Assorted links

1. Unbelievable “nail houses” around the world
   
   
2. PAA 2014 - call for papers
   
   
3. Violent Crime Hotspots in London
   
   
4. Undesirable trends in the labor force participation rate 
   
   
5. Life can't get any better than this
   
   
6. Beijing Subway - morning rush hour
   
   
7. What Brazilians mean when they say...
   
   
8. Stratifying PISA scores by poverty rates
   
   
9. The Africa-Driven Demographic Future of Earth
   
   
10. New York City Transit System Morning Peak Flow, 1954 (via Transit Maps)

[click on the image to enlarge it]

Global Innovation and Diffusion in Public Transport

Duncan A Smith has created some great animations of 'Global Innovation Diffusion in Public Transport'. Here is the video showing the diffusion of BRT systems. Neat work! You should check it out the other videos.

Animating Global Innovation Diffusion- Bus Rapid Transit from Duncan A Smith on Vimeo.

[Image Credit: Duncan A Smith]

replay: The world's shifting centre of gravity

Few weeks ago, The Economist magazine published a short piece on the world's shifting centre of gravity*. The map is based on this study by the McKinsey Global Institute.

According to the study, "the centre is rapidly shifting east—at a speed of 140 kilometres a year and thus faster than ever before in human history". As you have already guessed, the main reason for this is rapid urbanisation in developing countries, in particular China.

*The global center of gravity is calculated weighting the approximate centre of landmass of the world by countries' GDPs.

The Census Bureau of the US also calculates the National Mean Center of Population. This is the animated map displaying the evolution of its position (and here is a different static version of the map).

PS. Dear readers, my life is undergoing some major (good) changes so I'm out of time to post. I hope you don't mind a 'replay post'!

Maslow's hierarchy of needs revisited

[via 9gag.com]

An introduction to R, from Google

The guys from google have developed a series of short introductory videos to R.

[via Nathan Yau, from Flowing Data]

Related Links:

• The Applied Demography Toolbox
• Using R to create good looking survival curves (via Corey Sparks)
• rworldmap: A New R package forMapping Global Data
• A list of R packages, by popularity

Music for the weekend

Chinese Ghost Cities + Copy & Paste Cities

It's been a while since I don't make any post on the Chinese empty cities. So here is an updated 12-minute video on the "Chinese Ghost Cities":

Besides these famous Ghost Cities, China has also a growing number of copycat towns, the 'Copy & Paste Cities' as I like to call them. They have built a fake Paris, fake Hallstatt (Austrian village), fake Venice and a fake White House.

Assorted links

1. OECD Health Data 2013
   
2. The infrastructure behind Dutch cycling (via MR)
   
3. How people get to work across England and Wales?
   
4. Red Bull Illume Photo Contest 2013
   
5. Many transit visualizations in one place (via David Levinson)
   
6. INDEPTH launches a repository of (longitudinal) demographic and health data for low/middle-inc.countries (via Emilio Zagheni)
   
7. A century of jittery oil production and prices
   
8. Effect of a conditional cash transfer programme on childhood mortality in Brazil (via @HansRosling)
   
9. Chinese Food and Population Density by Neighborhood in NYC

Urban Picture

Esplanada dos Ministérios Construction site in Brasilia, Brazil (1958)

by Marcel Gautherot

More here and here.

Thanks T de Aragão for sharing.

Quote of the Day

Hard choices:

... he also gave me some of the best advice I've ever received. Trying to decide whether to major in psychology or art history, I had gone to his office to see what he thought. He squinted and lowered his head. "Is this a hard choice for you?" he demanded. Yes! I cried. "Oh," he said, springing back cheerfully. "In that case, it doesn't matter. If it's a hard decision, then there's always lots to be said on both sides, so either choice is likely to be good on its way. Hard choices are always unimportant."

(Adam Gopnik writing of his former teacher Albert Bregman)

I saw this at The Drunkeynesian Blog. A great blog by the way!