Selection of Geo-Projects
Had a great time at last night’s GeoDC meetup. Here’s a quick list of some of the cool projects at top of mind this morning, mostly to get my thoughts down in one place.
- Map Kibera and its empowerment of people living in Nairobi’s informal settlements. And on that note, next month‘s GeoDC topic is slum mapping!
- The Pacific Northwest and the ‘Last Settler Syndrome’ – one always wishes s/he were the last to discover the beauty of a place, and to keep it uncrowded.
- It’s essential to remember the user experience when creating maps, whether static or interactive. GIS developer AJ Ashton of Development Seed walked through some of the choices a designer makes in creating intuitive, easy-navigable maps.
- Andy Chosak of the Mobility Lab discussed transit spider maps, such as this spider map of the H Street Corridor and its nearby transit lines by Peter Dunn. It’s modeled after the spider maps used in London (example below). Spider maps are a great way to display these sorts of systems because they show all the modes of public transportation branching out from a single area, making it easy for a
Everyday Lessons Learned: December 2011, Week 4
Here’s to the end of 2011. It’s been quite a busy and eventful year. I’m pleased with how I’ve been able to keep up with posting what I’ve learned every day, even if I didn’t keep track in June (posting instead about my trip to Korea). One blogging tip I have – especially for longer term projects like my “Everyday Lessons Learned” – is to set aside time to post. Otherwise it’s easy to forget and realize that you’ve fallen behind. If you set a personal schedule of posting and set yourself to it, it’s not hard to keep a blog active.
22: This year was the first year in over 3 decades in which we sentenced fewer than 100 people to death row. From a report by the Death Penalty Information Center, as reported on NPR’s Morning Edition. Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association, says one factor in this is crime rates:
This year the murder rate fell to where it was in the 1960s, meaning there are fewer people to charge with capital murder. That’s an enormous drop from the 1990s — when the U.S. executed more inmates than in at least half a century.
23: Did anyone else attempt to read the dictionary as a kid? I’m reminded of my short-lived attempt to read (not necessarily memorize) every word in the dictionary when I see this list of words David Foster Wallace copied out of a dictionary. My bookmark while I read DFW’s Infinite Jest was a sheet of paper on which I wrote all the words he used that I didn’t know the meaning of.
24: Together with the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) forms the Triple Crown of long-distance hiking in the United States. It’s 3,100 mile long, and runs along part of the North American Continental Divide. A thru-hike (a complete hike of the entire trail from end-to-end) of the CDT takes around six months at a pace of 17 miles/day. Add that one to your bucket list.
25: The East Coast Greenway (ECG) is a 2,500-mile, car-free path planned to go from Calais, Maine to Key West Florida, spanning huge distances with a continuous path. Currently over 25% is already on paths free of motorized vehicles, and the rest consists of interim on-road routes while the rest of the paths are being constructed. The goal for the ECG is to link all the major cities along the way, creating a safe way to travel by non-motorized means between these places on the eastern seaboard.
26: Some of the benefits to having a green roof:
There are many benefits to a green roof including a decrease in heating and cooling costs, which in turn mitigates the urban heat island effect. Other benefits include a natural filter for rain water, an increase in the life span of the roof, a natural habitat for animals and plants and a reduction in dust and smog levels. (via ArchDaily)
27: Detroit is planning a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system that will span 110 miles with these dedicated bus lanes. This would make Detroit’s BRT system the largest in the United States. (The largest in the world is currently Jakarta’s TransJakarta BRT system.) Stephanie Lotshaw at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy says that all current BRT systems in the U.S. are under 20 miles.
28: As described in the New Yorker, the Pitch Drop Experiment is the world’s longest running lab experiment, in which University of Queensland physics professor Thomas Parnell poured hot pitch into a glass funnel, tracking how long it would take for a drop to fall. It look eight years for the first drop of pitch to fall, another nine for the second drop, and so far there have been eight drops. The professor currently overseeing the experiment, John Mainstone, predicts the next drop will occur in 2013 – no one has yet witnessed the actual occurrence of a falling drop.
29: Layaway programs are regaining popularity in America with the depressed economy. These allow shoppers to make payments on the full price of a product, only getting the product once it’s paid off. However, there’s usually a $5 service fee, which means that it would typically cost more to buy something on layaway. The option of paying for things on layaway has recently returned to Walmart. Some of the appeal of layaway is that it forces you to put money aside for a specific product, rather than spending it elsewhere, especially because of the sunk cost of the service fee and the extra fee for cancellation if the shopper doesn’t make all the payments.
30: The Teapot Dome Scandal was an incident considered the greatest scandal in American politics, before Watergate. In 1922, during President Harding’s administration, the Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall accepted huge bribes from oil companies to grant them production rights without competitive bidding at Teapot Dome, an oil field in Wyoming. Fall was the first Presidential cabinet member to be imprisoned for his actions while in office.
31: Just to come back around: In 2011, Arlington may have had its first year since the 1950s without a single murder. DC’s also experiencing a decline in murders.
For some other notes in the year-end roundup, keep reading.
Traffic to my blog grew by more than 65% over last year.
Most-read posts on Aesthetics of Everywhere from 2011:
- Everyday Lessons Learned: May 2011, Week 3
- T-money for transport and more in Seoul
- Spa Land in Centum City, Busan (and this one I just typed out quickly on my iPod)
- Seersucker Social 2011 Photos
- “Hamtdaa: Together” at Artisphere
Cheers to the New Year! Make 2012 count.
More 2011 roundup posts than you’ll ever get around to reading
I hope by now everyone’s wrapping up the year and spending a lot of time with family and friends. Here’s my roundup of 2011 roundups. Add your own in the comments!
- Zeitgeist 2011: Year in Review Video (Google)
- Best Maps of 2011 (Spatial Analysis)
- Best Memes of 2011 (Know Your Meme)
- Best Websites of 2011 (Time Magazine)
- 10 Worst Social Media Marketing Blunders of 2011 (Advertising Age)
- Top 10 Best TED Talks of 2011 and Top 10 Culture-Tech Stories of 2011 (ReadWriteWeb)
- Another List of Lists at Listgeeks Staff Picks for Best of 2011
- Rusty’s Top 30 Songs of the Year and Top 50 Albums of the Year
- The Best Data Visualization Projects of 2011 (FlowingData)
- From one of my favorite new art blogs of the year, A Colossal Year
- Conversational Reading’s Favorite Films of 2011
- Doree Shafrir’s Top Longreads of 2011
- Ryan Little’s 10 Best Local Tracks of 2011
- The Most Important Graphs of 2011 (The Atlantic)
- The Geography of the Year in Music (The Atlantic Cities)
In 2011, I…
- Kept a running list of new things I learned almost every day.
- Read fewer books than I did the previous year, which isn’t a good thing – but I have a long commute by bus/Metro so I’m looking to up that number in 2012.
- Joined – and became slightly obsessed with - Quora. It’s the way online Q&A should be done.
- Cooked a lot and tried out many new recipes, including a bunch of kale soups, pierogies, kimchi chigae, the best sweet potato fries recipe ever, and homemade salsa and tortilla chips.
- Traveled to South Korea for a few weeks with my brother and my boyfriend. Went hiking on Soraksan, danced in Korean clubs, visited royal palaces, and made new friends.
- Took shorter trips to Philadelphia, Austin, New York City, and Baltimore. All of them are exciting cities with vibrant cultural and artistic life.
- Greatly expanded my knowledge and study of urbanism, public transit systems, and mapping projects.
- Rode my bicycle all over DC, and on fun rides like the Seersucker Social, the Tweed Ride, and bike caravans with friends.
- Started taking Capoeira classes. Fun, challenging, and an incredible workout.
- Moved to the Bloomingdale neighborhood of DC, which is definitely my favorite place I’ve lived in Washington, DC.
Looking forward to setting some new goals in 2012!
Everyday Lessons Learned: December 2011, Weeks 2 and 3
Projects abound these last few weeks. I keep forgetting it’s nearing that time to stop and take a break.
8: There are a variety of ways that allergists test for allergies. Allergy specialists use skin tests or blood tests to test the patient against suspected allergens, and several are usually tested at the same time.
9: Vacation photos of hotels can often be misleading. Check out Oyster’s Photo Fakeouts for some particularly exaggerated ones.
10: Random Hacks of Kindness is a hackathon devoted to creating software solutions focused on disaster risk and response. Programmers assemble in groups all over the world to work on projects like raising awareness of emergency hydrants in San Francisco or this analysis of health facilities distribution in Haiti.
11: Google has a product called Fusion Tables that allows you to import your data and map it fairly quickly. Somehow I missed when this came out, even though I’m a geek about making maps. I’ve played around with the sample and though Fusion Tables isn’t what I’d call a great product yet (it’s still in beta), it’s certainly nice to see the act of mapping data simplified and opened up to the masses. See examples here.
12: In September 2006, the mayor of São Paulo banned all outdoor advertising in the city – to include billboards, flyers, ads on buses, and other forms of “visual pollution.” This Clean City law was a move intended to wash away all the garish adverts that covered virtually every surface and increase quality of life for those in São Paulo. For some thoughts on how effective this has been, see the responses on Quora.
13: The Cupertino effect is a widespread error in texts of a certain time period that originated with spell-checking software. When the word “cooperation” (without a dash between “co” and “operation”) was typed on an older computer, the word would auto-correct to “Cupertino”, a word that was commonly found in the spell-checker’s dictionary.
14: A talk by Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice, always an entertaining topic. ”The way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to.”
15: The LuminAID is a solar-powered inflatable LED light designed by two Columbia University graduates, Anna Stork and Andrea Sreshta. It’s lightweight and waterproof, making it ideal for disaster relief. They also position the LuminAID as “a cheaper, safer alternative to kerosene lamps.”
16: Apparently there’s a language fad among female college students called vocal fry, a kind of “creaky” sounding voice. Hear an example here. But be warned, this is one of those things where once you hear it, you’ll start to hear it everywhere.
17: Read “The Movie Set That Ate Itself” and just try not to think about The Truman Show. Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky began a mock town inside of Kharkov, Ukraine, placing cameras all around this set and making it home to over 210,000 cast and crew members for six years. They’re recorded 24 hours a day, living out their roles. This is for his film Dau, and filming is scheduled to end in 2012. If anything, it’s an undertaking.
18: Composting your food waste has benefits for the environment, because less organic matter that ends up in landfills means less methane gas produced by the landfill. Currently about 98% of America’s food waste goes to landfills according to the EPA. Reduction of food waste is even more essential, as America wastes 27% of the food available for consumption – around 30 million tons of food each year.
19: An amazing story from a researcher conducting ethnographic fieldwork in China: Street Vendor Life in China.
20: Get geeky with these 3D pixelated animals by artist Shawn Smith. He uses balsa wood which he cuts to length and paints, arranging each ‘pixel’ to form these striking figures.
“For the past few years, I have been creating a series of ‘Re-things.’ These whimsical sculptures represent pixelated animals and objects of nature. I am specifically interested in subjects that I have never seen in real life.” (via Colossal)
21: Though I am planning a round-up of great end-of-year lists, The Atlantic’s In Focus series of photos from 2011 is especially noteworthy: The Year in Photos (Part 1 of 3)
The Santas of Washington, DC
Photos from Santarchy DC 2011! This is an annual December festival/invasion of hundreds dressed in their Santa outfits and variations on holiday costumes.
Everyday Lessons Learned: December 2011, Week 1
Already a week into December, and I’m not looking forward to the holiday shopping season – I work near a mall, meaning traffic is nearly at a standstill for the last few weeks of the month. Fortunately, in December there are also a lot of distractions in the form of festive parties and visiting friends.
Things I’ve learned in the past week:
1. Dr. Cornel West is an inspiration. He could convince anybody to devote their life to activism.
2. Ever thought about regionally-specific hand gestures? I hadn’t until a friend from Michigan taught me what a Michigan hug is: two friends press their palms together and wrap their thumbs around each other’s hand. There’s another where you just greet each other by repeatedly slapping each others’ hands as if they were trouts flopping on land. And even more strangely, there’s such a thing as hand-based cartography.
3: Bikram yoga, or “hot yoga” as it’s commonly called, is a highly-regulated form of yoga in which the room is heated to precisely 105 degrees Fahrenheit and its practitioners aren’t allowed to take even a sip of water during the 90 minute session. This is because Bikram yoga is copyrighted by its founder, Bikram Choudhury, who has sued a number of yoga schools and instructors for deviating from his method of practice when teaching Bikram.
4: Stop signs are fairly similar throughout the world, with the United States and many European countries abiding by the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways (MUTCD). There are a number of interesting differences between stop signs worldwide, collected on the Wikipedia entry for Stop sign.
5: Here’s a great primer about map design: “Web cartography… That’s like Google Maps, right?” (Via Axis Maps blog.)
6: Work at a job that has you looking at a computer screen all day? You can do things like dim your screen or turn up the brightness of the room’s lights to help keep your eyes healthy. As long as the ambient light in the room is brighter than the computer’s screens, your eyes should be fine. Try to minimize the glare on your computer screen as well. I’ve also heard you should occasionally focus on something far away from you, because if you spend a prolonged period of time focusing on close things, you may cause yourself eye strain.
7: In Silicon Valley, California (and maybe elsewhere), it’s common for people who want to start start-ups to go on co-founder dates. Before diving into a new venture, it’s important to try to minimize your risk by judging whether your potential co-founder’s personality and skill set complement yours.
Dr. Cornel West at GWU for “Democracy and Public Argument”
Dr. Cornel West is an incredible speaker. I went to see him speak on Thursday as the keynote presenter for “Democracy and Public Argument”, a series hosted by the George Washington University’s writing program. Having a background in civil rights and democracy struggles along with degrees in Philosophy from Harvard and Princeton, Dr. West is equal parts intellectual and activist.
Courage was a recurring theme throughout his speech. Dr. West poetically emphasized the courage and conviction necessary to uphold a democracy – to never take your rights for granted. At one point he claimed, “I am an anti-imperialist even when America is the empire.” So much of democracy relies on critical public discourse.
Other topics ranged from the Occupy movement (of which Dr. West is a strong supporter, speaking often with Occupy groups across the county), the Obama re-election campaign, the history of democracy in America from the time of our founding fathers, and the necessity to shed one’s ideologies to find the common truth of humanity. You can’t find the truth in a person or a civilization unless you listen to its suffering.
Everyday Lessons Learned: November 2011, Week 4
22: A third of all restaurant searches on Google are made on a mobile device. Seems obvious, since people are usually looking for directions or perhaps reading Yelp reviews on their way there, but it’s important to think about if you’re looking to improve your restaurant’s visibility in search results.
23: A good question: How much tech should be allowed in competitive sports?
24: Art has the power to transform lives. See some of the artist JR’s work, especially his famous mural of women’s eyes in Rio de Janiero’s oldest favela. He’s done a similar project in Kibera, Nairobi.
25: Urban planning in Africa still largely follows adopted models from the global north that often don’t apply to African cities. Urbanized areas in Africa need to be assessed according to their own needs. That is the aim of the Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS), an organization that seeks to reform Africa’s urban planning education. Nancy Odendaal, project coordinator of AAPS, explains that the colonial planning strategy that is traditionally taught “simply does not have the built-in flexibility to accommodate the diversity of livelihoods pursued in a typical African city. Conventional urban plans typically criminalize the informal economy, for example, where street vendors are harassed by police and have their incomes curtailed.” Therefore it’s important to understand the unique features and issues associated with each place. An African city should not be designed to imitate the cities of British tradition (or otherwise).
26: Starlings, when they talk, are pretty creepy. They’re loud and spend a lot of time mimicking sounds, including human speech.
27: The Where’s George bill-tracking data is available online. Where’s George is a long-running project to track the movement of dollar bills as they exchange hands throughout the nation. The dollar value of all the tracked bills totals over $1 billion.
28: Cycling more just makes sense. Commuting by bicycle costs less in dollar spend, but takes more of your time. You can think of that extra time spent as an investment in your health. I have a coworker who used to ride his bike two hours a day to work – now that’s active transport. Via Streetsblog, “Can America Afford Not to Bike More?“
29: Map Kibera is a project to map one of Nairobi’s largest slums. The central goals of this crowdsourced effort, as outlined in the Map Kibera proposal, are:
- Raise general awareness of the living conditions in Kibera by mapping, as much as possible the extents of navigable streets and other mappable features within the informal settlement.
- Catalyze the local community and expand the capabilities local participatory mapping, expanding previous work and initiating mapping parties within Africa starting with Kibera.
- Test the licensing mechanisms of multiple mapping platforms by making raw data freely available and uploading that data into multiple systems.
30: A toy that has seen more of the country than I have, in the cross-country adventure Address is Approximate by Tom Jenkins. (Navigation using Google Maps Street View.)
Digital Preservation of Historic Places
Preserving the world’s historic places is no mean feat. It is inevitable that buildings will fall, statues will be destroyed, and the structures of entire civilizations past will be mere memories. Buildings will erode, be reimagined and rebuilt in a new form. However, technologies such as digital photography are playing an increasing role in cataloguing and recording the world’s historically significant sites. With the advent of new methods of digitizing these places, our histories are better shared and the fabric of our cultures are better recorded.
Ben Kacyra is the inventor of a 3D scanning system that has been used to visualize historic sites. The projects of the CyArk archive use this system to collect millions of data points for each heritage site, capturing the sites in point clouds that together form a precise 3D model. You can browse the public online archive to see a point cloud, a 3D model, a Google Earth representation, and various photos of each site that has been digitally preserved so far. Also see his inspiring TED talk, “Ancient Wonders Captured in 3D.”
Our heritage is much more than our collective memory, it is our collective treasure. We owe it to our children, our grandchildren, and the generations we will never meet to keep it safe and pass it along.
Close to home: Google Street View screen capture of the Wonder Bread factory in Shaw.
In a way, the immense efforts of the Google Street View team are also a piecemeal digital cultural preservation of our highways and byways (as well as the life lived around these paths). Camera-mounted vehicles have driven across more than 30 countries, documenting the view from the streets. Small moments are taken out of time.
At an intersection in downtown São Paulo
Those images above are just two of my finds this evening, but especially interesting Google Street View finds can be found at Jon Rafman’s project 9-eyes.com. There you’ll see a wild slice of life as caught by these roaming photo cars: passersby waving, police officer pat-downs, caribou traveling down the highway, chaotic urban scenes and, every once in awhile, bits of serene bliss.
Everyday Lessons Learned: November 2011, Weeks 2 and 3
Lots of topics the past two weeks about cool research. I’m deep in data these days, so it’s seeping into all of my thoughts…
8: Before the concept of homesickness came around in the 1750s, it was known as nostalgia and categorized as a medical condition – deaths could be attributed to this condition. Francesca Mari reviews Homesickness: An American History: “By two years in, two thousand soldiers had been diagnosed with nostalgia, and in the year 1865, twenty-four white Union soldiers and sixteen black ones died from it.”
9: A mondegreen is a mishearing of a spoken phrase that results in a more interesting take on the intended phrase. Here’s the origin of the mondegreen:
The term “mondegreen” was coined by Sylvia Wright in a 1954 Atlantic article. As a child, young Sylvia had listened to a folk song that included the lines “They had slain the Earl of Moray/And Lady Mondegreen.” As is customary with misheard lyrics, she didn’t realize her mistake for years. The song was not about the tragic fate of Lady Mondegreen, but rather, the continuing plight of the good earl: “They had slain the Earl of Moray/And laid him on the green.” (Source)
10: New research suggests that the middle class eats the most fast food – not the poor.
11: It’s no secret that bicycling keeps you fit. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that if residents of 11 Midwestern cities ran just half of their short-distance errands by bicycle for four months out of the year, it would save at least $3.8 billion from avoided mortality and reduced health-care costs, and lower the number of annual deaths by 1,100. Results of the study are posted here.
12: Natural Language Processing: Where linguistics meets computers. Check out some of the work by the Stanford Natural Language Processing Group here.
13: The debate around climate change has changed markedly in recent years. A Harris poll in 2007 estimated that 71% of Americans believed burning fossil fuels led to climate change. That number was only 51% two years later, and then dropped further to 44% by June 2011. But this shift in belief has been very one-sided: 70-75% of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe in climate change, while only about 20% of self-identified Republicans do. (The Nation)
14: Mexico City’s Metro officials reported that 23 to 35 people fall into train pits each year. Mexico City is working to install platform barriers in its stations, starting with just two of their busiest stations (due to budget constraints). From The Atlantic Cities blog.
15: A law student in Austria, Max Schrems, requested his Facebook data – and received a CD with a 1,222-page long PDF of his personal information including deleted private messages.
16: Number of people who have disappeared from cruise ships in the past decade? 171. And 19 people have already gone missing this year alone. Because cruise ships tread murky international waters, and it’s often not possible to stop the ship to search for a person fallen overboard, and there’s also a high incidence of suicide on cruises, many cases are unresolved. It’s true, some are likely to be on-board murders. It’s in the cruise industry’s interests to quiet any of these disappearances. The eerie story of Rebecca Coriam, the first public disappearance from a Disney cruise, is recounted in The Guardian.
17: Apples go through a trial by fire kind of process when they’re bred; the process is narrated in John Seabrook’s piece in the November 21 issue of the New Yorker, “Crunch.” This story’s a lot more compelling than it sounds at first. For instance, did you know that apples are often selected over time for their redness, despite the fact that the redder apples have less flavor? It’s called “red drift” – retailers believe customers buy with their eyes, so growers tend to select for redness while sacrificing taste. An all-red apple also hides its cosmetic defects better, meaning more of your apples will be sold.
18: The Love Parade Stampede was an incident in Duisberg, Germany, on July 24, 2010 in which 21 people were trampled to death and over 500 were injured in the underpassthat led to the Love Parade music festival area. This was the only entrance and exit, and long after the stage area had filled up past capacity, people were attempting to enter through this tunnel. Those who were already in the main festival area had no way of exiting, with the masses of people pressing forward to get in. I first saw video footage of this horrifying scene in the crowd-sourced documentary Life in a Day, which records the happenings of a single day as experienced by people all over the world. Al Jazeera coverage shows footage of the event.
19: Pierogies are made in essentially the same way as Korean mandu (dumplings), except the filling’s a bit different and you add sour cream to the flour. Our first batch came out decent, though the process was kind of long. It’s a learning process. I’d say every culture has their own form of dumplings – one of my favorite things to do at family gatherings is sit around with my mother and grandmother and form the mandu by hand, adding special flourishes to mark them as yours (like signing a work of art).
20: There’s a proposed plan to turn an abandoned trolley terminal in NYC’s Lower East Side into an underground public park: Delancey Underground, or “the LowLine”. It’d be like the subterranean equivalent of the High Line.
21: According to XKCD’s notes on the Money Chart, the EPA’s current dollar value on a human life is $8.4 million. Go spend some time exploring that chart.
Hope everyone enjoys their few days of rest and feast. Happy Thanksgiving!
