6th Anniversary of Urban Demographics !

On this 25th of June I celebrated the 6th Anniversary of Urban Demographics blog. It has been a really valuable resource  of procrastination  as a personal repository of papers, maps and texts I find interesting. Thanks for all the readers \o/

Here are some stats that show a summary of the blog over the past year. Please, feel free to drop me a line with suggestions on how to improve the blog. If you have any criticisms, please direct them to this other blog here.

• 153 posts, an average of 3 posts per week 
• 40,088 visits, an average of 11 visits per day
• 3,865 followers on Twitter
• 1,834 likes on Facebook 
• 275 rss subscribers

The most popular posts:

1. World Population Distributed by Latitude and Longitude
2. Creating tilted and stacked maps in R using ggplot2
3. Testing Jane Jacobs's ideas on urban vitality using mobile phone data
4. Data visualization with R: geographic networks
5. Where to find high spatial resolution data on population distribution

and 6 of my favourite posts:

1. Build and they will come, or The Black Hole Theory of Highway Investment
2. ReDesigning the Global Map of Refugees
3. How much faster you could travel today compared to 1914
4. Brazil Racial Dotmap
5. Global Grid of Probabilities of Urban Expansion to 2030
6. The hidden inequality of who dies in car crashes

Where do readers come from? (170 Countries, or 4,513 Cities)

1. United States (29.1%) 
2. Brazil (14.3%) 
3. United Kingdom (9.6%) 
4. Germany (3.4%) 
5. Canada (2.9%) 
6. India (2.7%)
7. other countries (38%) Not many readers in Siberia no Greenland though

Quick (and sad) note on Brexit

The Leave Vote was strongest in regions (1) most economically dependent on EU, and (2) with fewest migrants. via John Burn-Murdoch (more here)

NEW: Regions with biggest Leave votes are the most economically dependent on EU 🤔 https://t.co/X5bfpkpUfE #Brexit pic.twitter.com/frbQqiknwG

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) 24 June 2016

On my way to Brazil

The blog will be a little less active in the next few days as I'm flying to Brazil today.

I will be between Rio and Brasilia, where I'll be  hanging out with family and friends  discussing the transport legacy of the Olympic Games in Brazil and its impacts on urban accessibility and equity. In case you're also going to the WPSC conference, feel free to drop me a line or a tweet so we can chat over some caipirinhas at the conference.

credit: Flavio Veloso

Soundtrack:

Assorted Links

1. Web Scraping Big Data on Rental Housing Markets across the United States, by Geoff Boeing
   
   
2. Using aerial images to compare 60 Years of Urban Change in the US 
   
   
3. China's high-speed rail vision
   
   
4. 25 of the best photographs of Muhammad Ali
   
   
5. Real-time visualization of Ebola evolution and geographic spread
   
   
6. This interactive map shows how ‘wrong’ other maps are via Pablo Astudillio
   
   
7. My type of dog 
   
   
8. World’s Most Influential Universities as revealed by Wikipedia articles
   
   
9. How the Earth Would Look Like Without Oceans

My latest failed plot

Unintentionally creating abstract art in R using ggplot2. I fail my PhD, I'll try to sell my plots to an art gallery.

R Links

1. A Compendium of Clean Graphs in R
   
   
2. An introduction to Agent-Based Modelling in R
   
   
3. Implementing Spatial Segregation Measures in R
   
   
4. How long it takes from question submit to 1st answer on StackOverflow?
   
   
5. How to efficiently calculate distances between pairs of coordinates
   
   
6. A quite fast R script to download data of the Brazilian Census 2010
   
   
7. How to reproduce the famous Joy Division cover using ggplot2
   UPDATE:  there is an R package for that ! (ht @mikefc)

Visualizing globalization with shipping traffic lanes

via The Dunkeynesian

Shipping traffic lanes show who is part of globalization and who is left out pic.twitter.com/dUcy5Fravl

— William Easterly (@bill_easterly) 2 June 2016

Assorted Links

1. [new paper] Mortality differentials by education in Brazil: Life expectancy was 6.27 years longer for men with a complete university degree than for those with less than primary education in 2010. The paper is in Portuguese
   
   
2. A nice summary of 10 major data science methods
   
   
3. Beautiful photos of 1908 Japan
   
   
4. 40% of the buildings in Manhattan could not be built today under current zoning rules
   
   
5. Will autonomous vehicles be safer then conventional cars ? Here is why answering this question is far from simple  via Tyler Cowen
   
   
6. Lisa Charlotte Rost ‏ has gone through the painful task of creating the same chart with 12 different tools and libraries. This gives me more reasons to stick to R and ggplot2 :)
   
   
7. Road intersections as art
   
   
8. Making explicit the network behind air transport: by Martin Grandjean