Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Visualizing the concept of prospective aging with R

In two great papers published in Science and Nature, W. Sanderson and  S. Scherbov proposed a new way to understand population aging. Instead of focusing on the time people have lived, the authors take a prospective look at the number of years people are still expected to live.

This concept of "prospective aging" is nicely summarized by Ilya Kashnitsky in a blog post:
"The underlying idea is really simple – age is not static: a person aged 65 (the conventional border deliminating elderly population) today is in many aspects not the same as a person ages 65 half a century ago. Health and lifespan improved a lot in the last decades, meaning that today people generally have much more remaining years of life at the moment of being recognized as elderly by the conventional standards. Thus, Sanderson and Scherbov proposed to define elderly population based on the estimation of the expected remaining length of life rather than years lived. Such a refined view of population ageing disqualifies the alarmist claims of the approaching demographic collapse."
If you're interested in the topic, I would highly recommend reading the whole post (and the papers, of course). Ilya brings not only a nice summary of the concept, he also presents some R scripts to create animated population pyramids to visualize prospective aging.

 Ilya Kashnitsky writes a great blog and twitter about demographic research and R more broadly, and I would highly recommend following his work online.



Related Links:

Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Urban Picture





Sunday, May 21, 2017

The impressive expansion of subway systems in China

I have posted in the past a GIF that compares the expansion of the subway systems of Rio and Shanghai between 1979 and 2014. This is a bit embarrassing for Rio, for sure, but let's be honest. Pretty much any developing country and even the USA in their efforts to develop mass transport infrastructure pales in comparison to China. Needless to say that massive expansion of infrastructure like this usually comes at high social and environmental costs that should not be neglected.

Peter Dovak (twitter) has created a new GIF that shows the expansion of subway systems in China between 1990 and 2020, giving a glimpse of the Chinese urban powerhouse. Peter has other great projects you might want to check out, including the Mini Metro Maps of the world.




ps. I saw this on the Transportation Planning and Analysis Facebook group, via Gonçalo Correia

Saturday, May 13, 2017

Time-lapse: night-flight over Europe

Great shot, by Thomas Pesquet.

Wednesday, May 10, 2017

Message of the Day

Dedicated to a dear friend, Claudia Comberti. From London to the Amazon forest.


Friday, May 5, 2017

Changing relation between wealth and left-wing vote: Piketty's guess on the French elections

I don't usually post about politics in the blog, but I had the chance to attend Thomas Piketty's presentation at the Marshall Lectures over the last two days and he dedicated a few minutes of his speech to talk about the 2017 French elections happening this weekend. 

He presented these two slides, where he shows the changing relationship between wealth + education and left-wing vote in France. The slides show what is Piketty's guess on what is going to happen in the French elections.  Hi guess are the red lines in both charts, suggesting that Macron will win the election. I think I'll just leave this here, for the record.

update after the elections: so, apparently, Piketty was correct.


photos: by Rafael H M Pereira

Thursday, May 4, 2017

Urban Picture

Street Chalking Games, New York city 1950

credit: ?, via MicropolisNYC

Monday, May 1, 2017