Hong Kong in the 1950s

A wonderful photographic essay with registers of Hong Kong in the 1950s, by Fan Ho (via T de Aragão).

[image credit: Fan Ho]

[image credit: Fan Ho]

[image credit: Fan Ho]

Every Device Connected to the Internet

Quick post since I haven't had much time to procrastinate lately about this lovely map showing Every Device in the Worlds that is Connected to the Internet (via Harvey Miller).

The maps was created by John Matherly using matplotlib, a plotting library for Python.

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: John Matherly via Gizmodo]

Bike-sharing in the world

The world leader in bike-sharing is… China  obviously!

"In fact, of the 20 biggest bike share programs on the planet, all but four are in China. The exceptions are Paris, London, Barcelona, and New York (and the last two tie for #20)."

 The full story is here, via Dan Hill.

[image credit: Quartz]

Related Links:

• Mining bicycle sharing data around the globe
• The size of bike-sharing systems Worldwide
• Bicycles access and school enrollment

Assorted links

1. Krugman's recent piece on the role housing costs in interregional differences in economic and population growth
   
   
2. São Paulo is eliminating parking minimums
   
   
3. A comparison of programming languages in economics
   
   
4. The 27th International Cartographic Conference will be held in Rio, 2015. The Call for Papers is open
   
   
5. How liberal or conservative are America’s cities? (ht Pedro Souza)
   
   
6. Hong Kong skyscrapers a radical new look
   
   
7. Map of countries with a smaller population than Tokyo (via Guardian Cities)

[image credit: Alasdair Rae ]

Listen to Durkheim delivering a talk

Kieran Healy (Duke Uni) and Marion Fourcade (Berkeley) found this recording of Émile Durkheim delivering a talk in 1911 (ht Pedro Souza). This is an amazing piece of history as Durkheim is one the the founding fathers of Sociology. He is also my favourite author of the three little pigs of Sociology, Durkheim, Weber and Marx.

In his blog, Kieran Healy writes:

"It’s a fragment of a piece titled Jugements de valeur et jugements de réalité, which you can read in French here. It was recorded in 1911 at a meeting in Bologna, which I think is one of only quite few times that Durkheim left France in order to attend a conference. Here it is. (There’s a short bit of dead silence at the beginning.)"

If you don’t see the player, download the clip directly from here. Unfortunately, Durkheim's power point presentation is not available :(

Related Links:

• How old is the stuff sociologists cite?
• Key Works in Sociology
• The rise and fall of Urban Sociology (?)
• The Suicide Paradox
• The Social Network Effect Behind Obesity

Big Data and Smart Urbanism

How smart are 'smart cities' ?

Unknown street artist, Poland

Big Data and Smart Cities are fairly recent buzzwords in the media and in the academic community. To be honest, these words are so commented that I cannot help rolling my eyes when I read researchers and journalists using them in a sloppy way, as they often do.

So I would like to share this presentation Rob Kitchin gave in Oxford Internet Institute (oii) on March 2014. Rob gives a broad picture of the cutting edge literature on smart urbanism. He also makes the concept of big data pretty clear by contrasting  it with more traditional types of data, like population census.  

In case you're interested, Rob's presentation is based in this paper recently published: The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism.

Related Links:

• The Programmable City
• Cities,complexity, and emergent order, by M. Batty

Uncertainty

How to make your tables less terrible

By Darkhorse Analytics, via Lena Groeger

Modeling Complex Systems for Public Policies

Some of my colleagues at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea - Brazil) are organizing a seminar on 'Modeling Complex Systems for Public Policies'. It is a great initiative to bring some of the cutting edge developments in academia to discuss critical challenges faced in the policy world.

The event will have the participation of some great researchers, including Luis Bettencourt and Michael Jacobson (full programme here). The seminar will be held in Brasilia in the beginning of September 2014.

[click on the poster to enlarge it]

R Links

1. Robin Lovelace will be teaching a practical introduction to spatial microsimulation in R, Cambridge/UK Sept 18 - 19th
   
   
2. Free e-book on Data Science with R
   
   
3. Rob Hyndman talks about how to do Forecasting, Backcasting and Coherent population forecasting using R
   
   
4. Computational Actuarial Science with R
   
   
5. Exploring the United Nations population projections with rCharts, by Kyle Walker
   
   
6. There are many useful tips in the Applied Demography Toolbox
   
   
7. Behold the R meme generator! Your life will never be the same after this.

What do we know about the Top Incomes?

Marcelo Medeiros and Pedro Souza (two excellent researches) give an answer to this question in a recent study:

"The Rich, the Affluent and the Top Incomes: A Literature Review" 

Abstract:

We review the literature about the rich, the affluent and the top incomes focusing in two issues: identification and measurement, and the analysis of the determinants of richness. The review discusses data sources, indicators, populations and units of analysis used for the identification of the rich, approaches used to construct affluence lines and measures of richness. It also surveys empirical results about the composition of the incomes of the rich and the role of direct determinants of richness, such as individual characteristics, the State and the structure of production. We cover literature since the early twentieth century but give special attention to the research conducted after the 2000s.

Chart of the Day

A new report by the World Bank brings this interesting chart on the Real GDP Per Capita and share of Global Population (via Timothy Taylor).

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: World Bank via Timothy Taylor via Conrad Hackett]

Urban Picture

[image credit ?]

Soundtrack:

2,600 years of migration and cultural history

Here is one new study to feature in the list of demographic papers published on Science and Nature. Using free databases with the date and place of birth and death of around 150,000 notable individuals (caveat: biased towards Europe and US), Maximilian and his colleagues were able to analyze the migration patterns of those notable individuals over the last 2,600 years (between 600 bc and 2012). 

Schich, Maximilian, et al. (2014) "A network framework of cultural history." science 345.6196 : 558-562. (ungated version here)

Abstract:

The emergent processes driving cultural history are a product of complex interactions among large numbers of individuals, determined by difficult-to-quantify historical conditions. To characterize these processes, we have reconstructed aggregate intellectual mobility over two millennia through the birth and death locations of more than 150,000 notable individuals. The tools of network and complexity theory were then used to identify characteristic statistical patterns and determine the cultural and historical relevance of deviations. The resulting network of locations provides a macroscopic perspective of cultural history, which helps us to retrace cultural narratives of Europe and North America using large-scale visualization and quantitative dynamical tools and to derive historical trends of cultural centers beyond the scope of specific events or narrow time intervals.

The video abstract is also jaw dropping :)

Venn Diagram Doodle

Great Google Doodle today to celebrate the 180th birthday of John Venn, creator of the Venn Diagrams. I particularly like this one.

[image credit: ? via Flowing data]

Related Links

• Venn Diagrams and Regression Analysis

Assorted links

1. Lessons From Brazil’s War on Poverty
   
   
2. What makes most restaurant reviews worthless
   
   
3. The present and future of Google Maps
   
   
4. The world cup impact on porn websites traffic
   
   
5. 2014 total malware volumes in the first 3 months already surpassed entire 2013 total(via Anchises)
   
   
6. The Billion Prices Project - an academic initiative at MIT that uses prices collected from hundreds of online retailers around the world on a daily basis to conduct economic research (e.g. comparing Inflation in Latin American Countries). - via The Drunkeynesian
   
   
7. Other things I'd rather be doing
   
   
8. Watch 220 years of U.S. state population growth

[click on the image to enlarge it]