Assorted Links on COVID19

I must say I've been feeling saturated and underwhelmed by the number of data analysts who suddenly became public health and epidemiology experts creating so many data dashboards on COVID-19. There I said it.

Having said that, there many interesting and intelligent people working to understand how the COVID-19 epidemic affects and is affected by demography and human mobility patterns, and how these relationships intersect with and reveal our socioeconomic inequities. I've selected some of the best pieces on the coronavirus crisis I've come across so far.

1. Our World in Data: possibly one the best websites to get updated data and interactive visualizations, by Max Roser and an amazing team at Oxford.
   
   
2. Ilya Kashnitsky and José Aburto have a preprint discussing how COVID-19 poses an extra challenge to the unequally ageing European regions
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
3. Learning from the past: How some cities ‘flattened the curve’ during the 1918 flu pandemic
   
   
4. Google published a series of Community Mobility Reports ... in PDF format !!! Fortunately, you can find the data in .csv here, scraped by Vitor Batista
   
   
5. The effect of human mobility and control measures on the COVID-19 epidemic in China. Paper by Moritz Kraemer et al.
   
   
6. Changes in nighttime lights reveal a dramatic decrease in Wuhan following the COVID-19 outbreak, via Joshua Stevens (one of  my favorite Twitter accounts)
   
   
7. Kuan Butts shows the dramatic impact quarantining has had in road traffic in major cities around the world
   
   
8. How much is air traffic down from normal levels? More than half, by Niko Kommenda for The Guardian
   
   
9. Satellite images show pollution on the decline in the US and Europe
   
   
10. The coronavirus epidemic has also significantly decreased public transport ridership, restaurant bookings, retail activities, energy use and congestion levels
    
    
11. My all favorite. Article on the NYT illustrate how quarantine is a class and racial privilege. Smartphone location data reveals how many lower-income workers continue to move around in cities across the U.S., while wealthier people 'can afford' to stay home and limit their exposure to the coronavirus. Brilliant piece by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Denise Lu and Gabriel Dance.

Assorted Links

1. Evolution of European Motorways 1920-2020
   
   
2. Dataviz of spatial and temporal spread in networks
   
   
3. paper: Open office architecture seems to decrease the volume of face-to-face employees' interaction and increase electronic interaction.
   
   
4. Global Mapping of GDP at 1 km2 Using VIIRS Nighttime Satellite Imagery
   
   
5. Microsoft releases 18M building footprints in Uganda and Tanzania to enable AI Assisted Mapping
   
   
6. OpenRailwayMap, the open online map of the worldwide railroad infrastructure
   
   
7. In 2019, Helsinki had 0 pedestrian or cyclist fatalities for the first time since 1960. How Lowering speeds and traffic calming.

A list of my favorite entries to the 2019 'Information is Beautiful Awards'

Every year since 2012, David McCandless (founder of Information is Beautiful) and a team analyze hundreds of data visualizations, infographics, interactives etc to recognize some of them with the Information is Beautiful Awards. Here is a list in no particular order of some of my favorite entries to the 2019 Information is Beautiful Awards.

1. Racial Disparities In Illinois Traffic Stops
   
   
2. Britain's Top 40 Most Complex Motorway Junctions
   
   
3. Imaging The Entire Earth, Every Day
   
   
4. How much warmer is your city?
   
   
5. Visualising the world’s addiction to plastic bottles. Every day, 1.3 billion plastic bottles are sold around the world
6. Earth At Night, Mountains Of Light, by Jacob Wasilkowski
   
   
7. The Opportunity Atlas
   
   
8. American segregation, mapped at day and night
   
   
9. Dynamic visualization of schedules in The Netherlands
   
   
10. Visualising TomTom Probe Data In Amsterdam
    
    
    
11. How does your zip code impact your health?
    
    
12. 3D Map of Land Values in Japan: 1989 - 2019
    
    
13. Britain’s Most Trodden Paths
    
    
14. The spatial associattion between the prevalence of diabetes in London neighborhoods with the diversity of nutrients of 1.6B grocery purchases
    
    
15. How Many Years Do We Lose To The Air We Breathe?
    
    
16. The complex relationship between certainty and scientific discovery
    
    
17. The Minimum Fleet Network model

Assorted links

1. 25% of students think they are in the top 1% of social skills. 94% of professors think their work is better than their peers. The Social Psychology of Biased Self-Assessment (ht Leo Monasterio)
   
   
2. What happened when New York City (randomly) increased street lighting? Crime fell by 36% as a direct result. HT John B. Holbein ‏, who is great at finding this kind of gems by the way.
   
   
3. Sacred Spaces: a series on modernist churches' by Thibaud Poirier, HT Darran Anderson
   
   
4. Interesting report comparing housing in London , New York City, Paris and Tokyo, by Jim Gleeson. Some key results summarized in this short thread.
   
   
5. The power of a single book. Beautiful metaphor for how ideas can have real impact
   
   
6. The data that was missing in your research: an incredibly detailed 3-D maps of the lunar surface
   
   
7. Microsoft Researchers trained a neural network to analyze satellite imagery and generate the footprints of 125,192,184 building in all 50 US states. The data are available on GitHub. Great coverage in the NYT, by Tim Wallace et al.

image credit: NYT

The suburbs of Mesa, Arizona

image credit: NYT

Assorted Links

1. Nice website to compare the area footprint and density of metro areas at the same scale, by Brandon M-Anderson
   
   
2. How population growth is affecting the declining dynamism in the economy
   
   
3. The city of Zurich published its 50,000 detailed 3D buildings as Open Data, via Christian Hürzeler 
   
   
4. “Economics to Sociology Phrase Book”: a guide “to help economists adjust their way of speaking in a manner that will make it comprehensible to Sociologists” via Leo Monasterio
   
   
5. Interesting paper bridging the fields of human geography, sociology and personality psychology to improve current models of mobility and tie formation. by Laura Alessandretti, Andrea Baronchelli and Sune Lehmann
   
   
6. Google Maps, but for emissions modeling via Eli Knaap
   
   
7. Extraordinary 4 minute tram-ride, along the streets of Rochdale (UK) in 1900, via Tim Dunn
   
   
8. Alasdair Rae has written a tutorial on working with high resolution global population data in QGIS

Our Top 10 Posts of 2018

1. How much residential space could you rent with $1,500 in 30 global cities?
   
   
2. Using R to Predict Route Preferences in Bike Sharing
   
   
3. Visualizing space-time networks
   
   
4. Political populism and the revenge of the places that don’t matter
   
   
5. New tool to get population estimates for any user-defined area
   
   
6. Assorted R Packages for Spatial Analysis
   
   
7. The urban footprint of the largest metropolitan areas of Europe
   
   
8. The health and economic benefits of cycling network expansion in 167 European cities
   
   
9. A review of 85 Agent-Based Modelling platforms and tools
   
   
10. A survey of the literature on mobile phone datasets analysis

The space-time tree, by Craig Taylor

Assorted Links

1. Paper: "exposure to socioeconomic inequality in an everyday setting negatively affects willingness to publicly support a redistributive economic policy" by Melissa Sands
   
   
2. Peak Artificial Intelligence
   
   
3. Interactive historic map of every UK railway line that's ever existed, via Tim Dunn
   
   
4. Oxford DEMIG databases with unprecedented coverage of migration & migration policy data now available for free download, via Hein de Haas
   
   
5. Using machine learning in R to predict Automobile Collision and Bike Share Demand and subsidy via Ken Steif
   
   
6. Awful AI: a curated list to track current scary usages of AI - hoping to raise awareness, HT Will Geary
   
   
7. The software used to create the black hole in the movie 'Interstellar' is a full implementation of Einstein's equations in 40,000 lines of C++, and rendered thousands of 23-megapixel IMAX frames on a 32,000-core render farm at about 20 core-hours per frame via John Arundel
   
   
8. What to consider when choosing colors for data visualization, by Lisa Rost

credit: Lisa Rost

Assorted Links

1. How rich are you? Probably richer than you think
   
   
2. The first data on air pollutants from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite have been released
   
   
3. Implications of Zika virus for the number of live births in Brazil, by Marcia Castro et al
   
   
4. Some MOOCs on Cities
   
   
5. Unpacking the polarization of workplace skills by Cesar Hidalgo et al
   
   
6. Parking lines viewer and editor for OpenStreetMap , via Maurizio Napolitano
   
   
7. A global dataset of river network geometry and a global dataset of river widths developed from Landsat Imagery, via GAUMSS
   
   
8. How Much Hotter Is Your Hometown Than When You Were Born? Brilliant dataviz by the NYT team

credit: NYT 

Soundtrack:

Assorted Links

1. Tokyo has a great public transport system....all things considered
   
   
2. report: Migration Data using Social Media: a European Perspective by Zagheni et al
   
   
3. imagineRio, a searchable atlas that illustrates the social and urban evolution of Rio de Janeiro over the entire history of the city
   
   
4. self recommending: Machine Learning beyond Curve Fitting: An Intro to Causal Inference and do-Calculus, by Ferenc Huszár
   
   
5. Brazil’s National Museum have been lost to fire
   
   
6. The late Waldo Tobler's legendary, seminal, (but unpublished) PhD thesis from 1961 is actually downloadable online. HT Michiel  Meeteren
   
   
7. When should you show percentage changes on a log or linear scale? Great post by Lisa Rost. I should re-read this post every now and then.
   
   
8. Google has launched a search tool for datasets. This is only a beta version but the idea could be really useful in the next years
   
   
9. Calculating driving isochrones considering traffic levels in QGIS (Python script here), by David. If you are more like an ArcGIS person, Riccardo has you covered. BTW, David and Ricardo run the great blog Digital Geography which is also on Twitter.

traffic enhanced isochrones during a in Birmingham

credit: davidribbon

and some isochrones of Chicago

credit: Riccardo

Assorted Links

1. The monumental scale of human sacrifice in the Aztec capital
   
   
2. 3D interactive Data Visualization that renders all 47K buildings in Manhattan
   
   
3. Microsoft has released 125 million Building Footprints in the US as Open Data via GIS Song
   
   
4. The late Waldo Tobler's legendary, seminal, (but unpublished) PhD thesis from 1961 is downloadable online. HT Michiel Meeteren
   
   
5. A really straightforward abstract
   
   
6. An exploration of color Palettes to communicate uncertainty, via Andy Woodruff
   
   
7. One of the greatest scenes in documentary history
   
   
8. paper: Bayesian Estimation of Age-Specific Mortality and Life Expectancy for Small Areas With Defective Vital Records (ungated version and replication files), by Carl Schmertmann and M.Gonzaga

image credit: Schmertmann and M.Gonzaga

Assorted Links

1. Using geolocated tweets and the Google Books datasets to map the Americanization of English in space and time, by Bruno Gonçalves et al.
   
   
2. Sony World Photography Awards 2018
   
   
3. Interactive maps with deforestation and reforestation of national parks at the border between Brazil and Argentina, between the 1950s and the 2010s, including some aerial and satellite pictures from US spy satellites from the 1960s. via Frederico Freitas
   
   
4. Why the New Research on Mobility Matters - via Juan Pablo Chauvin
   
   
5. Do peoples' judgments on hypothetical trolley dilemmas predict what they would do in a real-life trolley dilemma situation? via Dina Pomeranz
   
   
6. Meaning of the colors in country flags. The explanation of the Brazilian flag hurts
   
   
7. Life expectancy vs. health expenditure over time... needless to say the USA has a problem here. via Max Roser et al at Our World in Data

Assorted Links

1. The National Transit Database (NTD) of the USA
   
   
2. The jaw-dropping view from a comet surface
   
   
3. Ed Glaeser has a new Edx course on The Past, Present and Future of Urban Life
   
   
4. Advanced microscope shows cells at work in incredible 3D detail via Marcia Castro
   
   
5. The Vertical City: The Price of Land and the Height of Buildings in Chicago 1870-2010, by Gabriel Ahlfeldt
   
   
6. A colour-coded map showing the speed limit of every road in London
   
   
7. Using Deep neural networks to copy artistic style
   
   
8. Christaller and “big data”: recalibrating central place theory via the geoweb, by Ate Poorthuis & M. van Meeteren

credit: Michiel van Meeteren and Ate Poorthuis

Assorted links

1. Automation and AI will increase spatial/regional inequalities. Paper by Morgan Frank and colleagues
   
   
2. Explore, select and download data of the global population projections by age, sex and education, a great collaborative work of researchers from the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital
   
   
3. The team led by Max Roser at Our World in Data is hiring a postdoctoral researcher in the area of global health and population sciences
   
   
4. Greyhound: a powerful platform to interactively explore and analyze massive point clouds with Trillions of points in the browser, via Howard Butler
   
   
   
   
5. The dynamical structure of political corruption networks. A paper by Haroldo Ribeiro, Luis Alves et al., analyzing 27 years of political corruption scandals in Brazil
   
   
6. Citywide effects of high-occupancy vehicle restrictions: Evidence from “three-in-one” in Jakarta, by Rema Hanna et al.
   
   
7. Want to find statistically significant hierarchical modules in weighted networks? paper here and code here, by Tiago Peixoto, who is the author of the graph-tool Python library

Assorted Links

1. The world’s largest subway system goes cashless as Shanghai Metro adopts QR code
   
   
   
   
2. Fitness tracking app Strava data gives away location of secret US army bases
   
   
   
   
3. Marriages have on average long lasting positive effects on well-being and life satisfaction HT Cesar Hidalgo I cannot confirm nor deny
   
   
   
   
4. Most Americans didn't approve of Martin Luther King Jr. before his death
   
   
   
   
5. Sprawling Mayan 'cities' uncovered under Guatemala jungle using LIDAR data - "The study estimates that roughly 10 million people may have lived within the Maya Lowlands"
   
   
   
   
6. What factors are associated with population projection accuracy? by Guangqing Chi and Donghui Wang
   
   
   
   
7. The World's 15 Most Complex Subway Maps and our cognitive limits: "Multimodal transportation systems in large cities have thus already exceeded human cognitive limits and, consequently, the traditional view of navigation in cities has to be revised substantially"
   
   
   
   
8. The total seasonal snowfall in the continental US for 2017–Jan 2018, shown as a relief map. Beautiful dataviz by Garrett Dash Nelson
   
   

Assorted Links

1. Post-doctoral position at Lund University to work on sustainable urban mobility and accessibility with a focus on economics and transportation equity, HT Jean Ryan
   
   
2. Rainbows make horrible colour maps... let's stop using them
   
   
3. paper : Rich do not rise early: spatio-temporal patterns in the mobility networks of different socio-economic classes
   
   
4. The Internet of Things in unexpected things
   
   
5. An Open Letter from 1,470 Economists on Immigration
   
   
6. There is an app to crowdsource data on shootings in Rio. Great initiative by Cecilia Olliveira
   
   
7. A Catalog of Civic Data Use Cases, via Igor Calzada
   
   
8. An interactive global overview of the magnitude, disparities and trend of infant mortality in the world between 1950 and 2011, by Ramon Martinez

The most visited posts of 2017

1. Mexicans didn’t cross the US border. The border crossed them
   
   
2. The people who keep us company throughout our life cycle
   
   
3. The long-term effect of slavery on inequality today
   
   
4. Creating an animated world map of life expectancy changes from 1950 to 2100 in R
   
   
5. An open dataset with 6,000 years of global urbanization
   
   
6. Two new libraries for working with Spatial data in R
   
   
7. The impressive expansion of subway systems in China
   
   
8. The effect of Uber on traffic congestion
   
   
9. Using deep learning and Google Street View to estimate the socioeconomic characteristics of neighborhoods
   
   
10. The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion

Assorted Links

1. paper: carpooling options from companies like Uber and Lyft could reduce the number of vehicles on the road by a factor of three without significantly impacting travel time
   
   
2. Istanbul Urban Database: digitizing the historic urban archives of Istanbul , via @geog.an.mod
   
   
3. "Bussed Out: How America moves its homeless"
   
   
4. The effect of population age structure on innovation. In short, younger societies are more innovative. Via Tyler Cowen
   
   
5. Loud orgies of Mexican fish could deafen dolphins, say scientists.
   
   
6. Place matters: A longitudinal study estimating the influence of neighbourhood walkability on walking behaviour in across different life-stages via Ahmed el Geneidy
   
   
7. The science myths that will not die. The `population bomb` myth is included in the list
   
   
8. Carl Schmertmann‏ pointed out on Twitter to a new open access book "Visualizing Mortality Dynamics in the Lexis Diagram". You might also like this really great interactive interface to explore how mortality patterns change over time and across countries , developed by Jonas Schöley

Assorted Links

1. Interactive visualization of all the world's flight paths, by Callum Prentice
   
   
   
   
2. Chile is using mobile data to find out how and why women use the city differently than men
   
   
   
   
3. The Actual Voices of Enslaved Black People Recorded From The 1800s, via Danilo Freire
   
   
   
   
4. A research agenda on geospatial big data and cartography, by Anthony C. Robinson et al
   
   
   
   
5. Researchers produce images of people’s faces from their genomes
   
   
   
   
6. Alex Singleton, Seth Spielman and David Folch have a new book called Urban Analytics. The book looks really promising! I haven't had the chance to read it need to work on my phd thesis and it is packed with GitHub resources that you can access here
   
   
   
   
7. A photographer has documented life in this Chinese square for 30 years. via Peter D Smith
   
   
   
   
8. Does causation imply correlation?
   
   
   
   
9. The transition from more than 6 to fewer than 3 children per woman took the UK almost a century. This change took 26 years to happen in Brazil, and only 11 years in China - Max Roser (ht Leo Monasterio)

Assorted Links

1. Thanks to Geoff Boeing's great work, you can easily create isochrone maps for anywhere in the world automatically with Python and its OSMnx package
   
   
2. Christian Brand (TSU/Oxford) is one of the co-authors of a new WHO report on "Health economic assessment tools (HEAT) for walking and for cycling"
   
   
3. An AI experiment to find unsafe housing using street-level images, by Jonathan Jay
   
   
4. The Right to the City: Free Ebook Download
   
   
5. Rio's mega-event transportation investments did not address inequalities (or even improve mobility)
   
   
6. call for papers on supply chain and logistics:  2018 MIT SCALE Latin America Conference
   
   
7. The Harvard University Data Science Initiative is seeking applications for its Harvard Data Science Postdoctoral Fellows Program for the 2018-2019 academic year
   
   
8. Google has been mapping air pollution using Google Street View cars. So far, they've measured over one billion air quality data points and now air quality scientists can request access to their data

Assorted Links

1. The next time you have "a new idea no one's thought of before", read this list, be humble and go back to  Google  the library.
   
   
2. This website helps you select a projection for your map (paper here)
   
   
3. Mapping London’s “pseudo-public spaces,” spaces “that appear to be public but are... controlled by developers.” via Geoff Manaugh
   
   
4. How One Brilliant Woman Mapped the Ocean Floor’s Secrets via Sabrina Lai, who is the creator/admin of a great group about Geographical analysis, urban modeling, spatial statistics on Facebook
   
   
5. Infographic of the fascinating timeline of the far future via Tyler Cowen
1. In a 100 million years from now: “Future archaeologists should be able to identify an ‘Urban Stratum’ of fossilized great coastal cities, mostly through the remains of underground infrastructure such as building foundations and utility tunnels.”.
   
   
6. 100 greatest images of Saturn from its Cassini Mission
   
   
7. Heads up for some great opportunities:
1. University of California, Santa Barbara Department of Geography invites applications for a tenure-track position in spatial data science
2. The Ohio State University, Department of Geography invites applications for a tenure track position with expertise in areas such as spatial-temporal data analytics, spatial simulation and modeling, cyberGIS and high performance computing, and/or geovisualization
3. University of Texas St Antonio is hiring a tenure track/Associate demographer who works with big data
   
   
8. Beautiful data visualization of music, by Nicholas Rougeux
   
   
   
   This is a data visualization of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. You should read it read clockwise.
   Size = note length
   Distance from center = pitch
   Colors = instruments.