A Butterfly in Australia Flaps its Wings

Some of you might have heard something about this already, but I have to say it’s made big waves in the transport forecasting community today. Google’s Australia office made the announcement of a new service that essentially uses a mix of the advanced statistical tools to forecast the future state of a web page. Put simply, they have tweaked Google Search such that anyone can sit down at a computer and get the kind of information that transport forecasters have been trying to do for decades. Something similar happened a few years ago, when Google Earth came out: suddenly, anyone could sit down at a computer and be a Geographic Information Systems analyst! (click below the image to read more…)

The Offense and Defense of a PhD Defense

Two Bears
Originally uploaded by csmellish

On Friday, my colleague Markus defended his dissertation. It doesn’t work the same here as in the U.S. The biggest difference is that the student doesn’t present the dissertation; the opponent does….

The Illustrated Urban Life (with Music by Röyksopp)

A few days ago I marked this in my “recommended reading” feed, so you might have already checked it out. But it’s so good, it’s worth highlighting here. Beautifully addressing several minor fascinations of mine—urban environments, technical illustration, a keen wit, and fun Nordic electronic music—this music video follows the ordinary life of young woman in central London, where her context is illustrated by infographics such as orthographic drawings, electricity-grid maps, a water-cycle diagram, an Underground station diagram,…you get the picture…all designed by H5, a design studio in France that actually designs infographics for a living, mostly for advertisements. The video is well worth watching.

When Edward Tufte first published his wide-format, beautifully designed book “The Visual Illustration of Quantitative Data“, many people in academia thought, “why didn’t I think of doing that?”, yet it was Tufte who got rich off the idea. Now, I bet that Tufte would think the same thing while watching this video: “Why didn’t I think of that?”

(with a nod to the blog Digital Urban)

Planning Conference

Last week I attended the annual conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (the conference is colloquially named after the organization’s acronym, ACSP). ACSP the organization consists of the urban planning academic programs throughout North America. I attended as a presenter, giving a short paper on the differentiation in travel choice responses, across incomes, to a hypothetical increase in the cost of driving, using data from the Seattle metro area….