Street art + Satellite pictures

Street art + Satellite pictures = the world's largest GIF, by INSA

[image credit: BALLANTINES]

More info here:

Assorted links

1. The emergence of "4D printing"
   
   
2.  A great piece on New York’s Shadow Transit, by Aaron Reiss
   
   
3. Report: a multidimensional comparison of  24 medium-sized European cities with population around 100 thousand (ht Andreas Zeidlitz)
   
   
4. 25 Brutally Honest Peer Review Comments From Scientists
   
   
5. The Economist has published a nice piece on about how the emerging world is becoming suburban. As usual, Peter Gordon is very sharp in finding a few weak points of this unifying discourse on "the suburb" as a single reality
   
   
6. The smallest creation of the human form in history
   
   
7. Pictures From The Coldest Inhabited Town On Earth 
   
   
8. Joel Cohen: An Introduction to Demography
   
   
9. What Are Traffic Waves and Why Do They Happen So Much? , by Lewis Lehe
   
   
10. Top Ph.D programs in Philosophy, by Kieran Healy (ht Pedro Souza)

click on the image to enlarge it

[image credit: Kieran Healy]

The Big Data trap

Tim Harford's talk on the perils of big data at the Royal Statistical Society (RSS):

Here is a short summary of one of the main arguments:

Hidden biases in data are a problem. Even the largest of datasets have bits of information missing. Quoting Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford, Harford said one might think they have all the data, but there will always be people missing from any dataset.

To illustrate this, Harford pointed to the City of Boston's Street Bump smartphone app - a clever idea to tackle the problem of potholes. Bostonians were encouraged to download the app and set it running when out in their cars so that when their vehicles hit a pothole, the bump would be recorded by the phone's accelerometer and location data sent to the city's public works department. What happened, of course, was that most of the potholes that were identified and fixed were those in young, affluent areas - areas where people owned smartphones and could download the app.

City officials might have thought they had found a way to record every pothole, but that wasn't the case. As Harford concluded: "Some might think we are now able to measure everything; that we can turn everything into numbers. But we need to be wise enough to know that is always an illusion."

Urban Picture

Canton Valais, Switzerland

[image credit: Jean Revillard via NYT]

Sometimes, the size of your data matters

off-topic post:

The Millennium Simulation Project is a simulation of the large-scale evolution of the Universe from just after the big bang to the present:

The Millennium Run modelled more than 10 billion particles to trace the evolution of the matter distribution in a cubic region of the Universe over 2 billion light-years on a side. It kept busy the principal supercomputer at the Max Planck Society's Supercomputing Centre in Garching, Germany for more than a month.

Related links to remind us how uninportant we are: 

1. Spatial Scale of The Universe 
2. Time scale of the universe

Blade Runner 2019? No! Beijing, today

Blade Runner? No! Beijing, today. pic.twitter.com/JB6lUGLzg0
— Puño (@punodraws) January 14, 2015

The multilayer network of public transport in the UK, now available

Riccardo Gallotti and Marc Barthelemy have recently published an interesting paper on the Anatomy and efficiency of urban multimodal mobility.

As a by-product of their research, they have also made a great contribution to transport studies in the UK. This is because the data they gathered on the UK public transport system are now made available. This includes a really large multi-modal system with flights, rail, ferry, coach, subway, bus, tram, light rail, etc

Thanks to Gallotti and Barthelemy, you can easily have access to all these data for free, here !

[image credit: Gallotti and Barthelemy, Rendered with MuxViz]

[image credit: Gallotti and Barthelemy, Rendered with MuxViz]

Assorted links

1. The Best Satellite Images of 2014
   
   
2. Extrapolating the backgrounds of famous art with machine learning
   
   
3. We've Been Incorrectly Predicting Peak Oil For Over a Century
   
   
4. Forbes Magazine has recently published their list of 30 Under 30 Science, with brightest scientists in 15 different fields under the age of 30. A huge congrats to my Department friend John Mittermeier ! Mom, I told you I'm not on the list! By the way, John has some amazing photos as well
   
   
5. The most detailed tweet map ever, with 6 Billion Tweets (high definition), by Eric Fischer
   
   
6. A great selection of the best Data Visualizations of 2014
   
   
7. The Reversal of the Latitude-Income Correlation
   
   
8. A Fully Interactive Map of the Middle Earth, from The Lord of the Rings
   
   
9. The Modern Beauty of 19th-Century Data Visualizations

US population composition by place of birth, 1790-1890

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: 1870s statistical atlas, via Laura Bliss]

Explore urban dynamics with LuminoCity3D

If you didn't have internet connection during 2014, you might have missed some of the  buzz around LuminoCity 3D (more info here). This is probably the best interactive tool for visualizing and exploring the 2011 Census data of the UK*. 

It brings data from a wide range of topics. For example, it makes  it possible to visualize urban growth, analyze household energy use or compare living and working densities in cities across England and Wales, etc.

LuminoCity 3D is a project by Duncan A.Smith (CASA/UCL), who also runs the great blog 'City Geographics'. obs. It is such a great project that I fill a bit embarrassed that I'm only posting about it now.

Workplace Employment Density, 2011

[click on the image to enlarge it]

[image credit: Duncan Smith]

Journey-to-work flows

[image credit: Duncan Smith]

* DataShine is a similarly great project, by Oliver O’Brien (CASA/UCL). 

Nobel Dialogue on Population Aging

The Nobel Week Dialogue of last year was dedicated to the topic of population aging, with many interesting presentations (ht Population Europe and Bernardo Queiroz). I liked these two sessions in particular, but other presentations are also available here.

• James Vaupel's talk on the demographic causes and consequences of an aging society (13'-27')

• The economics of population aging

Related Links:

• How old is your government?
• Demography may explain secular stagnation
• The Uneven Aging and "Younging" of American Metropolitan areas