Jazz On A Summer's Day (1958)

a great film by Bert Stern. Enjoy your weekend! (via Open Culture)

BRIC's population in US metros

Aaron (Urbanophile) has done this analysis showing how many Brazilians, Russians, Indians and Chinese are living in US metropolitan areas. We are not as many as I thought and we are by far fewer when compared to other BRIC countries. Click here to take a closer look.

Total Brazil born population by metro (2010)

[image credit: Urbanophile]

Soundtrack: Tim Maia

Message of the Day

via

Assorted Links

1. The laws of the city - nice article on how data might change cities
   
2. What Money Can't Buy - the moral limit of markets (Michael Sandel's presentation at St Paul's Cathedral last month)
   
3. The world map of CO2 emissions via @worldmapper
   
4. Asians have surpassed Hispanics as the largest wave of new immigrants to the USA
   
5. Congrats to Gilvan Ramalho Guedes for the best PhD Thesis in Demography/Urban Planning in 2011!
   
6. U.S. Life Expectancy by County (via J. Crowe)

Soundtrack: Gotye

"Credit is the opium of the people"

The German bank Sparkasse Chemnitz recently launched a Karl Marx credit card (via Alex Tabarrok MR)

I mean it! It's  supposed to be serious!

Shoppers of the world, unite!

"Lost jobs, broken marriages"

That's a great title for a paper!


"This paper examines the impact of both husbands’ and wives’ job displacement on the risk that the marriage ends in divorce. Using Swedish-linked employee–employer data [...] Over a 12-year period, the excess risk of divorce among couples’ in which the husband was displaced was 13% and statistically significant. The estimated impact of wives’ job displacements was of almost the same size, but not statistically significant."

related paper: The Rise and Fall of Divorce: A Sociological Extension of Becker's Model of the Marriage Market

Urban Picture

Brasília from above (via emBrasilia)

by the way, I’m finally back to Brasília  and I'm not sure if I like it 

Soundtrack:  retrato pra iá iá

3D Density Map

Alasdair Rae came up with this new 3D Density Map of China, and according to this Hu Huanyong line 43% of the Chinese territory concentrate 94% of the population (it has been like this since 1935).

ps. And here is a nice gift for 3D Maps fans.

[image credit: Alasdair Rae]

Soundtrack: J Hendrix - Little Wing

EPC 2012

The European Population Conference 2012 has begun !  Some interesting papers.

Assorted Links

1. London is now France's sixth biggest city !
   
   
2. Two hundred years of hospital costs and mortality, as seen through the lens of one hospital (via MR)
   
   
3. Another paper on China’s recent fertility decline and its impact on the country’s long-term development
   
   
4. Population density and human fertility
   
   
5. (delayed) Happy Birthday, Erving Goffman! 
   
   
6. Migration and barriers to social mobility in China
   
   
7. Mapping London urban structure by Duncan Smith

LA Light Timelapse

LA Light Timelapse by Colin Rich  (via)

LA Light from Colin Rich on Vimeo.

What is on a Demographer’s Mind?

A worldwide survey conducted among IUSSP members (970 demographers) shows what is on Demographers’ Minds. A nice paper (via)!

And the prize for 'the most important population issue' goes to 'Population Aging'!  'Urbanization' got the second place, except in Europe (Figure 2).

The general remarks of the paper are closely related to this recent article by The Economist "A new science of population". Quote:

“Now though, […] the focus of demographers has switched from the overall size of populations to their composition—that is, to age groups and their relation to one another. Instead of high fertility rates, demographers study ageing, dependency ratios, the “demographic dividend” (a bulge of working-age adults) and distorted sex ratios, which result when millions of parents choose the sex of their children, often by aborting baby daughters.”

Figure 2: What do demographers think are the most important problems in their country of residence? Percentages of demographers who think a problem is very important

[click to enlarge image]

 

Image source

US Newspapers, 1690-2011

Growth of newspapers across the US  1690-2011 (via flowing data)

The Growth of US Newspapers, 1690-2011 from Geoff McGhee on Vimeo.

Data sources: Chronicling America collection, Library of Congress, Urban population estimates from NASA

Data visualization by the Rural West Initiative, Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University
Credits: Dan Chang, Krissy Clark, Yuankai Ge, Geoff McGhee, Yinfeng Qin and Jason Wang