mean a new form of reading experience, in which readers may “push back” through the medium to ask specific, contextual (and constrained) questions of the author.

Meet agate, a Python data analysis library optimized not for performance, but for the performance of the human who is using it. That means focusing on designing code that is easy to learn, readable, and flexible enough to handle any weird data you throw at it. Here’s why you should try it.

On October 19, the Guardian published Homan Square: A Portrait of Chicago’s Detainees as a part of its ongoing investigation into the Chicago Police Department’s alleged abuses of detainee rights at a warehouse facility on Chicago’s west side. We spoke with the Guardian interactive team responsible for the interactive feature, both in their NYC offices and via email.