- Engineers of Jihad (Marginal Revolution) — brief book review, tantalizing. The distribution of traits across disciplines mirrors almost exactly the distribution of disciplines across militant groups…engineers are present in groups in which social scientists, humanities graduates, and women are absent, and engineers possess traits — proneness to disgust, need for closure, in-group bias, and (at least tentatively) simplism…
- Box of a Trillion Souls — review and critique of some of Stephen Wolfram’s writing and speaking about AI and simulation and the nature of reality and complexity and … a lot.
- Alphabet Starting Sidewalk Labs (NY Times) — “We’re taking everything from anonymized smartphone data from billions of miles of trips, sensor data, and bringing that into a platform that will give both the public and private parties and government the capacity to actually understand the data in ways they haven’t before,” said Daniel L. Doctoroff, Sidewalk’s chief executive, who is a former deputy mayor of New York City and former chief executive of Bloomberg. Data, data, data.
- SIGBOVIK — the proceedings from 2015 include a paper that talks about “The Tortilla Endofunctor.” You’re welcome.
"transportation data" entries
Four short links: 18 March 2016
Engineering Traits, Box of Souls, Transport Data, and Tortilla Endofunctors
Visualization of the Week: NYC Citi Bike use, in real time
Oliver O'Brien has visualized real-time bike share use not only in NYC, but in cities around the world as well.
New York City’s new bike-share program, Citi Bike, has been underway for a couple of weeks now. Its level of success is still up for debate, but the stats are impressive: as of June 10, there had been 173,516 trips traveled over 510,782 miles since the launch. Oliver O’Brien, a researcher and software developer at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), and a contributor to OpenStreetMap, has developed a visualization of bike share use in real time.
Visualization of the Week: How people commute
Two visualizations look at how commuters get to and from work.
The Datablog team at The Guardian dug into the recently released 2011 UK census data and mapped how people around the UK get to work — by car, bike, train or walking.
Visualization of the Week: Hubway commuters’ time saved
An interactive visualization shows how bike-sharing service Hubway has saved its commuters more than 45,000 hours of travel time.
Boston’s bike-sharing service Hubway recently opened up its data and held a visualization contest. The winners were announced this week: Overall Best Visualization went to MIT student Virot “Ta” Chiraphadhanakul. His interactive visualization measures trip times from one Hubway station to another and compares the times to the same trips using Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) public transportation and/or walking. His results show that in 513,733 one-way trips, commuters have saved more than 45,000 hours of travel time by using Hubway.
The overall interactive chart allows you to hover over specific dots, or trips, to see travel times and time saved using Hubway. Bigger dots represent more popular trips.
