Assorted links

1. Google is starting a new company to improve cities
   
   
2. paper - Why the racial gap in life expectancy is declining in the United States
   
   
3. Research Questions in Urban Ecological Sustainability
   
   
4. Einstein on Socialism (ht Pedro Souza)
   
   
5. The anatomy of urban social networks (ht Anna Hushlak)
   
   
6. What is the origin of the word ‘posh’?
   
   
7. Routledge has recently launched a new intriguing  peer-reviewed journal on porn studies
   
   
8. Nathan Yau has done a great job in recreating the 1874 Statistical Atlas of the United States using the 2010 Census data
   
   
9. A great interactive data visualization of urban expansion in Las Vegas

[image credit: ProPublica]

NYC Subway From Above

Cameron Booth (who runs the great blog Transit Maps) points out to this beautiful map of the New York city subway as seen from above.

[image credit: Arnorian]

Soundtrack:

R Links

1. Using programming for data visualization: where to start?
   
   
2. An Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R
   
   
3. Include a cat silhouette in your plot and you will never need to worry about complaints from journal  reviewers any more (packages rphylopic or cats)
   
   
4. An interactive simulation model of Ebola made with R and Shiny (via Robin Lovelace)
   
   
5. RStudio has some great Cheat Sheets that you might like 
   
   
6. Create maps using Hexagonal “Statebins” in R
   
   
7. A big catalogue with R Color Palettes and codes
   
   
8. Cohort analysis with R using “layer-cake graph” and heat maps

[image credit: AnalyzeCore]

Quote of the Day

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers" , Pablo Picasso

[image credit: ?, via Mateus Andrade]

The London Underground In 3-D

Bruno Imbrizi is a  Brazilian web developer and programmer that moved to London three years ago. Using publicly available data from Transport For London, Bruno has created and awesome interactive 3D map of the London Tube that I think some of the millions of readers of this blog might find interesting.

Sophie Weiner has written a nice piece on Bruno's work and you can check it here. You can also check some other cool dataviz of London underground in the Related Links, below.

[image credit: Bruno Imbrizi]

Related Links:

• Visualizing Disabled Freedom Pass trips on the London Underground
• A day in the life of a city
• Oyster Card Touch Ins & Touch Outs

A personal note about Summer in the UK

[image credit: ?]

True story.

How far can you go from any European capital to anywhere else by train?

Stephan Franziskus runs an interesting blog where he has written a great post about the history Isochrone Maps. These maps use color gradients and contour lines to visualize the places one can reach from a single destination within different time windows (isochrones).

obs. We have already posted about these maps in this blog to show some isochronic maps of American railways in the 1800s, a similar map departing from Rome during the times of the Roman Empire, and a contrast between Old and New techniques of isochrone maps.

Stephan Franziskus shows a very precious map, created by Francis Galton (yeap, the same Galton who demonstrated the central limit theorem using a 'bean machine'), which shows the number of days to get to different places in the world if you were to departure from London in 1881.

More recently, Peter Kerpedjiev has applied the same idea to estimate the places one can reach from different European capitals within different time windows using only trains and walking. There is a very good piece by Lazaro Gamio published in The Washington Post covering Kerpedjiev's work. You might like it.

click on the image to enlarge it

[image credit: Peter Kerpedjiev, Lazaro Gamio, WP]

Assorted links

1. MOOC on Questionnaire Design for Social Surveys in Coursera, offered by the University of Michigan
   
   
2. More than half of Beijing’s residents live far from the city center, beyond the fifth ring road, and still Beijing is denser than Los Angeles (via Tyler Cowen)
   
   
3. Just added this to my Survival kit: map of the Breweries of Europe
   
   
4. Jennifer Lundquist has interviewed a number of demographersabout their careers, including big shots like Samuel Preston and Monica DasGupta
   
   
5. Pets outnumber children in Brazil
   
   
6. The world's most beautiful metro stations - in pictures
   
   
7. Beautiful Chemical Reactions Filmed with a 4K UltraHD Camera
   
   
8. The Soviet erotic alphabet picture book from 1931 - you might consider reprinting your research proposal
   
   
9. Measuring Brainwaves to Make a New Kind of Bike Map for NYC

Brazil's Income Inequality Compared Globally

Brazil is internationally famous for a few things, one of them is having one of the highest levels of income inequality. The good news is that inequality is falling in the country and in Latin America more generally. Here is a nice article on income inequality in Brazil and the relatively small but still important role of conditional cash transfer programms  (ht Renato Saboya).

Here are some more info on the historical evolution of income inequality in Brazil: An interactive chart (by Max Roser), and this interesting chart showing the relation between GDP and Gini index during each presidential term since the 1980s, published Alberto Cairo in his recent book.

image credit: Alberto Cairo

Related Links:

• The trend of income segregation in the US, 1970-2009
• Spatial income inequality in Brazil, 1872–2000
• "The Rich, the Affluent and the Top Incomes: A Literature Review" 

Glaeser on Cities, Development, and Density

The NYU Stern Urbanization Project has been organizing a number of great seminars that cover interesting speakers at the intersection of urban planning and economics (Check their YouTube channel here). In December last year, they had Edward Glaeser talking about Cities, Development, and Density.

In case you want a more academic reference, much of Glaeser's presentation is present in his recent paper on 'the causes and consequences of urbanization in poorer countries'.