Saturday Music

How many (good) research questions are there?

In the past few months, I have been thinking a lot about the question I should investigate in my PhD-project. It put me thinking about how many good research questions are there? How many of these questions I'm interested in?

Right now I'm following the steps of a great Brazilian rock/ska band to figure it out. Once, a journalist asked the band what was their secret to have so many hits. They said something like "We write down hundreds of songs a month. At the end of the year, we can keep a few good ones."

So, that's exectally what I have been doing in the last few weeks. I writing down every research question I can think of, considering my research interests (no matter how stupid, obvious, naive or ambitous they sound).

After saying all this, this TED talk here may sound a bit self-help. But it's worth seven minutes of your time.

"The simplest questions can carry you out to the edge of human knowledge"  (via Flowing Data) 

ps. Of course most of the posed questions will be discarded. The next step should be to select the few good ones (if there's any left). But first things first...

Assorted Links

1. Get Ready for the 1940 Census!
   
2. Top five most common regrets of the dying
   
3. Uncovering the World's First Cities
   
4. The Age of Uncertainty (HT Bruno Cruz)
   
5. 10 key datasets to understand the British economy
   
6. Brazil's pension system:
   
   
   Bernardo L. Queiroz says: "It’s a puzzle. The unions are against changes. But without them, the workers they represent are paying for other people to get much more generous pensions than they will ever get themselves.” - what political scientists would have to say about this ?

     7.  Helsinki Public Transport Visualized (via Edward Lee)

Sizing up cities (podcast)

Here's a short podcast on the difficulty of sizing up cities (by More or Less: Behind the Stats Podcast - duration of 11 mins).

“Which are the world’s biggest cities, and what are their populations? Two simple questions that we discover are surprisingly difficult to answer. Plus, has the world got heavier or lighter since the industrial revolution?” 

ps. It is hard to belive in Chinese official statistics.


Related links:

• Urban shrinkage in Leipzig (Germany)
• Urban shrinkage in Germany and the USA
• Shrinking Cities: Urban Challenges of Globalization
• I didn't know there is a 'Shrinking Cities International Research Network (SCIRN)' !

Brain Gain and Engineering labor force in Brazil

Interesting story (in Portuguese only) by Globo News on international migration of high-skilled workers coming to Brazil (via R. Ojima).

Job prospects in Brazil are looking quite good

[Image Credit: The Economist]

By the way:

• Our study on engineering labor force in Brazil  was mentioned  by The Economist Magazine last week. 
• Our paper* has been accepted for publication in the Brazilian Journal of Population Studies (REBEP)!

* "Projections of skilled labor supply in Brazil: scenarios for the supply of Engineers until 2020" (in Portuguese only ) 

Motorways and slime mould's rationality (!?)

This is probably the  strangest  most creative  idea for paper I have seen in the last months (HT Leo via MR).



"Are motorways rational from slime mould's point of view?"

Abstract:

We analyse the results of our experimental laboratory approximation of motorways networks with slime mould Physarum polycephalum. Motorway networks of fourteen geographical areas are considered: Australia, Africa, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, Iberia, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, The Netherlands, UK, USA. For each geographical entity we represented major urban areas by oat flakes and inoculated the slime mould in a capital. After slime mould spanned all urban areas with a network of its protoplasmic tubes we extracted a generalised Physarum graph from the network and compared the graphs with an abstract motorway graph using most common measures. The measures employed are the number of independent cycles, cohesion, shortest paths lengths, diameter, the Harary index and the Randic index. We obtained a series of intriguing results, and found that the slime mould approximates best of all the motorway graphs of Belgium, Canada and China, and that for all entities studied the best match between Physarum and motorway graphs is detected by the Randic index (molecular branching index).

Soundtrack: Stand Up

Assorted Links

1. paper Climate Change, Crop Yields, and Internal Migration in the United States (via Matthew E. Kahn)
   
   
2. Nice instrument to have in a band
   
   
3. The Jobless Rate for People Like You
   
   
4. How child-mortality rates have changed since 1970
   
   
5. The State of the African Cities Report 2008 (UN-HABITAT)
   
   
6. International Seminar on 'Measuring Urbanity' (Lisbon, May 7th-12th, 2012)
   
   
7. Exploring the debate over contraception and health care in the US

Soundtrack: Café Tacuba

Workshop on "Urban Syntax"

My dear friend Valério Augusto Soares de Medeiros (CV) is going to teach a workshop on Urban Syntax at the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture - Technical University of Lisbon (UTL).

More information here and here.

Break a leg!

Crime by hour in major American cities

Really interesting analysis by the Trulia Trends Team on the distribution of crimes by hour in major American cities (via Nathan Yau).

Related Links:

• San Francisco crimes in 3D
• Crime Trends in Metropolitan America

Spatial Layout Efficiency (Space Syntax)

An informative presentation by Tim Stonor on Spatial Layout Efficiency, where he explains the fundamentals of Sapce Syntax and its applications in modelling the urban space.

ps. And our modest contribution to the topic: Spatial Layout Efficiency in terms of travel time.

Quote of the day

Excerpt from 'Toward Spatially Integrated Social Science': 

"... although basic science is directed at the discovery of general principles, the ultimate value of such knowledge, apart from simple curiosity, lies in our ability to apply it to local conditions and, thus, determine specific outcomes. Although such science may itself be placeless, the application of scientific knowledge in policy inevitably requires explicit attention to spatial variation, particularly when the basis of policy is local."

Goodchild et al. (2000: 142) apud Marcia C. Castro (2007 )

off-topic: Political support

Where do you stand?

(via Gordo Nerd)

SoundTrack: Linha de Passe

Assorted Links

1. Geography of Inequality and government benefits by County (US)
   
   
2. Call for Papers: "Aging and the city"
   
   
3. James Follain: Predicting Housing Bubbles
   
   
4. Net migration to Britain remains at record levels (+link to Immigration Statistics)
   
   
5. Feeling depressed? want to be part of something big?
   
   
6. Demographic Trends in Dublin
   
   
7. A Block-by-Block Look at the Energy Consumption of New York’s Buildings (via PD Smith)

O RLY?

I received an incredible email yesterday. I'd like to share it with you. 

I laughed my head off !

Dear Friend,

My name is Mrs Ananala Safiya From Burkina Faso.

I am writing in respect of my inheritance fund [...] I am the wife of late Gadafi president of Libya.

[...] my late husband have an account in one of the bank here in Burkina Faso. My husband deposited the some of Eighteen million.

[...] to claim this fund I most use the account of a foreigner and also does the change of ownership into the name of the beneficiary the certificate of deposit is with me.

[...] If you are really ready to assist me [...] I will give you 40% of the said amount. 

[...] You should forward to me all your personal information's as soon you receive this mail.

Thanks

Mrs Ananala Safiya Gaddafi. 

Residential Rents Worldwide

Just a short post today with this chart showing Residential Rents Worldwide (via The Economist).

[image credit: The Economist]

Soundtrack: Daft P.

“We thought we had it nailed”

Alasdair Rae has posted a short analysis of  'Small Area Population Change in London, 2001 to 2010'. He mapped the results using ONS mid-year population estimates for small areas.

But we all know how these kind of demographic forecasts for small areas can become tricky sometimes.

When it came to plan Plan education or health care in London “We thought we had it nailed” says Baljit Bains (head of the Greater London Authority’s demography unit).

[Image Credit: under the raedar]

soundtrack: Metropolitan Jazz Affair

Las Vegas Urbanization (1976-2010)

Some of you might remember this post showing the urban expansion of Las Vegas (1984-2009).

Now, NASA decided to celebrate Landsat 5's 28th birthday publishing a time-lapse video showing the city's outward expansion. (via Mark Byrnes)

It makes me want to have my own satellite..... Don't you feel the same?

Replay: Parking Rates Worldwide

Colliers International (a big real estate company)  did an international survey on the cost of car parking. The results are presented in the chart below, which shows the monthly parking rates. (via The Drunkeynesian)

What caught my attention:

• Prices that are too low (in my almighty opinion of course): Bangkok , Delhi, Jakarta,Mumbai, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Los Angeles, Seoul, São Paulo, San Diego, Santiago, Beijing, Mexico City, Istanbul and Atlanta.
  
  
• Prices that are too high: _________(?).

Monthly Parking Rates Worldwide* (USD)
[Click on the chart to enlarge the image]

*Monthly unreserved median rates.

Assorted Links

1. The Age of Reason
   
   
2. Breathtaking Aaerial panoramas of several cities around the world (HT Paulo Afonso Rheingantz)
   
   
3. No reason to worry about Chinese housing bubble .... not for now.
   
   
4. The Three Laws of Future Employment
   
   
5. VI World Conference 2012 - Spatial Econometrics Association (HT Bernardo Furtado)
   
   
6. International Workshop on the Economic Impacts of Extreme Events (March 23 in São Paulo)
   
   
7. Tracing the Liveliness of Mobile Phone Usage in Geneva  (via infosthetics)

   

"The vanishing workforce"

"Basically, economic growth comes from having more workers, making them more productive or a combination of the two. If a country has fewer workers, productivity has to do all the work, and even then real growth is likely to be slow.

[...] Of course, very-rapidly growing population can be a problem, especially if you can't find jobs for young men. But it is better to be in the top half of the table - like Australia, New Zealand and Ireland - than the bottom."