Assorted Links

1. 180 Current trends in inequality in Britain and Worldwide
   
   
2. Forget the Placebo Effect: It’s the ‘Care Effect’ That Matters (via Patricia Morita)
   
   
3. New Head of UN Population Division
   
   
4. Dangers of artificial intelligence: Watson couldn't distinguish between polite language and profanity
   
   
5. Lectureships in Human Geography – University of Bristol
   
   
6. Top 5 city destroyers of all time - of course Godzilla couldn't be out of this list!
   
   
7. Don’t come to Britain posters (via MR)
   
   
8. Jerven on Measuring African Poverty and Progress
   
   
9. The effect of Air Pollution Control on Life Expectancy in the United States
   
   
10. Rainfall Deficit as a predictor of U.S.-Bound Migration from Rural Mexico
    
    
11. Does Human Capital Tend to Cluster in Center Cities or the Suburbs?

[Image Credit: Michelle Hopgood]

Out for vacation!

Dear readers, I will be out of office for a couple of days with restricted access to emails. I've scheduled a few posts to run in the meantime. ok?

Yes mom... I've got my jacket...

Pop-Up Economics, by Tim Harford

Tim Harford has a new radio series on the BBC called Pop-Up Economics. It's highly recommended!

The next epidose will talk about Thomas Schelling. I'm looking forward to listening to it !

Average Traffic Density of US Highways (1944)

Eric Fischer has found this awesome map showing the predicted average traffic density of US highways in 1944 (via Tim De Chant). Since they didn't have the GIS technology we have today, how do you think they did this? 

[Click on the image to enlarge it]

[Image Credit: Eric Fisher via Per Square Mile]

Related Links:

• London's Daytime Population
• Daytime Population in the United States
• Population Density Maps
• 3D Density Map
• London Urban Form 3D Map

Off-topic: A regular day of traffic in Russia

(via uhull)

Quote of the Day

"The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones"

(it's hard to find who said it first)

How Much Does a Good Boss Really Matter?

A new podcast by S. Dubner talking about this working paper: "The Value of Bosses".
If you're curious about the answer but don't have much time to read the full paper, listen to the podcast or just read the abstract !





ps. I'm not sure if their findings could be applied to universities or research institutions. But why not?

How the U.S. lost out on iPhone Work

@cduhigg and @KeithBradsher for the NYT:

"Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days"

 This article is  outdated by over a year now  very interesting!

Assorted Links

1. Heading for success: or how not to title your paper (via David Levinson)
   
   
2. The 10 largest African cities in 2013
   
   
3. PAA 2013 Preliminary Program (via Eddie Hunsinger)
   
   
4. The Rio favela transformed into prime real estate (via Andres Marroquin)
   
   
5. Muddy Waters in Manchester (1964)
   
   
6. A monumental burden: Should Washington DC build skyscrapers?
   
   
7. Mapping climate change (via Per Square Mile)
   
   
8. The Skyscraper Index

Replay: World Population Distribution Map

Tired with those traditional World Population Distribution Maps ?

Bill Rankin came up with this creative way to understand population distribution in our planet!

ps. it got me thinking about Global Warming and sea levels, desertification, etc.

The human factor behind traffic radars

The best part starts at 1:13.

Does aging population hinder Innovation?

Here is the reasoning basis.

Sociologists have described a technology adoption life cycle, which represents the way an invention spreads throughout a community. It’s depicted as a bell curve where the x-axis represents time and the y-axis represents the number of adopters. [...] If the young tend to be more creative and to adopt new ideas more readily than the old, then the coming demographic changes—rising median ages across the West—portend a strong headwind for innovation in the next decades. Not only will we have fewer workers, but we’ll also have fewer inventors and what new ideas we have will face stronger resistance. [...] (by Michael Gibson, Forbes)

It sounds palusbile, although it is not clear yet how deeply innovation levels are affected by demographics. Additionally, I'd say that the coming demographic changes are not likely to affect all levels of innovation (from smartphones and tablets to tomographs and clean energy) in the same way.

So here lies one question: Can current economic and demographic trends around the globe change the geography of innovation markets (both production and consumption) in the future?

Related link:

• What really powers innovation: high wages (by Tim Harford)

American life expectancy lags behind

Interesting comments by Gary Becker and Richard Posner on why American life expectancy lags behind other developed countries.

[Image Credit: The Economist]

Related Paper:

• New Forecasting Methodology Indicates More Disease And Earlier Mortality Ahead For Today’s Younger Americans

Quote of the Day

“You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take."

(Wayne Gretzky)

Assorted Links

1. The ultimate question: What drives taxi drivers?
   
   
2. What City Skies Would Look Like Without Light Pollution
   
   
3. Every dataset from Guardian Datablog
   
   
4. Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics
   
   
5. Cost of living during the war period - Britain, 1941 (via Simon Rogers)
   
   
6. Where the Internet Lives 
   
   
7. Call for papers for the 6th international conference on migration and development
   
   
8. Beijing's air pollution crisis as seen from space (via Per Square Mile)
   
   
9. Phone-Call Cartography of Great Britain and USA

Great Britain

USA

Chart of the Day

The sum of human experience.

"By the end of this century [...] the world's population will have stabilised at just over 10 billion and those people will have accumulated 430 billion years of human experience between them."

Related Links:

• Modeling and Forecasting Health Expectancy: Theoretical Framework and Application
• Steep Increase in Best-Practice Cohort Life Expectancy
• Swiss Re on Understanding and Predicting Longevity

Urban Picture

Chicago

(Source: ?, via Human Scale Cities)

Two excellent time-lapse videos of Chicago:

• Cityscape Chicago, by Eric Hines
• The City Limits, by Dominic

JTRG call for papers: Transport and Logistics in China

Heads Up!

The Journal of Transport Geography (JTRG)* has opened a call for papers for a special issue on The Changing Landscapes of Transport and Logistics in China. More information on Tim Schwanen's blog.

*Impact Factor: 2.538

The most cited authors in Sociology

Inspired by this, I've decided to ask: Who is the most cited author in Sociology of all time? I'll give you a hint. It is not E. Durkheim, nor K. Marx. It is not P. Bourdieu either, although he is close to the top of the list.

This ranking is based on Google Scholar Citations page. Of course there are unregistered authors, what makes this ranking very inaccurate (although I believe the two first positions are correct).**

Anyway, the real purpose of this post is to encourage you to register at Google Scholar Citations. This is one of the best ways for academics to compute citation metrics and track them over time.

You only need a gmail account and Google does the rest for you. And anyone can register!

**A few authors missing from the ranking because they are not in Google Scholar Citations.

• Anthony Giddens
• Norbert Elias
• Manuel Castells
• David Harvey
• Robert Castel
• Saskia Sassen
• Loic Wacquant
• Ulrich Beck
• Zygmunt Bauman
• Jürgen Habermas
• Bruno Latour
• Mark Gottdiener
• This could go on and on...

Math Equations and research credibility

Math Equations add credibility to research - even if the math makes no sense ! 

So I've decided I'll start including a couple of math equations in some of my posts! And I'll also include a photo like this to my CV.

Here for more info on the UCI - Urban Centrality Index.

I hope this blog is a little more credible now.

Data Analysis online course using R

Jeff Leek (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) is teaching a course on Data Analysis on Coursera (starting on Jan 22nd). Here is a flowchart to help you decide whether you should take the course. And a 4-minute video with more info.

Related links:

• Resources for Getting Started with R
• An archive of 597 datasets distributed with R
• Style your R charts like the Economist, Tableau ... or XKCD (via Leo Monasterio)
• 
  

1:1 Population map of the US

An impressive interactive map from Brandon Martin-Anderson with the US population represented by 341,817,095 dots – one for each person. Via Jonathan Crowe.

[Image Credit: Brandon Martin-Anderson]

How old is the stuff sociologists cite?

These figures don't consider non-US journals. It got me surprised anyway.

The median publication year in the top 100 was 1992. Of the top 100, only one piece was published in the last five years.

[Image Credit: Scatter]

Related Lik: 

• Nine Facts about Top Journals in Economics

The Existential Adventures of Tim Maia

Tim Maia is definitely one of the greatest Brazilian singers of all time. Last year, Luaka Bop Records released Nobody Can Live Forever: The Existential Soul of Tim Maia, which includes 15 excellent tracks ! (via Open Culture)

My friend Rafhael Vaz wrote a post about it (in Portuguese) pointing to this link where you can download the record.

Tracklist
1. Imunização Racional (Que Beleza) – 1975
2. Let’s Have a Ball Tonight – 1978
3. O Caminho do Bem – 1976
4. Ela Partiu – 1975
5. Quer Queira, Quer Não Queira – 1976
6. Brother Father Mother Sister – 1976
7. Do Leme ao Pontal – 1981
8. Nobody Can Live Forever – 1976
9. I Don’t Care – 1971
10. Bom Senso – 1975
11. Where Is My Other Half? – 1972
12. Over Gain – 1973
13. The Dance Is Over – 1976
14. You Don’t Know What I Know – 1975
15. Rational Cultura – 1975

Assorted Links

1. A Research Agenda for Studying Climate Change Adaptation, by M. Kahn (UCLA)
   
   
2. 100 years of census: England & Wales 1911-2011
   
   
3. Several 'celebrations posts' for the 150th anniversary of the London Tube yesterday! My favortites: James Cheshire, David Levinson
   
   
4. Dancing lessons with James Brown ("Funky Chicken" ! wtf)
   
   
5. A piece by The Economist on growth of subway systems worldwide
   
   
6. Call for papers: 2nd international workshop on regional, urban, and spatial economics in China (ht Paulo Rheingantz)
   
   
7. New prize on causality in statstistics education
   
   
8. Cityscape Chicago

Recent Real Estate Trends in China

Abstract:

We provide the first multi-city, constant quality land price index for 35 major markets in China. While there is meaningful heterogeneity in land price growth across cities, on average the last nine years have seen land values skyrocket in many markets, not just those on or near the coast. The typical market has experienced double-digit compound average annual growth in real, constant-quality land values. The 2009-2010 stimulus period typically saw large surges in prices. Three notable characteristics about the land value appreciation series are their strong mean reversion at annual frequencies, the strong common factor in their movement, and their very high volatility. Quantities, not just prices, have been sharply increasing in recent years. The typical amount of space supplied via land auctions in our 35 city sample has doubled since 2008. Some local political economy traits such as the time the local Chinese Communist Party leader has been in office are correlated with land supply volume.

I saw this at Andres Marroquin's blog (it goes to my blog-reading list, by the way)

Related links: 

• China's Housing Market: Is a Bubble About to Burst?
• The Economist interactive overview of global house prices and rents
• JTRG call for papers: Transport and Logistics in China

Famous watchwords in Urban Planning

Some of you might have heard of the Google Books Ngram Viewer. Basically, it's a tool that charts the usage of any word over time in published books (Google books database has over 20 million scanned books).

So this time, I have used it as as a proxy for the popularity of famous watchwords in Urban Planning, such as smart growth, compact city, new urbanism, creative class and world city.

Here is what I've found. You can click on the image to enlarge it or you can click here and try your own combination of words.

[Click on te image to enlarge it]

Perhaps you might ask 'why would someome do that? for what purpose?' the ultimate answer!

You may also play around using google trends, which shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume in google's search engine.

Related Link:

• The rise and fall of Urban Sociology (?)
• The Global Lab Episode 18 . Smart Cities

Urban Picture

Chinese Architecture, Old and New. Awesome pictures! (via Tyler Cowen)

MRU short videos on Migration

Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok (from MR Blog) have a few excellent short videos on Migration as a part of their Development Economics course at the Marginal Revolution University.

This one is about internal migration in China.

Other MRU videos on Migration you should check:

1. Basic Facts about Migration
2. Wage Gains from Immigration
3. Remittances
4. Is there a Brain Drain?
5. Wage Effects in the U.S.
6. Internal Chinese Migration

Isochronic maps of American railways in the 1800s

We have already seen some Isochronic maps here at Urban Demographics Blog. Here are a couple of travel time maps for rail mode in the US using New York City as a starting point (1800, 1830, 1857 and 1930). Via Nathan Yau.

Time to get from New York City to almost anywhere in the US, in 1857.

[Image Credit: the 1932 Atlas of the Historical Geography of the US, via Michael Graham Richard]

Who's afraid of population decline?

A 51-minute talk by Professor David Coleman on the fear of population decline  (slides in PDF). You may also read his paper on the same topic published in PDR - Population and Development Review.

• Related Link (Updated): Russia's Population Decline in Regional Perspective

Chart of the Day

US housing (via The Economist)

Related Links:

1. Is It Better to Buy or Rent? (interactive)
2. UK house prices - as flat as a board
3. Demographic Transition, Economic Crisis and the Housing Deficit in Indonesia
4. The Balance of Affordable Housing in New York City
5. The spatial dynamics of the Hong Kong housing market, 1992–2008
6. A nice debate the merits of homeownership in The Economist
7. The Latin American Cohabitation Boom, 1970–2007

The Prison Population in the US is down

More here.

Quote of the day

"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

(William Gibson)