Music for the weekend

Urban Picture

São Paulo, Marginal Pinheiros in a regular Wednesday

[image credit: Moacyr Lopes Junior/Folhapress]

Soundtrack: Bogotá, by Criolo

obs. This one I took from Transportblog! (great blog, by the way) and it's in Auckland (NZ), but it would perfectly fit São Paulo streets today!

A Pyramid of Life Expectancies

Marcelo Duhalde came up with this interesting way to visualize and compare the Life Expectancy at Birth of different countries (via John Metcalfe).

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: Marcelo Duhalde]

Related Links:

• The Complicated Relationship Between Cities and Suicide
• How do people die? Global mortality and causes of death visualised
• The global burden of cancer

Assorted links

1. Oxford University under the winter Milky Way, by Yunli Song
   
   
2. U.S. Inequality in Six Charts (via Tim Harford)
   
   
3. Other things I'd rather be doing
   
   
4. How to NOT design urban streets
   
   
5. London, Then and Now (1927 to 2013)
   
   
6. What Happens When a Woman Wins an Election? (Brazil) - via Andrés Marroquín
   
   
7. Warning! this link can be depressing: How Much Time Have You Wasted on Facebook? via Emilio Ferrara
   
   
8. A visual exploration of refugee migrations over time via Flowing Data

[image credit: Hyperakt and Ekene Ijeoma via Flowing Data]

off-topic: Inspiration to Work

A good soundtrack to remind us of that important saying: 

'Stop procrastinating and go back to work!'

Eye of the Tiger

A Historic Traffic Jam: the "H-Day" in 1967

When was the last time you've heard about a traffic jam in which people were actually happy to participate?

In his amazing book 'Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)', Tom Vanderbilt gives us a glimpse of the "H-Day", when everyone in Sweden started driving on the opposite side of the road. I reproduce here a snippet of the book and two great pictures taken on "H-Day":

Just before dawn on Sunday, September 3, 1967, there was an unusually festive air in the streets of Stockholm. Cars honked, passersby cheered, people gave flowers to police officers, pretty girls smiled from the curb. The streets were clogged with cars, many of which had been waiting for hours to participate in a historic traffic jam. [...] At the moment the bell schimed for six o'clock, Swedes began driving on the right.

It had taken years of debate, and much preparation, to get to this point. [...] Undeterred, backers of right-side driving finally got a measure approved by the government in 1963.

As "H-Day" (after hoger, the Swedish word for "right") approached, the predictions of ensuing chaos and destruction grew dire. [...] And what happened when Swedes started driving on the other side of the road, many for the first time in their lives? The roads got safer. [...] Remarkably, it was not just for a few days, or even weeks, after the change over that Sweden's roads were safer. It took a year before the accident rate returned to what it had been the year before the changeover.

[images credit: ? via wired]

Related Links:

• There is also a nice piece on this published at The Wired
• A nice graphic showing traffic fatalities over time
• "Road crashes now kill 1.3m people a year, more than malaria or tuberculosis."
• Detecting traffic accident clusters with network kernel density estimation and local spatial statistics

Paid Maternal Leave Around the World

Via The New York Times

Related Links:

• Economic incentives and the timing of births: evidence from the German parental benefit
• 4 million Euros for New Demography Programme on Fertility
• Has Divorce Become a Pro-Natal Force in Europe
• The relationship between Civil Unions and fertility in France

The earliest sprawl?

Michael E. Smith writes a very interesting piece on How ancient cities can help us understand modern cities. And this paper caught my attention:

Ur, Jason A., P. Karsgaard and J. Oates (2007) Early Urban Development in the Near East. Science 317:1188 [ungated version]

Abstract: It has been thought that the first cities in the Near East were spatially extensive and grew outward from a core nucleated village while maintaining a more or less constant density in terms of persons or households per unit of area. The general applicability outside of the Near East of this southern Mesopotamian.derived model has been questioned recently, and variations from it are increasingly recognized. We can now demonstrate that such variation was present at the beginnings of urbanism in the Near East as well.

[image credit: Ur et al 2007 via Michael E. Smith]

Related Link [updated]: 

• New estudy by SFI - Cities – ancient and modern, big and small – follow same rules of development (ht João Vitor Meirelles)

Urban Picture

San Francisco, USA

Skyline

[image credit: Toby Harriman, amazing work by the way]

Cable Cars

[image credit: @GoogleEarthPics ]

Soundtrack:

Housing Bubble in Brazil

Robert Shiller (Yale Prof. and 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics, “for their empirical analysis of asset prices”) talks about the recent home price boom in Brazil, aka 'Housing Bubble in Brazil' (via Sergio Jatobá).

Related Links:

• Call for chapter proposals: Trends and Issues in Housing in Asian cities
• Location, Location: The Hottest Real Estate Markets On Earth
• Where Housing Prices Are on the Rise in the US
• Brazil's High Flying Real Estate Prices Outpace All Countries

Assorted links

1. Beijing City Lab
   
   
2. Say goodbye to your concentration problems
   
   
3. BBC uses a slightly different Chinese zodiac
   
   
4. rMaps | Interactive Maps from R, by Ramnath Vaidyanathan
   
   
5. The Super Bowl effect on porn traffic on the web
   
   
6. How a New Science of Cities Is Emerging from Mobile Phone Data Analysis
   
   
7. Valentines Cards for urban planners.  This!
   
   
8. A bit of PhD life. So real...
   
   
9. Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Computing in a Short Animated Video

Message of the Day

[image credit: ? via Melissa Hogenboom via Jane Bradley]

Related Link: other funny "scientific" jokes

Subway systems of Rio and Shanghai 1993-2013

Alex Bellos points out to this striking comparison of the subway systems of Rio and Shanghai 20 years ago and today.

[image credit: ?]

Related Links:

• Subways of the World at the same scale
• Commute times in Brazilian metropolitan areas
• Beijing Subway - morning rush hour 
• Fake London Underground signs
• Hidden Animals in the London Underground Map

Uncreative titles in academia

Patrick Dunleavy (LSE) recently published a useful piece suggesting four steps to avoid useless titles for articles and chapters. To those suggestions, I would add: avoid cliches. To illustrate my point here, Google Scholar shows:

• 1,110 hits for publications with "Location Location Location" on the title.
  and
• 1,800 hits! for "A tale of two cities" (ht Leo Monasterio)

By the way, don't try to be funny either. Amusing titles are weakly associated with the number of citations.

The World’s Largest Annual Human Migration

A map of the world’s largest annual human migration, in China of course

[image credit: Baidu via Slate]

Via Joshua Keating, to Slate Magazine:

"Millions of Chinese are currently heading to their hometowns for the Lunar New Year - the world’s largest annual human migration. Last year, a total of 3.4 billion trips were taken ... To put that number in perspective, only a little more than 3 million people in total went on Hajj to Mecca in 2012.

Baidu, China’s largest search engine, created the stunning map above showing the migration for the 40-day festival [...] the map was “created using data taken from users of its location-based applications to calculate and analyze the mass migration of the population during the Spring Festival. The map shows the travel routes and their popularity.” If you click into the interactive version, you can get data for specific cities (in Chinese only)"

Related Links:

• Immigration and the origins of regional inequality in Brazil
• Interprovincial Migration, Regional Development and State Policy in China, 1985–2010
• International Migration Outlook 2013
• Forecasting migration
• How Can European Migration Policies Promote Development?
• A Staggering Migration in China
• Counting Climate Migrants

Assorted links

1. Canada's weirdly recursive geography
   
   
2. FordLand: Henry Ford’s Failed Jungle Fantasy and 6 other abandoned wonders of Brazil
   
   
3. Moving to R after using Excel? How to do many spreadsheet tasks in R
   
   
4. Planning at work #fail
   
   
5.  The Oxford Institute of Population Ageing is undertaking Demography Research Programme on the role of Education and Environment in Fertility decision making and behaviour of women in developing countries Great website with info, publications and data viz.
   
   
6. The Largest Free Mass Transit Experiment in the World
   
   
7. What accounts for the geographical variation in socialmobility? and The Equality of Opportunity Project

[image credit: The Equality of Opportunity Project]

The City of 7 Billion

The City of 7 Billion is an ambitious research project on the impact of population growth and resource consumption at the global scale that reframes the entire world as a single urban entity: the city of 7 billion. The project is being conducted by Bimal Mendis and Joyce Hsiang of the Yale School of Architecture. 

More info on the project here and here.

A visualization of population growth in cities around the world from 1990 to 2015

Music for the weekend

[ht Juliana Belisario]