A spreadsheet to calculate congestion charge

For those interested in transport modelling and congestion pricing, here is a piece in Wired about Komanoff 's spreadsheet to calculate congestion charge. He has been working for three years now on the Balanced Transportation Analyzer, an Excel spreadsheet proposed to model every aspect of New York City transportation (I thank Fabio Storino for the pointer).

And here is a 15-minute video where Komanoff explains the whole idea of the project.

The spreadsheet is quite impressive as for the amount of input data it demands. However, I'm not familiarized with transport modelling, so I'm in no position to have an opinion on this spreadsheet. I'd rahter have some experts' opinions published in scientific journal assessing it.

ps. I confess though I asked myself: why 'Excel' ?!  This is too vintage.

Urban Picture

Hong Kong, by Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze.

Chart of the Day

A nice piece on The Economist covering India’s demographic challenge.

As some studies have pointed out, the key element in discussing the so called 'demographic dividend' of a country is education, and more education. And of course, in the end, education and aging are crucial for productivity levels.

[Image Credit: The Economist]

Media Exposure and Reproductive Behavior

Three papers discussing the effects of media exposure on reproductive behavior.

Ferrara et al (2008). Soap Operas and Fertility: Evidence from Brazil. IDB Working Paper Nº 533 *

Chong and La Ferrara (2010). Television and divorce: Evidence from Brazilian novelas. J. European Economic Association.

Westoff and Koffman (2011). The Association of Television and Radio with Reproductive Behavior. Population and Development Review.

*A  funny  curious finding: "the likelihood that the twenty most popular names chosen by parents for their newborns would include one or more names of the main characters of novelas aired that year was about 33 percent if the area where parents lived received the Globo signal and only 8.5 percent if it did not."

Related Links:

• Baby Deficit and Economic Crises
• Fertility Transition in Brazil
• Birth rate plummets in Brazil
• Updated: How Electricity, Development, and TV Reduce Fertility

Message of the Day

(via tudoaomesmotempoeagora)

Assorted Links

1. How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?  (via @blqueiroz)
   
   
2. Openly available datasets about Amazon
   
   
3. The 25 Least Visited Countries in the World (via Drunkeynesian)
   
   
4. The Flynn effect vs. population aging (via MR)
   
   
5. 3D Mapping in R
   
   
6. An advice for young researchers
   
   
7. Human Development Index of Mexico municipalities
   
   
8. An excellent discussion on the The Challenge of Ageing (and a related essay competition)
   
   
9. Length of the average dissertation (via Flowing Data)
   
   
10. What if we replaced the moon with Jupiter or Saturn?
    
    
11. Population density in select cities around the world

Visualizing surface changes over time in every corner on Earth

A while ago we had a few posts with satellites images showing the urban expansion of Phoenix (1989 - 2009), São Paulo (1957-2007) and Las Vegas ( 1984-2009 or 1976-2010)*. Now you may check similiar timelapse satellite videos for many (many!) other places on the planet from 1984 through 2012 (yearly pictures amounting a total of 909 terabytes of data).

Search anywhere here and say thanks to NASA, Google, Time and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

* Reletad Link:

• Atlas of Urban Expansion - comparing the urban expansion of London, Cariro, Chicago and São Paulo from 1800's through 2000.

Bending Manhattan

Some of you probably remember the city bending scene from the movie Inception. Here is a similar idea applied to Manhattan (via Colossal by BERG).

[Image Credit: BERG]

Soundtrack: Miles Davis improvising on LCD Soundsystem 

Chart of the Day

(click on the image to enlarge it)

[Image Credit: US Census Bureau]

Tracking Trash

Abstract:

Using active self-reporting tags, the authors followed 2,000 objects through Seattle's waste management system. By making the waste "removal chain" more transparent, they help reveal the disposal process of everyday objects, highlighting potential inefficiencies in the current removal system.

This paper is one of the publications from 'Trash Track', a research project led by Carlo Ratti at the MIT SENSEable City Lab. I haven't read the paper. Still, this empirical strategy sounds as one of the most sharp ideas I've heard in the last couple of years. It' a very appealing and straightforward idea and it raises great potential impact for public policy. Here is a short promotional video of the project.

ps. This is the kind of idea that makes you think: "This is so obvious! Why haven't I thought of this before?"