Quote of the Day

Somebody Else’s Problem (SEP):

"An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye. [...] it relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain."

(Douglas Adams in his novel Life, the Universe and Everything)

The same is true for scientific discoveries.

Urban Picture

NY by Jeff Weston

Manhattan 1964, by Evelyn Hofer (via @BeschlossDC)

China's policies for the aging population

The Oxford Chinese Economy Programme (OXCEP) promoted a series of workshops on June 2013. Here is the presentation by Prof. Zhao Yaohui (China Center for Economic Research at Peking University) on Chinese policies for the aging population.

Related Link:

• Policies against poverty (Prof. Li Shi - Director of the China Institute for the Study of Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University)

IPUMS-International and Brazilian census microdata

Imagine what research questions you could answer if you had in your personal computer the census microdata of several countries around the world. I am talking about over 211 census from over 68 countries  - for some countries, every census round since 1960 is available. This is made possible thanks to the IPUMS-International project. 

They do this huge effort "to inventory, preserve, harmonize, and disseminate census microdata from around the world. The project has collected the world's largest archive of publicly available census samples. The data are coded and documented consistently across countries and over time to facillitate comparative research. IPUMS-International makes these data available to qualified researchers free of charge through a web dissemination system"

By the way, Robert McCaa alerted me that the 2010 sample of the census of Brazil is now available for download at IPUMS website. Enjoy it !

Related Links:

• How we should answer Brazilian census questionnaire
• Brazil Shapefiles for download
• IPUMS Country Report: Brazil
• Interactive - Brazilian Census 2010: basic results by census tract
• Last month, Prof. Toni Lopez taught us a workshop on IPUMS here at Ipea. Thanks again Toni!

Assorted links on Demography, Inequality and Economic Growth

1. How Europe's changing population will impact on income inequality
   
   
2. The distributional impact of population aging
   
   
3. Population Aging and the Growth of Income and Consumption Tax Revenue
   
   
4. Book - Population Aging and the Generational Economy: A Global Perspective
   
   
5. Long-term fiscal sustainability in major economies
   
   
6. Gini estimations for almost any country and a historical analysis of global income inequality (via Leo Monasterio)
   
   
7. World Income Inequality Database
   
   
8. Penn World Table Version 8.0 - a database with information on relative levels of income, output, inputs and productivity, covering 167 countries between 1950 and 2011. Not bad! (via Drunkeynesian)

The Most-Cited Articles from Urban Studies

A list with the most-cited articles as of July 1, 2013 published in Urban Studies

1. Social Cohesion, Social Capital and the Neighbourhood
2. Industrial Clusters: Complexes, Agglomeration and/or Social Networks?
3. Clusters from the Inside and Out: Local Dynamics and Global Linkages
4. The Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis: What Has the Evidence Shown?
5. Is the Journey to Work Explained by Urban Structure?
6. Governance Innovation and the Citizen: The Janus Face of Governance-beyond-the-State
7. Social Polarisation in Global Cities: Theory and Evidence
8. Unravelling the Process of 'Partnership' in Urban Regeneration Policy
9. Creative Cities and Economic Development
10. Spatial Mismatch or Automobile Mismatch? An Examination of Race, Residence and Commuting in US Metropolitan Areas
11. ...

Message of the Day

[via Shoot The Shit]

Assorted Links

1. Beijing Intersection Timelapse
   
   
2. Anatomy of a New Yorker cartoon
   
   
3. Free Parking Comes at a Price
   
   
4. Global map of protests: 2013 so far
   
   
5. "Foreign students make up the majority of enrollments in U.S. graduate programs in many STEM fields [...] as well as in economics" via MR
   
   
6. The average destination of international flights
   
   
7. Global Movement of Refugees Since 1960
   
   
8. Earth's moon from a different angle
   
   
9. David Levinson alerting the Call for Papers for the World Symposium on Transport and Land Use Research 2014

13th WCTR + Commute Time in Brazil

Dear readers, next week I'll be in Rio for the 13th WCTR. I'm presenting a working paper Tim Schwanen and I have recently published. In this study we explore 18 years of commute time trends in Brazil. I was planning a dedicated post to talk about this study but I've been quite busy these days. 

So here it is. You may download it here:

Commute Time in Brazil (1992-2009): Differences Between Metropolitan Areas, by Income Levels and Gender

[Portuguese version]

ps. It would be great to meet some of you in case there is anyone out there that's also attending the conference. If there is anyone out there, just leave a comment of drop me an email.

Health conditions in the United States

An interactive visualization of health conditions in the United States by the Washington Post (via Alberto Cairo, whoe runsa great blog by the way).

Related Links:

• Eastern German men gain almost six years in life thanks to unification
• Save the Date for the PRB Webinar on Education and Mortality in the US
• New book on spatial inequalities in Accra, Ghana

Urban Picture

Around the world 30 pictures architect

La vuelta al mundo de un aquitecto en 30 fotografias (via Drunkeynesian)

México DF

Norilsk (Russia)

Dubai

Barcelona

Huaxi (China)

Brasília (Brazil)

European shipping routes between 1750 and 1800

James Cheshire (UCL) have used R to create this incredible map showing some European shipping routes between 1750 and 1850. What struck me most is the existence of a remarkable dataset like this, containing digitised information from the log books of ships.

Congratulations to the team that has done such a great work recovering these data! And congratulations to James who has recently published his map.

Click on the  image to enlarge it

[Image Credit: James Cheshire]

Related Link: An animation 100 Years of ships

Returns to College Education

A nice piece by Catherine Rampell on The Return on College Around the World (ht Raquel Guimaraes). You may download the OECD report here: Education at a Glance 2013.

[Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. via Economix]

Off-topic: Internet monitoring

Image credit: someone's (can't remember who) facebook page

Assorted links

1. Departments’ characteristics that make researchers more productive (via @ADEH)
   
   
2. "3% of users post 60% of all content to Twitter" and other pitfalls in analyzing Big Data
   
   
3. A World of Rising Health Care Costs
   
   
4. The Coolest Transit Ad Ever
   
   
5. How academics can engage with policy
   
   
6. The gravity equation for on-line education
   
   
7. "Using Internet Explorer leads to murder" and 9 other Bizarre Correlations (via The Drunkeynesian)

[Image Credit: Gizmodo]

Pricing and Funding Public Transport in Brazil

 Self-promotion alert  Some colleagues and I have just published a report on 'Pricing and Funding Public Transport in Brazil' [available only in Portuguese].

Related Links:

• How Brazilian protesters are using Twitter
• About the recent protests in Brazil
• Working paper: Commute Time in Brazil (1992-2009)

Quote of the day

[Image Credit: pak9 and @over]

Full quote: "What is a city, but the people; true the people are the city"