Assorted Links

1. The Future of Science 2021
   
   
2. Measuring racism with Google search (the paper shows that Barak Obama lost 3-5 percentage points of the popular vote in 2008 because he is black)
   
   
3. Call for papers: Convergence special issue on mobile media in Brazil
   
   
4. Announcement of Congestion Pricing in Bogota
   
   
5. The Greater Tokyo Area, as compared to the UK
   
   
6. The one-second film festival held by Montblanc
   
   
7. An interactive map showing oil production by country from 1960 to 2010 (via The Map Room)

soundtrack: Céu



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Urban Demographics is now on Twitter !

@UrbDemographics

Spread the words: we are now on Twitter ! @UrbDemographics

I'm still learning how to use it. You will have to be patient with me during this test period.

Baby Deficit and Economic Crises

In his paper 'The Baby Deficit' Science 2006, Michael Balter points out why public policies are unlikely to reverse fertility declines. His abstract couldn't be more brief:

"As fertility rates decline across the developed world, governments are offering big incentives for childbearing. Experts don't expect them to have much effect."

And talking about fertility reversion, economic recession will not help much in that. Read this NYT piece Fewer Births in a Bad Economy. How low can fertility get in Europe?

(image credit: NYT)

Untangling the City

A new CASA Working Paper by Michael Batty. I will probably take a few hours to really understand the paper. But I'll try it !

[image credit: ?    I love this image. It reminds me of a movie scene from 'Inception']

According to M. Batty, the paper describes "the transition from thinking of ‘cities as machines’ to ‘cities as organisms’". I wonder what could be clinically diagnosed as an urban cancer...


soundtrack: Beck

NeW! 'Prata da Casa' session: regional and urban economics handbook

I'm starting a new post session called "Prata da Casa" to recommend some good research and publications by my colleagues here at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (IPEA).

"Prata da Casa" is a Portuguese expression that in this case refers to some good 'homegrown research'. So I'm inaugurating this session with a recent regional and urban economics handbook with emphasis on Brazil:

Regional and Urban Economics: Theories and methods with emphasis on Brazil (organized by Bruno Cruz, Bernardo Furtado, Leonardo Monasterio and Waldery Rodrigues Júnior) - Portuguese Version Only

off-topic: Modernist Modernist Monuments

I bumped into these bizarre and still beautiful Modernist Monuments. I would say that we have something similar here in Brasília in a much smaller scale with the Crystals Square (by Burle Marx).

This reminded me of a book with fascinating photos from Frederic Chaubin depicting socialist architectural eccentricities: 

Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed 

soundtrack for the weekend: Legião Urbana

Travel Time Maps

We have already seen some Isochronic maps here at Urban Demographics. This post shows a few more Travel Time Maps for other cities around the world.

• A very good analysis on travel time variation across Melbourne and Victoria (Australia)
  
  
•  a few  UK Cities

• Mapnificent for more than 20 cities (tutorial video here)
  
  
• New York - Travel Times on Commuter Rail via (visual complexity)
  
  
• Isochronic London Underground (interactive)
  
  
• and the most attractive: Netherlands Isochronic Map (by Vincent Meertens via wired)
  

TIMEMAPS from graphsic on Vimeo.

Road Casualties Mapped

Road accident casualties mapped for the USA and for Britain (by The Guardian via David Levinson)

Recommended Podcasts

We are opening a new session on the right column of this blog with ‘recommended Podcasts’. 

I usually listen to them on my daily walking commute to my work place or I do it as I wash the dishes  it helps keeping me away from marital problem 

I will start the session recommending two podcasts:

• Shift: Stories Behind the Stats from CBC Radio (rss or itunes) - this one it focuses on the front lines of demographic change.
  
  
• Transport Studies Unit Podcasts by Oxford University (rss or itunes)*

* by the way, you might enjoy this seminar by Professor Robert Cervero (UC Berkeley): Mobility, place-making, and economic competitiveness 

(seminar review, screencast and presentation slides)

off-topic: Lovely Owl

I just couldn't help it. It is too damn cute to ignore it.

Migration Patterns and the Bubble

Jon Bruner of Forbes comes up again with a new graphical visualization of migration flows in the US (now using IRS data to map county migration).

[image credit: Jon Bruner/Forbes via Nathan Yau]

How does it relates to the recent real estate crisis in the USA? William Frey wrote down some of his thoughts on this (more here).

*Click here if you want learn how to built this kind of map (using JavaScript, Python and MySQ) .

By the way, here is related map by William Frey.

[image credit: William Frey]

soundtrack: Tulipa Ruiz (Brazil)

Assorted Links

• Lecture: Complexity in Regional Regional Science by Michael Batty (congratulations for the prize!)
  
  
  
  
• candidate for the 'Creative Title Award'.  And now you're probably singing this song.
  
  
  
  
• The Popularity of Data Analysis Software (via Leo Monasterio)
  
  
  
  
• Regularización de asentamientos informales en América Latina (new book by Edesio Fernandes published by The Lincoln Institute) available for download in Spanish or Portuguese.
  
  
  
  
• Rio de Janeiro under the clouds and Brasília from above (HT Paulo Afonso Rheingantz)
  
  
  
  
• Data on Property Tax in the USA.

soundtrack: Feist

Urban Picture

The  work  vacation trip to Rio de Janeiro was really good. I ran into this as I walked through the CBD.

Petrobras Building, Rio de Janeiro

[Photo credit: Rafael Pereira using TiltShift Generator]

and I could also go to two excellent concerts: Pearl Jam and Broken Social Scene! (Elisa and Gui, thank you guys for hosting me)

soundtrack: BSS

Population Projections Seminar highlights

I have just come back from a  work  vacation trip to Rio de Janeiro, where I could attend to this seminar on Population Estimates and Projections. It was a great seminar! Here are my highlights:

• Demographic housing demand: estimates by household sizes (by Gustavo Givisiez)
  
  
• Household projections: methods, application and current practice (by Brenda Yepez-Martinez. Here is her phd thesis)*
  
  
• Health Services Demand Projection: Methods and application for Brazil (by Cristina Guimarães)
  
  
• Demographic models for projections of social sector demand (by Tim Miller) *
  
  
• Sergei Scherbov (the man behind IIASA probabilistic population projection) and his intriguing perspective on population ageing. Papers here and here. a five-minute presentation here.

*I couldn't find the actually presented paper.

Key Works in Sociology

Key Works in Sociology infographic . (via Graphic Sociology)

[Click here to enlarge the image - image credit: Norton]

I have told you that one of my favorite books in sociology is "Suicide: a study in Sociology" by Émile Durkheim (1858-1917). 

My second favorite author is Erving Goffman with his microsociology approach in "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life".

soundtrack: Chico e Caetano

off-topic: Flying over Planet Earth

Cities at Night seen from Spacebird's-eye View (again).

 from Michael König on Vimeo.
(via Dan Colman from Open Culture)

Assorted links

• Issac Newton’s first published research paper (via open culture)
  
  
• We have reached 50 likes on FaceBook! thank you mom
  
  
• 36 Hours in Brasília by the NYTimes (a comment on this here)
  
  
• Event: CHINA - Supercities and Mega-Migrations: China’s Urban Futures (via urban systems)
  
  
• 3rd Annual IPSA-AISP Summer School in Concepts and Methods in Political Science - deadline for applications is November 20, 2011 (HT Joice Melo Vieira)
  
  
• Sense of Patterns: Visualizing mobility data - Twenty Four hours of Taxis (via UrbanTick)

off-topic: The zipper of your pants

Where does the zipper of your pants (and all your made-in-China products) come from?

China's Top 100 Industrial Clusters

(by The China Sourcing Blog)

[Click on the map for a bigger view]

 

 (via human scale cities)

Event: Population Estimates and Projections

More information here. Final program here.

Assorted links on Urban Sprawl

• A Meta-Analysis of Global Urban Land Expansion (more on this paper here)
  
  
• "Wrestling Sprawl to the Ground" a great paper title. The paper is also pretty good!
  
  
• The Costs of Smart Growth Revisited: A 40 Year Perspective (great piece)
  
  
• Growth Rings - The flight of Americans to the suburbs

(image credit: Stephen von Worley)

• Do Freeway Traffic Management Strategies Exacerbate Urban Sprawl?
  
  
• Multidimensional Urban Sprawl in Europe: A Self-organizing Map Approach
  
  
• Is sprawl over? Nops!

soundtrack: subirodoistiozin

The demographic challenge in Brazil

OECD has just published its 'Economic Surveys' on Brazil (thanks Leo for the tip). According to the report, the aging of the population is a major challenge in Brazil. This is not big news, but they say it in a concise manner:

"Like many emerging-market economies, Brazil’s population is going to age rapidly in the coming decade (Figure 1). The share of the elderly population is expected to double in less than 20 years, a transition that took around three times as long for today’s advanced economies. These demographic changes will alter the  macroeconomic environment. Assuming no policy changes, lower working-age population growth could lower potential output growth significantly by the middle of the century. This fall will most probably be partially compensated by the effect of the Growth Acceleration Programme (PAC) on productivity growth, but that impact is hard to estimate. Ageing is also likely to increase savings through life-cycle dynamics, although in Brazil’s case prospects for aggregate savings will depend on the effectiveness of social and labour-market policies in continuing to lower the share of poor households, who traditionally save less. Ageing will also tilt public spending toward greater outlays on old-age pensions and health and long-term care and less on education, but the aggregate impact on public finance is likely to be negative."

Figure 1.  The speed of population ageing*

*Number of years for the share of population 65+ to double from around 10% to around 20%

Note: United Nations population projections have been used. Numbers for France and the United Kingdom correspond to an increase from 12% to around 20%.
Source: OECD calculations

Fuzzy Logic explained

Explaining Fuzzy logic with one image:

(via Nathan Yau  again )

A talk with Lotfi A. Zadeh (the father of fuzzy logic) here.


soundtrack: BSS