Category Archives: Online Tools / Apps / Data Sources

automated aggregation of scientific literature

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I am intrigued by this example from Stanford of computerized review and synthesis of scientific literature:

Over the last few years, we have built applications for both broad domains that read the Web and for specific domains like paleobiology. In collaboration with Shanan Peters (PaleobioDB), we built a system that reads documents with higher accuracy and from larger corpora than expert human volunteers. We find this very exciting as it demonstrates that trained systems may have the ability to change the way science is conducted.

In a number of research papers we demonstrated the power of DeepDive on NMR data and financial, oil, and gas documents. For example, we showed that DeepDive can understand tabular data. We are using DeepDive to support our own research, exploring how knowledge can be used to build the next generation of data processing systems.

Examples of DeepDive applications include:

  • PaleoDeepDive – A knowledge base for Paleobiologists
  • GeoDeepDive – Extracting dark data from geology journal articles
  • Wisci – Enriching Wikipedia with structured data

The complete code for these examples is available with DeepDive.

Let’s just say an organization is trying to be more innovative. First it needs to understand where its standard operating procedures are in relation to the leading edge. To do that, it needs to understand where the leading edge is. That means research, which can be very tedious, and time consuming. It means the organization is paying people to spend time reviewing large amounts of information, some or even most of which will not turn out to be useful. So a change in mindset is often necessary. But tools that could jump start the process and provide short cuts would be great.

This is my own developing theory of how an organization can become more innovative: First, figure out where the leading edge is. Second, figure out how far the various parts of your organization are from the leading edge. Third, figure out how you are going to bring a critical mass of your organization up to the leading edge – this is as much a human resource problem as an innovation problem. Fourth, then and only then, you are ready to try to advance the leading edge. I think a lot of organizations have a few people that do #1, but then they skip right to #4. Then that small group is way outside the leading edge while the bulk of the organization is nowhere near it. That’s not a recipe for success.

Scratch

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“Scratch” is another programming language supposedly aimed at children.

Scratch Overview from ScratchEd on Vimeo.

If you watch the TED talk in the first link, there is an analogy I like – just because you use technology created by others (web browsing, texting, etc.) doesn’t make you fully literate in that technology. It is akin to being able to read but not able to write.

online productivity and creativity apps

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This article from Civicly lists useful online apps for planners – actually, I think they are useful for anybody whose job involves trying to solve problems with a little creative latitude. I especially like the free tools for infographics – it looks like you can pick a template and customize it for your data.

habitat fragmentation and connectivity

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Did you ever wonder how to quantitatively analyze the quality, shape, and degree of connectivity of natural habitats? Well, there’s an open source app for that, called FRAGSTATS, and good documentation that describes the theory behind it. To summarize, it looks at area and edge, shape, core area, contrast, aggregation, and diversity. Here are just a few quotes describing some of the metrics.

“Core area is defined as the area within a patch beyond some specified depth-of-edge influence (i.e., edge distance) or buffer width.”

“Contrast refers to the magnitude of difference between adjacent patch types with respect to one or more ecological attributes at a given scale that are relevant to the organism or process under consideration.”

“Aggregation refers to the tendency of patch types to be spatially aggregated; that is,
to occur in large, aggregated or “contagious” distributions.”

“FRAGSTATS computes 3 diversity indices. These diversity measures are influenced by 2 components- richness and evenness. Richness refers to the number of patch types present; evenness refers to the distribution of area among different types.”

protected bike lanes

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Continuing on my recent transportation theme, this article on Alternet has some really good statistics on protected bike lanes. I am convinced that biking (a.k.a. cycling) is just a more practical way to get around urban areas than cars – it gets more people from point A to point B with less infrastructure, less cost, less wasted space, and no pollution. Plus, it promotes a more healthful, active lifestyle and urban design that supports that.

But for all this to happen, we have to build cycling infrastructure that is truly safe, and the U.S. just hasn’t fully committed to that. There are signs of hope, however – here are some of the statistics I’m talking about:

  • 27% of all trips in the Netherlands are made on bicycles. The Dutch designs are not secret but are available here (although their manual costs 90 Euros and it is not clear to me whether an English version is available).
  • The “pioneering” American city in protected bike lanes is…Montreal with over 30 miles (I just remembered, Canada shares our North American continent). But New York City has caught up and surpassed them with 43 miles. Other cities are Chicago (23 miles), San Francisco (12 miles), Austin (9 miles), and D.C. (7 miles). (Here in my native Philadelphia, we have not built protected bike lanes but have closed some lanes to traffic and painted some new stripes on the streets that would allow us to eventually separate them. Philadelphia has a burgeoning cycling culture and I think eventually it will happen. We don’t like to do anything first, we always sit back and watch what New York is doing for a few years before we build up the courage to try something new.)
  • Studies are finding that bike infrastructure boosts retail sales – 49% for a street in New York, 24% in Portland – and 65% of merchants surveyed reporting positive effects in San Francisco. (I’m not surprised by this – there is less space wasted on car travel lanes and parking, less time wasted circling around looking for parking, less money spent on parking, more room for trees and fountains and sidewalk cafes – you have more people in a given space, yet less crowding, with more time and money on their hands and a nicer environment where they want to hang around.)
  • And…duh…protected bike lanes are safer for everyone, and add more capacity to move more people at much lower cost compared to new traffic lanes.

The article also links to this fantastic collection of articles and data on protected bike lanes from “peopleforbikes“.

falling fruit

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This website, called Falling Fruit: Mapping the urban harvest, is attempting to be a worldwide map of harvestable food in urban areas. I think this is a great idea both for sustainability and for livability in urban areas. There must be a lot of fruit and nut trees on private land and in forgotten spaces of public land – median strips, the “tree lawn” between street and sidewalk, and so forth. But in many cases the people who own or control this land may not be interested in taking care of these trees. At the same time, I believe there are a lot of frustrated urban armchair gardeners out there who would love to take care of them, but don’t have permission to access the private property, or don’t know about or feel comfortable taking care of the trees on the public property. So a website like this could begin to connect the trees to the people who are willing to take care of the trees.

That’s just the trees we have now. If something like this took off, we could gradually replace more of our ornamental urban landscaping with edible landscaping – fruit hedges, strawberry lawns, and so on.  We could incorporate rain barrels, rain gardens, compost bins, even chickens and rabbits for people who are open to that. We could take wildlife habitat into account to, and start to take a larger view of the landscape – how patches of urban habitat can be connected, and how patches of urban habitat can be connected to larger urban parks and rural reserves.

By the way, I don’t mean for urbanism to be the primary subject of this blog. The subject is how our civilization is connected to, and impacting, and dependent on, the natural world and what that means for the future. But at the risk of stating the obvious, urban areas are where the people are so I will return to urban design and urban hydrology and urban ecology and land use and transportation topics fairly often.