Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources

new technology for mapping street trees

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Philadelphia Parks and Rec has used a Google Street View-like technology to map street trees.

CycloMedia’s tool is “like Google Maps on steroids,” said Parks and Rec’s lead GIS Specialist Nora Dougherty, who spearheaded the project. It is a way of capturing all kinds of high-definition imagery that is geolocated, which means it can be used for a variety of projects. The tool is easy enough for non-experts to use, according to Mark Wheeler, Chief Geographic Information Officer for the Office of Innovation and Technology, plus the custom-captured imagery can be fully integrated with the city’s existing GIS software. CycloMedia’s tool captures an unprecedented level of detail in the images it records: You’re able to see features like address numbers and even deterioration of rooflines. Plus, every image is date and time stamped, so the user can verify that the images are consistent. This tool is also highly accurate for measuring distances and heights.

After all the streets in Philadelphia were captured using the technology, GIS technicians Tom McKeon and Stuart Olshevski virtually traveled down every street and dropped pins marking the location of each tree. The result is an inventory of nearly 112,000 street trees with geolocation data, which means street trees are now represented in a new layer of geographic information that can be mapped and analyzed. (Forest trees make up the other thousands of trees in Philadelphia, but it’s nearly impossible to accurately inventory them.) Information about the health and species of street trees is also being recorded…

The street tree inventory will be available on August 5 on Open Data Philly, and in an interactive map will be on the city’s website. Citizens can use that information to create their own maps and take action to monitor the trees in their neighborhood.

skyscraper game

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This looks pretty cool – an iPhone game for kids that lets them look inside a skyscraper.

In a few light swipes and taps, users “create” a made-up skyscraper by adding floors and choosing the color of the facade. On the app’s sidebar, select a tiny I-beam button to play a game where adding boulders, elephants, and sailboats sinks your building deep and lopsided into its foundation. An elevator icon takes you to an interactive view of interior life—families in their kitchens, watching television, tiptoe-ing through bedrooms. The details are incredibly ornate, especially in another mode, accessed by clicking on a little water drop, where you clog toilets and set fires on different floors. Watch how the building (which gets an anthropomorphic touch) reacts. They say if walls could talk…

Problems just keep backing up.
(Screenshot of “Skyscrapers” by Tinybop)

With virtually no text, the app invites you to play by intuiting through touch and iconography. Youngsters, presumably raised on the logic of iPhones, are the audience targeted by the app’s developer, Tinybop. “Skyscrapers” is the seventh in Tinybop’s “Explorer’s Library,” series, which “introduces kids to STEAM topics they learn about in school,” according to a spokesperson.

I looked at the Explorer’s Library and they have a number of cool simulation apps for kids, like plants, the human body, and weather. I think I might start with one of those rather than a skyscraper. I am always on the lookout for a really good ecosystem simulation for kids.

Habitica

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This app turns your to-do list into a game. It’s a cool idea – basically you are setting goals and tracking your progress toward them, not exactly a new idea. But it could be a fun idea that gets you over the hump of a goal that has been eluding you, or the gimmick that gets a team of smart but bored individuals (and smart individuals have a tendency to be bored) to come together and complete an important but less than intellectually stimulating work task.

inequality and mobility

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The Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland has an interesting study of income mobility in the U.S. It appears to be true that the poorest families tend to stay poor (between 2003 and 2013, 64% of families in the poorest 20% stayed in the poorest 20%), while the richest tend to stay rich (72% of families in the richest 20% stayed in the richest 20%). Looking at the table if you are in one of the middle quintiles, (between the 20th and 80th percentiles, your chances of moving up or down to the adjacent quintile look to be about even. This measure of mobility increased somewhat in the 80s and 90s, but appears to be on the decline since then. Mobility is harder to measure across generations, but it does appear to be much higher than within a single generation, which you would expect. Mobility in the U.S. is lower than in other developed countries, both the northern European socialist ones where you might expect it, but also the Anglo-American peers like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, although the UK, France, Italy are in the same ballpark as the U.S. If you’re interested in this, stop reading my wordy description and go look at the data!

where the money goes

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I am somewhat familiar with how the U.S. federal government spends its money, but it is still instructive to see it broken down occasionally. Once social security, medicare, and interest are taken care of, the discretionary spending that is left is less than a third of the total. Of that, more than half is military. Veterans’ benefits make up another sizable chunk, nuclear weapons are partially funded under the energy budget, and it is not clear (to me at least) where intelligence and homeland security funding fall, so the real total for military and security is even larger than it appears.

index of redevelopment potential

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This is an index of redevelopment potential for individual properties in Philadelphia and other cities. The application to real estate is obvious, but I can also see a number of applications to public policy. For example, changes to codes and ordinances can improve the overall health, safety, and environmental impact of a city. But these get implemented slowly and incrementally, especially in older cities with fixed boundaries, where most development is redevelopment. If you had a reasonable prediction of where and when redevelopment is likely to occur, you would know which areas to sit back and be patient, and which areas of the city to intervene more directly if you want to see change on any reasonable time frame.

It’s a little bit of a shame the person is not sharing their methodology. I’ve had a number of urban planners and economists tell me over the years this is very hard to do, and seen a few try and give up. So this is either brilliant, or it is little more than a guess. If it’s brilliant it could be very valuable indeed, so I guess I can see the financial incentive not to publish the details. But there is no way to know the difference without knowing how it is done. The author could at least publish a white paper showing some back testing of the algorithm against historic data.

vehicle speed and pedestrian injuries/deaths

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Here is the hard data on a person’s probability of survival when hit by a car traveling at a range of speeds. You should go to the link and look at the graphs, but here are a few highlights I picked out:

  • For the average person hit by the average vehicle, you need to get speed down to the 30-35 mph range to have a 75% survival probability, and the 20-25 mph range if you want a 90% survival probability. 15 mph would get you up to about 95%.
  • All people are not average. A 70-year-old struck at 30 mph has something like a 60% chance of living, while a 30-year-old has more like a 85% chance (I’m eyeballing a tiny graph, these numbers are not exact.)
  • All vehicles are not equal. Getting struck by a pickup truck or SUV is more likely to be deadly than a car. Again just eyeballing, if you’re hit by a light truck vs. a car at 30 mph, the average person’s odds of survival would drop from something like 80% to 75%.
  • Those numbers are for death. Obviously, the risk of severe injury short of death is higher. Again using the 30 mph example, the risk of severe injury for the average person hit by the average vehicle looks to be around 50%.

I think our first instinct is to look for someone to blame – and it’s obviously true that better driver behavior, pedestrian behavior, or both could prevent accidents. But police enforcement is obviously part of the answer. It upsets me when I hear the Philadelphia Police openly say they don’t enforce traffic laws because they have “real crimes” to attend to. Sure, their job is to keep the population safe from violence on our city’s streets – well, this is violence on our city’s streets! And it disproportionately puts children and the elderly at risk compared to other forms of crime.

Finally, better design of streets, intersections, and signals is a big part of the answer. Nearly perfect designs exist in places like Denmark and the Netherlands, but well-trained and well-intentioned U.S. engineers are either ignorant of them or cynically assume they can’t or won’t work here, or that they are not affordable.

I assume these same police and engineers would not go out on the streets and shoot old people and children in the head, because that would be unethical, so why is knowingly allowing the preventable deaths of old people and children through ignorance and negligence any different? And why does the public largely accept this and assume it can’t change?

how freight moves

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Here are some statistics on how freight moves in the U.S. Compared to my preconceived notions, trucking is even more dominant compared to rail than I thought. Even pipelines move more than twice the weight of rail. Air is vanishingly small in terms of weight, but used to move higher-value items. It’s not too surprising that the monetary value of everything shipped is projected to grow along with the economy, but it is a little surprising to me that the weight of everything shipped is projected to grow by 40% over the next 30 years. It argues against the idea that we are “dematerializing”, or achieving economic growth without physical growth. Sure, people like Alan Greenspan can make an argument that the weight per dollar is not increasing, but what does that mean exactly when a dollar is a fairly arbitrary human measure of value? Ultimately the tonnage of everything we move, from raw materials and fossil fuels to manufactured goods to waste, is one proxy for ecological footprint, and it doesn’t look like we are going to turn the corner soon. The only way that would change is if we had a closed loop, “circular economy” where the waste becomes raw materials again. Then we could theoretically keep shipping it around the loop faster and faster without increasing our footprint. That is, given enough clean, cheap energy.

Ted Cruz

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Thinking of Ted Cruz as an alternative to Donald Trump? Looking at Ted Cruz on ontheissues.org, here’s my assessment. He’s a traditional “god, gays, and guns” Christian fundamentalist. The government should have the right to tell us what to believe in (his particular brand of Christian fundamentalism, of course) and what it is okay for us to do in our own bedrooms and families. He would continue the failed “tough on crime” policies that have put so much of our poor and minority population behind bars at enormous taxpayer expense. He would “stand up” to nuclear-armed foreign governments like Russia, China and Iran through aggressive military means. On the other hand, in most matters not involving personal religious beliefs, sexual practices or armed violence against the already-born, he’s a “starve the beast” zealot who is ideologically opposed to the very idea of government. He would try to end government involvement in retirement, health care, education, environmental protection, financial stability and the ability to counteract recessions through fiscal and monetary policy.

Personally, I consider it completely non-partisan to look at the risks involved and just say no. This irrational, inconsistent set of ideas is not based on any sort of factual analysis or attempt to understand how the world works. It is likely to destabilize the economy and/or get us into wars. It’s just dangerous. Thinking people of any political stripe should just say no and back candidates who are interested in real solutions to real problems.