Thursday, August 27, 2015

Data visualization with R: geographic networks

I just bumped into this blog from a team at SNAP, where Matthew Leonawicz and his colleagues share some great data visualizations they've been creating with R (and some code snippets). Here are two nice examples of geographic networks on a flat map and on a 3D model of the Earth

This is very similar to the work of James Cheshire (UCL) on mapping the World’s Biggest Airlinesglobal migration and commuting patterns. Neat stuff. I've just added their blog to my feedly





[image credit: Matthew Leonawicz]

Quote of the Day

"The social sciences makes something everyone understands but no one is interested in and turns it into something no one understands and everyone seems interested in." 
(Tony King on a lecture titled "The Tale of Three Cities") ht Kelsi Nagy 

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The Globe of Economic Complexity

The Atlas of Economic Complexity is a project born from the collaboration between Cesar Hidalgo (MIT) and Ricardo Hausmann (Harvard). The Atlas has an online tool with interactive chars and maps that enables users to visualize a country’s total trade, track how these dynamics change over time and explore growth opportunities for more than a hundred countries worldwide.

More recently, the project has resealed a new visualization tool, the Globe of Economic Complexity (created by Owen Cornec and Romain Vuillemot.). The Start Intro is quite hypnotic, perfect for a few hours of curious procrastination. 

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Friday, August 14, 2015

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

Glaeser on The Happiness of Cities

Ed Glaeser has recently delivered an interesting talk at LSE about happiness and cities.


ps. On a similar topic, here is a great paper discussing well-being and transport.

Friday, August 7, 2015

Mapping NYC Taxi Data with python

The government of New York City has published a number of datasets with records of all taxi trips completed in NYC in 2014 and select months of 2015. The datasets are in CSV format and you can download them here (I thank Chris Whong for the pointer).


[image credit: Daniel Forsyth]

Thursday, August 6, 2015

The Transport Tech Revolution? Hold your horses!


There is an increasing buzz about the tech revolution that would happen in the transport sector in the next decades. Here is a glimpse of what I'm talking about.


In a more down to earth perspective, Tim Schwanen (TSU/Oxford) writes short piece with a few good reasons to expect the future of transport to look remarkably familiar. Here is his article.


Monday, August 3, 2015

Urbanization and Growth: A review of the past 500 years

Jedwab, R. and Vollrath, D. Urbanization without Growth in Historical Perspective. Working Papers from The George Washington University, Institute for International Economic Policy.

Abstract: 
The world is becoming more and more urbanized at every income level, and there has been a dramatic increase in the number of mega-cities in the developing world. This has led scholars to believe that development and urbanization are not always correlated, either across space or over time. In this paper, we use historical data at both the country level and city level over the five centuries between 1500-2010 to revisit the topic of “urbanization without growth” (Fay & Opal, 2000). In particular, we first establish that, although urbanization and income remain highly correlated within any given year, urbanization is 25-30 percentage points higher in 2010 than in 1500 at every level of income per capita. Second, while historically this shift in urbanization rates was more noticeable at the upper tail of the income distribution, i.e. for richer countries, it is now particularly visible at the lower tail, i.e. for poorer countries. Third, these patterns suggest that different factors may have explained the shift in different periods of time. We use the discussion of these factors as an opportunity to provide a survey of the literature and summarize our knowledge of what drives the urbanization process over time.

Saturday, August 1, 2015

Some Demographic Assorted Links

  1. The UN has recently released the 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects (via Bernardo Queiroz)

  2. Cutting edge research behind new population projections

  3. Can Demography Affect Inflation and Monetary Policy? (via MR)

  4. Which countries have the most immigrants?

  5. There are now at least two good open access journals in demography/population studies. The well known Demographic Research (twitter) , and the new International Journal of Population Studies (twitter)

  6. The new Institute for Asian Demographic Research, in Shanghai (via Emilio Zagheni)

  7. In celebration to World Population Day (11th of July), Springer and BioMed have made freely available a selection of free articles that investigate the consequences of the ever increasing population on health, migration and the environment. These papers will be freely available until September 10, 2015

  8. Nice piece in the NYT on the The Unrealized Horrors of Population Explosion

  9. A great series of GIFs showing demographic changes in different counties (ht Conrad Hackett)


[image credit: Laird Research]