By: Mark Wilson
Via: Co.DESIGN

USING ALGORITHMS, A TEAM OF STUDENTS ANALYZED THE CLUSTERS OF PLACES THAT LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE FLOCK TO.

Every city is filled with different neighborhoods, but often, you won’t find these places on any map. They’re word-of-mouth zoning distinctions known only to locals. The boundaries are vague and arbitrary, based as much upon the way people eat and dress as real estate prices and income per capita.

Yet if these areas are distinctive to city culture, is there a way that we could measure them and analyze them–map them–scientifically?


A team of students (Justin Cranshaw, Raz Schwartz) and professors (Jason I. Hong and Norman Sadeh) from Carnegie Mellon’s Mobile Commerce Lab has done just that. Their research project is called Livehoods, which analyzed 18 million Foursquare check-ins to spot algorithmic relationships between the spots people frequent. “Livehoods looks at the geographic distance between venues, but also a form of ‘social distance’ that measures the degree of overlap in the people that check-in to them,” the team tells Co.Design. “For example, if the algorithm notices that the people that visit a local bar are the same people that visit a nearby restaurant, these two places will be more likely to be grouped together.”
As more and more people and places are analyzed, Livehoods clusters this data into what becomes a collection [of] distinctive neighborhoods–places filled with people who enjoy going to the same restaurants, coffee shops, and music venues. And as calculating as the approach could seem, Livehoods’ scientific basis makes it extremely valuable as a social artifact: It defines local culture without the inherent judgement that comes along with human stereotyping.


With this scientific methodology in mind, the Livehoods team cross-checked their own findings of Pittsburgh with 27 resident interviews. What they found–the full results [of] which will be shared in a paper presented this June–was “compelling evidence” neighborhoods, as Livehood algorithms had defined them, had “real social meaning to people in the city.” In other words, the digital map lined up with many residents’ own mental maps.

All of this said, Livehoods aren’t a perfect snapshot of humanity just yet. The datasets mined for the project are limited by the perspective of Foursquare users. A lot of us don’t use Foursquare (with a strong skew toward older adults, most likely). “Our technique, however, is agnostic to the specific source of the data,” the team explains, “so as we get better, less biased sources of data, we should be able to produce more accurate views of the city.”

The young researchers also fear that we may take their boundaries a bit too literally. As much as Livehoods works to clarify invisible distinctions, the team, paradoxically, points out that these distinctions are more subtle than we might expect.

“In reality, neighborhoods tend to blend into one another,” they write. In which case, may I suggest a simple UI tweak? Maybe Livehoods should be rendered in gradients.

Via: Trace Media

Mapping Wikipedia is a groundbreaking visualization of the world mapped according to articles in 7 different languages. The map displays both the global patterns and the vast number of geo-located items. The dataset was produced by the Oxford Internet Institute as part of a project that examines Wikipedia in the Middle East and North Africa. For more information contact Gavin Baily or Mark Graham.

Before opening the map please note that some searches require a large download. For articles written in English try filtering the search by location e.g. Africa, Northern America, United Kingdom. Use the Stop button to cancel a search in progress.
We recommend using the latest version of Chrome, FireFox, Opera, IE or Safari. There’s Flash support for IE 7 and IE 8, but IE 9 or above is preferable.



The images below show the global distribution of articles written in each language.
















To further explore the geography of the data, each Wikipedia article is associated with various attributes, such as word count, number of authors, and number of images etc. You can investigate these using the ‘map’ dropdown. Here are a few examples for Europe, Asia and the US.




How it was built

The project was developed using the excellent Open Layers. To display the large number of articles we wrote a subclass of the Open Layers Canvas renderer, and optimised for point plotting. As a fallback for browsers that don’t support canvas we included the FlashCanvas shim. http://flashcanvas.net/.

The Google basemap was produced using the Styled Map Wizard:
http://v3.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/styledmaps/wizard/index.html

To glue everything together we used jQuery. A big thankyou [sic] to the authors of the following libraries and plugins.
Eric Hynds’ UI MultiSelect Widget:
http://www.erichynds.com/jquery/jquery-ui-multiselect-widget/

Mike Chambers’ Quadtree for mouse-picking articles:
http://www.mikechambers.com/blog/2011/03/21/javascript-quadtree-implementation/

Ben Alman’s BBQ library for storing URL hash values:
http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/

By Ted Burnham
Via: NPR


How healthy is your county?

To see how the place where you live stacks up against the rest of the U.S., check out the latest County Health Rankings, an annual report comparing health trends for more than 3,000 counties, plus the District of Columbia.

The rankings are produced by the University of Wisconsin and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. You can drill down to look at, among other things, which areas have the highest and lowest education rates and income levels as well access to medical care and healthful foods.

Researchers say healthier counties have lower rates when it comes to things like smoking, physical inactivity, teen births, unemployment and violent crime — but they are no more likely than unhealthy counties to have lower rates of obesity, excessive drinking or greater access to better food options.

“The County Health Rankings show us that much of what influences our health happens outside of the doctor’s office. In fact, where we live, learn, work and play has a big role in determining how healthy we are and how long we live,” Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of RWJF, says in a press release. (The foundation provides financial support for NPR.)

Check out the map above showing the density of fast-food restaurants. There are 30 counties where 100 percent of the restaurants are fast-food, but in many of these cases there are only one or two restaurants in the county, Dr. Bridget Booske Catlin, deputy director of the study and senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute, writes in an email to Shots.

Among counties with more than 10 restaurants, these five counties had the most fast-food places — (in descending order) Scott County in Tennessee, Fayette County in Indiana, Letcher County in Kentucky, Charlton County in Georgia and Sanpete County in Utah. Perhaps not surprisingly, all of these counties were in the bottom half of overall health rankings within their respective states, according to Booske Catlin.

Compare that with this map showing premature death (darker spots indicate a higher incidence) and you can see where there’s overlap.

The researchers also found these regional health trends:

     • Northern states have the highest rates of excessive drinking.

     • Southern states have the highest rates of children living in poverty, teenage births, sexually transmitted infections.

     • Unemployment is lowest in states in the Northeast, Midwest and central plains.

     • Deaths from motor vehicle accidents are lowest in the Northeast and upper Midwest.

By: Chuck Raasch
Via: USA Today

For the right price, you can own what is billed as America’s smallest town — Buford, Wyo., pop. 1. The minimum bid of $100,000 in Thursday’s national auction wouldn’t buy you a townhouse in many cities.

By Michael Smith, Wyoming Tribune Eagle via AP
Don Sammons is Buford’s sole resident and will sell the town by auction.

Whoever buys the 10 acres of commerce and history, owner Don Sammons says, “I just hope their dream continues to keep Buford moving in the 21st century.”

Sammons and auctioneers are unsure what Buford will bring, but there is interest. Amy Bates, senior vice president at Williams & Williams, the Oklahoma-based auction house offering the property, says people from more than 70 countries have checked the listing on the company’s website.

Williams & Williams markets Buford as a “unique opportunity” to “own your own income-producing town.” The auction will be at noon MT at 2 Sammons Lane in Buford, illustrating how naming streets after yourself is a perk of owning your own town. Online bidders who register by noon CT Wednesday can participate at www.auctionnetwork.com.

Buford isn’t the only town for sale.

Pray, Mont., pop. 8 people and 12 dogs, in a picturesque valley 30 miles north of Yellowstone National Park‘s only year-round entrance, was listed for $1.4 million last month. The town, which includes a trailer park, owner Barbara Walker’s photography studio, abandoned historic buildings and an all-important post office, was once moved and twice bypassed by railroads or highways.

The town’s neighbors include actors Jeff Bridges, Dennis Quaid and Peter Fonda.

“This town has no ordinances, no covenants, no restrictions,” says Walker, 52, whose late husband’s family bought Pray in 1953. “You could put a hog farm on it. You could put an artist colony.”

Her town is named for a late congressman, not the act on bended knee, although Walker says one interested party is a church attracted to the idea of a summer camp in a town called Pray.

Last fall, a Filipino church, Iglesia Ni Cristo, bought the mostly abandoned town of Scenic, S.D., near the Badlands. The Rapid CityJournal reported the sale price was $700,000.

If not a trend, town sales are certainly “history coming full circle,” says Patty Limerick, an author and historian and chair of the University of Colorado’s Center of the American West. She notes that many Western town sites were laid out by speculators trying to judge railroad routes. Now, she says, a “new form of commerce” is playing out in the sales of towns long bypassed by road or rail.

Buford is not among the bypassed, though.

The town’s new owner will get a trading post, gas station and a post office with their own ZIP code — 82052 — on an exit off Interstate 80 that Sammons says pulls 1,000-1,500 visitors a day in the summer. People stop all day and into the night, he says, to get pictures in front of what he claims is among the most photographed signs in the world.

Buford’s new owner will get this trading post, gas station and a post office with their own ZIP code.

At about 8,000 feet above sea level, Buford is the highest-elevated town on I-80 from “the Golden Gate to the George Washington” bridges, Sammons says.

Buford, 125 miles northwest of Denver, was named for Civil War Gen. John Buford, whose decision to hold high ground early in the battle of Gettysburg was key to the Union victory. Buford was founded four years later, in 1867, by workers building the Union Pacific transcontinental railroad, and once swelled to a couple of thousand people. Butch Cassidy and President Ulysses S. Grant passed through.

Sammons, 61, has lived in Buford since 1980 and owned the town since 1992. He is working on a book about the most interesting passersby. The St. Louis native moved his family to Buford in 1980. His wife died, and he has lived alone since the population was cut in half when his son, Jonathan, left about seven years ago.

Don Sammons, headed for semi-retirement, is proud of his urban renewal. He remodeled the one-room school as an office, rebuilt the trading post after a lightning-induced fire burned it down and got the state to erect the town sign. State transportation officials did turn him down on a request that the sign say “Buford — Population Don and Jon.”

When his son moved away, Don Sammons says it took a year to change that sign to, “Pop. 1.” The new owner may have to get it changed again.

By: Richard Florida
Via: The Atlantic Cities


Manufacturing is back, at least as a talking point.

President Barack Obama has been making an election-year case for a “built-to-last” economic strategy centered on American manufacturing. A recent Brookings Institution report argues that manufacturing is a powerful engine of exports, innovation, and high-wage jobs. In a feature story in the New York Times Magazine, Adam Davidson extols the resurgence of craft manufacturing in everything from high-tech precision parts for military helicopters and guided missiles to new herb mustards, all-natural beef jerky, and artisanal pickles. “Instead of rolling our eyes at self-conscious Brooklyn hipsters pickling everything in sight,” Davidson writes, “we might look to them as guides to the future of the American economy.”

Before we get too excited, I thought it might useful to put some actual numbers on the table. The chart below, by Michelle Hopgood of the Martin Prosperity Institute, outlines which manufacturing fields are most prevalent based on detailed data on production occupations from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To save space, we have grouped some of these categories together and also shortened some of the occupational titles.


Manufacturing work is important. We should applaud the men and women who do it, and do our best to make it better, more engaging, and higher paying. The best manufacturing jobs today look more like knowledge jobs, involving high levels of analytical and social intelligence skill such as team building and developing others.

But manufacturing will not provide a viable economic future, at least not by itself.

For starters, pay for productions workers is below the national average. Their average pay is $33,700 per year, or $16.24 per hour. That compares to an average of $44,410 across all jobs, or $21.35 per hour.

Even more telling: some manufacturing industries pay much better than others. The 66,530 tool and die makers or the 36,200 aircraft assemblers have great jobs earning – $48,710 and $45,230, respectively. But the nearly 150,000 sewing machine operators average just $22,630 a year, or $10.88 per hour.

The number of manufacturing jobs is also falling quickly, despite the government’s best efforts. Roughly 8.2 million American workers are employed in production jobs. This does not count the 408,000 Americans who work in fishing, forestry, and farming occupations. Add them in and it brings the total to 8.6 million workers, roughly 6.5 percent of America’s total labor force of roughly 127 million. That’s down from roughly a third of the workforce in 1950. And it’s projected to decline further, to about 5 percent, by 2020.

The decline in production workers mirrors the decline of agriculture over the course of the 20th century. But it may be even swifter. A century ago, roughly 37 percent of Americans worked on farms. This declined to just slightly more than one in five workers by 1930 and 17 percent of the workforce by 1940, a period of crisis and economic resetting analogous to the current one. More than one in 10 Americans were still employed in agriculture in 1950. It was not until 1960 that the share of workers in agriculture hit 6 percent, a level similar to the share of production workers today. Since that time, the share of Americans employed in agriculture has fallen to a fraction of one percent.

Of course, the United States still produces a huge amount of food, but we do it far more efficiently and with far fewer people. Similarly, America still makes a lot of manufactured stuff, including a great deal of advanced and artisanal products, but we also do that more productively and with far fewer people. Trying to rebuild the U.S. economy around manufacturing today is the historical equivalent of trying to build the 20th century American economy around farms.

By: Richard Florida
Via: The Atlantic Cities


Green jobs are often said to be a key growth area of the future. But according to a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 3.1 million people, 2.4 percent of all American workers, were employed in “green goods and services” jobs in 2010.

The report defines green jobs across five categories: production of energy from renewable sources; energy efficiency; pollution reduction and removal, greenhouse gas reduction, and recycling and reuse; natural resources conservation; and environmental compliance, education and training, and public awareness.

The majority of these green jobs (2.3 million) come from the private sector. The public sector employed about 860,000 people. The largest sector of employment was manufacturing, with more than 450,000 green jobs.

This squares with a July 2011 Brooking Institution study of clean economy jobs, which identified 2.7 million clean economy jobs across the United States. The report found that median wages for clean economy jobs are 13 percent higher than median U.S. wages, and that a disproportionate share of clean economy jobs are staffed by workers with relatively little formal education. This has created a sizable group of “moderately well-paying green collar occupations,” according to the report.

My colleague Zara Matheson at Martin Prosperity Institute used the BLS data to map the distribution of green jobs across the 50 states and the District of Columbia.


The first map, above, shows the number of green jobs by state. Leading the way were six states with more than 100,000 green jobs. California take the top spot with 338,400, followed by New York (248,500), Texas (229,700), Pennsylvania (182,200), Illinois (139,800), and Ohio (126,900). But, of course, those are also some of the largest states, so it makes sense that they have the most green jobs overall.


The second map (above) charts the share of total employment comprised by green jobs across the states. Now, Vermont is the leader – green jobs make up 4.4 percent of its total employment. Green jobs make up more than 3 percent of total employment in D.C. (3.9 percent), Idaho (3.7 percent), Maryland (3.6 percent), Alaska (3.6 percent), Montana (3.5 percent), Oregon (3.4 percent), Colorado (3.3 percent), Washington (3.3 percent), Pennsylvania (3.3 percent), New York (3.0 percent) and Wyoming (3.0 percent).


The third map charts the the number of green goods and services jobs per thousand workers. Now, all-urban Washington, D.C., leads with 44.6 green jobs per thousand workers, followed by Vermont (20.6), Alaska (16.1), Maryland (15.1), Montana (14.7), and Oregon (14.3).

With the help of my colleague Charlotta Mellander, I took a quick look at the factors that might be associated with green jobs across states, including income and education levels as well as other economic variables. (The analysis is based on green jobs per thousand workers). As usual, I point out that correlation points only to associations and does not imply causality.

Green jobs are more prevalent in higher income states. There is a moderate correlation between green jobs and state median income (.4).

Green jobs are more closely associated with education or human capital levels. We found a correlation of .65 between green jobs and the share of college grads in state.

Green jobs are also more likely in states with knowledge-based and creative economies. We found a substantial correlation between green jobs and the share of creative class workers (.8) and a significant negative correlation between green jobs and the share of workers in blue-collar jobs (.6). Green jobs are not associated with the share of high-tech jobs in a state.

This analysis is interesting. It suggests that, though the green job sector is likely to grow, it is unlikely to provide a steady supply of lower-skill jobs or substantially bolster the economies or job markets of more heavily industrialized states.

As chock-full of data as the BLS report is, it does not report on green jobs at the metro level. For that we must turn to a database of green jobs built by the Brookings Institution (in partnership with the Battelle Corporation). Jose Lobo and Deborah Strumsky, both MPI research affiliates, have been granted access to the full Brookings database, and in collaboration with MPI research director, Kevin Stolarick, are preparing a detailed study of the geography of the green economy. We’ll be bringing you its results here.