The mobility patterns of historically notable individuals

A new study using Natural Language Processing techniques to retrieve historical information from Wikipedia and analyze the spatial mobility patterns of historically notable individuals. A nice and inventive method to study historical mobility patterns. Science can be incredible and fun. (HT Marco De Nadai)

Lucchini, L., Tonelli, S. & Lepri, B. Following the footsteps of giants: modeling the mobility of historically notable individuals using Wikipedia. EPJ Data Sci. 8, 36 (2019) doi:10.1140/epjds/s13688-019-0215-7

image credit: Lucchini et al 2019

Ipea Seminar - Infusing Urban and Regional policy with Geographic Data Science

Today we are having Dani Arribas-Bel (Geographic Data Science Lab, University of Liverpool) presenting a seminar at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea). Daniel (website, Twitter) will be talking about his research agenda on "Infusing Urban and Regional policy with Geographic Data Science". The seminar will start at 3pm (local time). My apologies this post comes in short notice. This week has been hectic.

Daniel is part of the development team of  PySAL and he is a prolific researcher and also a great enthusiast of open data/software and research reproducibility. In fact, many of his papers (code and data) and teaching material are available on his Github repo.

Summary of the presentation:

The recent explosion in availability of new forms of data poses significant opportunities to how we analyse cities and regions, both in academic and policy contexts. Over the last decade, three families of data have emerged in this context. One is digital traces of individual activity. From credit card transactions, to mobile phone calls, to thoughts and feelings we decide to share through social media, more and more bits of our life are being stored digitally as data that a computer can understand. The second comes from an increasing number of sensors, from traffic controllers to nano-satellites orbiting the Earth, which are constantly recording information about the environment. The third one has existed for longer but has not been available until recently: a few years ago, governments started releasing data on their internal operations that used to be parked in (closed) silos. This presentation will walk through several examples where new forms of data are applied to tackle new questions or obtain new perspectives on long-standing challenges of regional and urban analysis. As part of this whirlwind tour, we will also spend some time trying to understand what the main challenges, methodological advances, and risks that "accidental data” pose are, and will emphasise the tremendous opportunities they unleash.

credit: Dani Arribas-Bel

Computational social science and the dynamics of social trust

Just a quick  procrastination  post today since I'm still working on the paper I'll submit to TRB.

I read a few days ago a great piece by Pseudoerasmus (Twitter) on 'Where Do Pro-Social Institutions Come From?'. It's a long read but it gives a nice and beautifully written overview on the recent research on the dynamics of social trust and its relation to collective action, culture, institutions and evolutionary game theory.

On a related topic, I just saw today the new project by Nicky Case. Nick is a star programmer/interactive designer that uses code to build interactive websites to explain scientific theories to the wider public. He has many interesting projects so be aware you might loose a day or two playing with his projects. In his latest project, Nick applies computational social science to game theory to explore the dynamics of social trust. It's a super well designed project that explains in simple terms such a complex topic. I think this is a great complimentary material to Pseudoerasmus' piece and in fact to any course on collective action, social trust, game theory, chaos and complexity theory.

Now go on. Take 7 minutes of your day and give it a try. It's worth it. If you don't have 7 minutes, this is the main take away.

"If there's one big takeaway from all of game theory, it's this: What the game is, defines what the players do. Our problem today isn't just that people are losing trust, it's that our environment acts against the evolution of trust. [...] In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it's us players who define the game"