Friday, February 28, 2014
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Urban Picture
São Paulo, Marginal Pinheiros in a regular Wednesday
Soundtrack: Bogotá, by Criolo
obs. This one I took from Transportblog! (great blog, by the way) and it's in Auckland (NZ), but it would perfectly fit São Paulo streets today!
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
A Pyramid of Life Expectancies
Marcelo Duhalde came up with this interesting way to visualize and compare the Life Expectancy at Birth of different countries (via John Metcalfe).
[click on the image to enlarge it]
[image credit: Marcelo Duhalde]
Related Links:
Friday, February 21, 2014
Assorted links
- Oxford University under the winter Milky Way, by Yunli Song
- U.S. Inequality in Six Charts (via Tim Harford)
- Other things I'd rather be doing
- How to NOT design urban streets
- London, Then and Now (1927 to 2013)
- What Happens When a Woman Wins an Election? (Brazil) - via Andrés Marroquín
- Warning! this link can be depressing: How Much Time Have You Wasted on Facebook? via Emilio Ferrara
- A visual exploration of refugee migrations over time via Flowing Data
[image credit: Hyperakt and Ekene Ijeoma via Flowing Data]
Thursday, February 20, 2014
off-topic: Inspiration to Work
A good soundtrack to remind us of that important saying:
'Stop procrastinating and go back to work!'
Eye of the Tiger
Sunday, February 16, 2014
A Historic Traffic Jam: the "H-Day" in 1967
When was the last time you've heard about a traffic jam in which people were actually happy to participate?
In his amazing book 'Traffic: Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)', Tom Vanderbilt gives us a glimpse of the "H-Day", when everyone in Sweden started driving on the opposite side of the road. I reproduce here a snippet of the book and two great pictures taken on "H-Day":
Just before dawn on Sunday, September 3, 1967, there was an unusually festive air in the streets of Stockholm. Cars honked, passersby cheered, people gave flowers to police officers, pretty girls smiled from the curb. The streets were clogged with cars, many of which had been waiting for hours to participate in a historic traffic jam. [...] At the moment the bell schimed for six o'clock, Swedes began driving on the right.It had taken years of debate, and much preparation, to get to this point. [...] Undeterred, backers of right-side driving finally got a measure approved by the government in 1963.As "H-Day" (after hoger, the Swedish word for "right") approached, the predictions of ensuing chaos and destruction grew dire. [...] And what happened when Swedes started driving on the other side of the road, many for the first time in their lives? The roads got safer. [...] Remarkably, it was not just for a few days, or even weeks, after the change over that Sweden's roads were safer. It took a year before the accident rate returned to what it had been the year before the changeover.
[images credit: ? via wired]
Related Links:
Friday, February 14, 2014
Wednesday, February 12, 2014
The earliest sprawl?
Michael E. Smith writes a very interesting piece on How ancient cities can help us understand modern cities. And this paper caught my attention:
Ur, Jason A., P. Karsgaard and J. Oates (2007) Early Urban Development in the Near East. Science 317:1188 [ungated version]
Abstract: It has been thought that the first cities in the Near East were spatially extensive and grew outward from a core nucleated village while maintaining a more or less constant density in terms of persons or households per unit of area. The general applicability outside of the Near East of this southern Mesopotamian.derived model has been questioned recently, and variations from it are increasingly recognized. We can now demonstrate that such variation was present at the beginnings of urbanism in the Near East as well.
Ur, Jason A., P. Karsgaard and J. Oates (2007) Early Urban Development in the Near East. Science 317:1188 [ungated version]
Abstract: It has been thought that the first cities in the Near East were spatially extensive and grew outward from a core nucleated village while maintaining a more or less constant density in terms of persons or households per unit of area. The general applicability outside of the Near East of this southern Mesopotamian.derived model has been questioned recently, and variations from it are increasingly recognized. We can now demonstrate that such variation was present at the beginnings of urbanism in the Near East as well.
- New estudy by SFI - Cities – ancient and modern, big and small – follow same rules of development (ht João Vitor Meirelles)
Sunday, February 9, 2014
Saturday, February 8, 2014
Housing Bubble in Brazil
Robert Shiller (Yale Prof. and 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics, “for their empirical analysis of asset prices”) talks about the recent home price boom in Brazil, aka 'Housing Bubble in Brazil' (via Sergio Jatobá).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)