Nextgov/FCW - Authors - Emily Badger

The Future of Mapping Is Inside Your Home and Office

Emily Badger, CityLab — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 11:14:17 -0500

Once all of our roads and rivers, buildings and parks, shops and monuments are mapped, there will remain one territory largely beyond the reach of GPS: the great indoors.

Right now, Google Maps can take you to the entrance of the Mall of America. But it can't narrate your route to the Aldo. It can drop you on the nonsensical campus of MIT, but it can't help you find the door to suite 9-209. Cutting-edge maps of all kinds can show you the location but not the interior of convention centers, airports, offices or apartment buildings.

As for exactly how this will be possible, Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group unveiled a prototype Android smartphone this week that does a lot more than track your global position as you move through the world. The phone also includes a motion-tracking camera and depth-sensing technology capable of constructing a 3D model of the environment around it. (And it looks more ambitious than a couple of other fledgling efforts at indoor mapping.)

In short, it could help you (and Google?) map your living room, your office complex, or the back booth at your neighborhood diner.

In the below video introducing the project, Googler Johnny Chung Lee explains the impetus for the idea this way: "We are physical beings that live in a 3D world, yet mobile devices today assume that the physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen. Our goal is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion."

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

(Image via Maksim Kabakou/Shutterstock.com)

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Why the Real Estate Industry Is Interested in Drones, Too

Emily Badger, CityLab — Thu, 30 Jan 2014 14:40:42 -0500

In this halting, vertigo-inducing video, you can watch a couple of guys from the creative agency Neoscape toy with their newly built drone, outfitted off the Boston Inner Harbor with a GoPro camera:

That footage captures a test flight for a modest but intriguing advance in architectural rendering and real estate marketing: drone's-eye views of new project sites. In the video, there's a construction site (and temporary car lot) in the foreground of that gray, mid-rise building. Neoscape ultimately used the drone footage it collected here to produce surrounding scenery and accurate aerial views – from a vantage point over the water – for the composite rendering of what will go on that construction site, shown above and here:

Neoscape

Those gleaming blue luxury condos aren't yet complete. But when they are, likely next year, the scene will look an awful lot like what you see in that picture. Studios like Neoscape more often have to rent helicopters or climb cranes – both expensive propositions – to complete architectural renderings or produce the kind of glossy marketing material that could give a prospective tenant a sense of his 20th-story view.

A camera-equipped drone, on the other hand, might gather these images or video more easily, not to mention cheaply.

"Every decade or every year or every day, there’s something new that people want look at, that everyone wants to do," says Carlos Cristerna, an associate principal and the director of visualization at Neoscape. "It seems like these days, drones are the thing ."

He adds, though, that they're not exactly a fad. "There are two sides of it," he says. "There's the practical side of it, and there's the eye-candy side of it."

Facebook Is Using Your Profile to Track Global Urban Migration Trends

Emily Badger, CityLab — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 10:25:31 -0500

Facebook possesses a startlingly massive trove of data on global migration patterns. It's hidden, innocuously enough, amid two simple biographical details that many people post on their profile pages: Where you live, and where you're from.

Between those two data points – spread across the millions of its 1 billion users who volunteer this information – Facebook can paint a picture of where large population shifts take place, which cities seem to attract the most people, and what kinds of communities are losing them.

Facebook's Data Science team recently produced an interesting analysis of what it's calling "coordinated migration" patterns among large groups of people who tend to flock from one city to a common destination (think Warsaw to Chicago, Havana to Miami, or from just about anywhere in Turkey to Istanbul). The results require a grain of salt: Facebook's sample admittedly self-selects for people anywhere in the world who use computers, and as Wired points out, the company's in-house analysis is not exactly open for peer review.

Read the full story at TheAtlanticCities.com.

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Imagining the U.S. Supreme Court Covered in Solar Panels

Emily Badger, CityLab — Mon, 16 Dec 2013 10:30:36 -0500

Last year, we wrote about a sweeping project from the MIT Sustainable Design Lab and the Boston design firm Modern Development Studio that mapped the potential for installing solar power on every square meter of every roof in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT developed algorithms using public flyover LIDAR data to automatically assess each building's suitability – by location, angle and surroundings – for soaking up the sun's rays.

At the time, the tool looked like a replicable one that could change how we harvest solar power on a community scale. Now, the project's original creators have licensed their technology from MIT and launched a spinoff company, called Mapdwell , that intends to scale this up beyond Cambridge, even beyond solar surveys. A similar and slick interactive platform, they figure, could also educate homeowners and commercial building managers about their potential for other kinds of green roofs, or rainwater collection.

The project just tapped its second city, Washington, D.C. And similar solar maps in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and, abroad, in Chile, are due in the new year. Eduardo Berlin, the new company's CEO, says Mapdwell is also in talks with about 20 other cities, mostly in the U.S., to create something similar to this Washington platform:

Mapdwell

Read the full story at TheAtlanticCities.com.

( Image via spirit of america / Shutterstock.com )

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Vancouver Is About to Get the World's First Bitcoin ATM

Emily Badger, Quartz — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 15:23:44 -0400

At some point on Tuesday, the world's first bitcoin ATM will begin exchanging actual cash for the digital currency in downtown Vancouver. Until now, bitcoin has existed – and swooned in value – almost entirely in the ether, in online exchanges and virtual wallets. It's sometimes traded for cash in meet-ups of individual users. But this is the first time the digital currency will get banking's traditional sidewalk interface, right near a neighborhood coffee shop.

The ATM itself, with four more rumored to come elsewhere in Canada, was produced by a Nevada-based company called Robocoin, and it will be operated by a local Vancouver exchange called Bitcoiniancs. Apparently, it's easier to test the concept in Canada than the U.S. Wired explains how it will work:

To buy bitcoins with the Robocoin ATM, you need to do a palm scan and then stuff the machine with as much as 3,000 Canadian dollars per day (roughly US$2,900). The machine then makes a trade on Canada’s VirtEx exchange and moves them into your online bitcoin wallet. The palm scan is to prevent people from doing more than $3,000 worth of transactions, as that would run afoul of Canada’s anti-money-laundering laws, says Mitchell Demeter, one of the Robocoin’s new owners.

Demeter seems otherwise convinced that the scheme is legal in Canada. And the coffee shop owner sounds thrilled as well. The machine doesn't look a whole lot different from a typical ATM, save for the palm scan part.

Here's a YouTube video of it in action (complete with a soundtrack that implies you're probably cashing in your bitcoins to fund your glow stick habit):

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Video: The Future of Personal Drone Navigation Is Here

Emily Badger, CityLab — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 14:00:04 -0400

Technology is forever trying to stay one step ahead of the spatially challenged, those people who never know exactly where they are on a street grid or how to get where they're going. Have no internal compass? There are maps for that. Befuddled by maps? There are smart phones. Still don't know which way to point your Android? Now, there are drones.

Meet Skycall, an "autonomous flying quadcopter and personal tour guide" from the MITSenseable City Lab. Researchers there are trying to test the potential of drones to sense and perceive complex environments, as well as their ability to communicate about that environment with humans on the ground via, say, your cell phone. Those two capabilities will be key to the capacity of unmaned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, to do all kinds of things: identify infrastructure problems, survey storm damage, calculate the world's first indisputably accurate crowd counts(I'm just daydreaming here; you should feel free to join me in the comments section).

Here, though, Skycall is starting with something much simpler (but no less impressive): It's navigating a kid through his college campus.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

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An App to Nab Jerks Who Illegally Use Disabled Parking

Emily Badger, CityLab — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 14:02:51 -0400

The Austin non-profit Parking Mobility argues that one in four cars parked in a disabled parking spot actually shouldn't be there, an abuse so common that law enforcement could never reasonably keep up with it. But while meter maids don't always spot these scofflaws, plenty of other people do (especially disabled drivers who are legitimately looking for such spots). So how do they get in on the shaming and ticketing?

There's a clever app for that, described this week by the New York Times' Wheels blog. Parking Mobility is trying to partner with cities on an app that would allow trained volunteers to file instant reports to the city from their smart phones of offenders they catch in the act. All they have to do is take three photos:

the rear of the vehicle (license plate and make/model of vehicle)

the parking spot showing both the vehicle and the disabled parking signs

the front windshield of the vehicle showing no disabled placard or ID

The app automatically adds GPS coordinates and a time stamp. "After you take these photos," Parking Mobility's website adds, "leave the violating vehicle and submit the report. That’s it!" They do not, in other words, want you sticking around to give the illegal parker a piece of your mind.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

(Image via AdStock RF/Shutterstock.com)

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The Patent Troll That's Been Bilking Transit Agencies Finally Slinks Away

Emily Badger, CityLab — Mon, 26 Aug 2013 10:47:52 -0400

Like just about every other legal settlement in the very strange saga of the patent troll that's been suing public transit agencies, this latest agreement is under wraps as well. But at least we know the outcome is finally a good one for transit agencies and their riders: ArrivalStar, the holder of several dubious patents covering real-time transportation notifications, has agreed to stop claiming patent infringement against the 1,500 agencies that belong to the American Public Transportation Association.

APTA sued ArrivalStar in June on behalf of all its members, after the Luxembourg-based patent holder had extracted settlements from at least 11 known U.S. transit agencies over a period of several years. ArrivalStar claimed that the most mundane and publicly beneficial of technologies – apps and systems that track the real-time movement and arrival of buses and trains – violated patents that were more than 20 years old.

ArrivalStar sued the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the New York Metropolitan Transport Authority, and Seattle’s King County Metro Transit, among others. An unknown number of other agencies received letters threatening lawsuits and demanding licensing fees as well. All of the agencies targeted by ArrivalStar evidently made the calculation that it would be less costly to settle with the company than to fight its patent claims in court.

Read the full story at TheAtlanticCities.com.

(Image via stockelements / Shutterstock.com)

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How Robots in Outer Space Are Influencing the Cars of the Future

Emily Badger, CityLab — Fri, 23 Aug 2013 12:42:59 -0400

NASA engineers referred to the most crucial moments in the Mars Curiosity mission last summer as the "seven minutes of terror." During that time, without the guidance or control of any humans back on earth, the rover had to enter the martian atmosphere, descend from an initial speed of 13,000 miles per hour, and land on target in one insanely expensive, intact piece.

"And the computer," as the engineer in this dramatic little NASA trailer explains, "has to do it all by itself."

Perhaps this sounds like a leap too far in transportation technology, but if engineers can build a car-sized robot capable of managing its own internal errors in a first foray to the martian landscape, surely some less sophisticated but equally reliable systems could be built into our more terrestrial vehicles?

"Imagine the complexity in software and from the hardware perspective that’s necessary in order to launch that successfully in seven minutes," says Aziz Makkiya, a design telematics engineer at Ford. "That’s one of the experiences that we're trying to mimic in a smaller scale in the automotive world."

Cars are about to get substantially more complex, more reliant on computers. Soon enough, they'll automatically be talking to each other, to the infrastructure around them, to distant emergency responders. And this isn't just in the faraway world of driverless cars. Cars that still have people behind the wheel will have "connected vehicle" technology in them that simply makes them safer, by for instance registering the presence of nearby speeding cars.

All of this technological promise, though, comes with greater risk. Parts breaks. Networks fail. Sometimes our phone calls get dropped or the power goes out. The real question about connected cars is actually the same one NASA asks about all those robots in space the agency invests millions of dollars in: How do we make sure this stuff never fails?

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

(Image via fujji/Shutterstock.com)

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Watch This Adorable Robot Scoot Down Utility Lines Searching for Damage

Emily Badger, CityLab — Thu, 08 Aug 2013 10:44:10 -0400

Nick Morozovsky's above invention, the SkySweeper, has at least two brilliant benefits: The acrobatic robot can shimmy down cables and power lines, inspecting them for damage and beaming data back to utility workers, at considerably less cost than your average unmanned helicopter. And in the process, the colorful little guy promises to make the maddening state of power outages a bit more entertaining.

Morozovsky, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at UC San Diego, has developed the robot with off-the-shelf electronics and 3D-printed parts, all of which could be scaled up for municipal use at something close to $1,000 a pop. That's significantly cheaper than the tools and robots utilities current use to inspect overhead infrastructure.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

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Watch the Intricate Patterns of Global Infrastructure Emerge From Geocoded Tweets

Emily Badger — Fri, 02 Aug 2013 12:12:32 -0400

You may have seen earlier this summer a series of maps released by Twitter showing thegeography of different cities as revealed by millions of tweets. Such maps of digital information are compelling for the way they also illustrate concrete infrastructure: the road networks around cities, the public parks inside of them, the clusters of commercial office buildings.

If you missed your own city in that series, Northeastern University assistant professor of computer science Alan Mislove has created a global, navigable map using much of the same data.

Maps of geo-tagged tweets always represent a biased sample of a biased sample. Tons of people aren't on Twitter. And of those who are, the vast majority never opt in to sharing their geographic location. The 275 million tweets shown in Mislove's map, collected between 2011 and April of the year, reflect just the 1.5 percent of messages that are readily geo-tagged. Still, these people appear to give a pretty impressive snapshot of the transportation networks of large stretches of the globe.

Twitter Can Tell Whether Your Community Is Happy or Not

Emily Badger, CityLab — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 12:39:40 -0400

Governments from the local to the national are increasingly interested in "wellbeing," that subjective notion that's harder to measure than per capita income or GDP, that comes closer to capturing what we more vaguely think of as happiness. We'd all like to have it: quality of life, life satisfaction, fulfillment.

As researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University put it in arecent study on the topic, with a technological twist:

Happiness matters. For example, when a sample of Britons were asked what the prime objective of their government should be – “greatest happiness” or “greatest wealth”, 81% answered with happiness (Easton 2006). In a set of other studies conducted around the world, 69% of people on average rate well-being as their more important life outcome (Diener 2000). Psychologists still argue about how happiness should be defined, but few would deny that people desire it.

We typically gauge happiness, among individuals and whole communities or demographics, with survey questions like "how satisfied are you with your life?" But surveys cost money and contain their own biases. And so these academics, led by Johannes Eichstaedt and Andrew Schwartz, began to wonder if they could glean some sense of a community's wellbeing from the firehose of daily updates many of us voluntarily communicate about ourselves on Twitter.

Alexis Madrigal wrote several months ago about an earlier research project that tried something like this, manually coding the "happiness content" of tweets coming from different parts of the country to find the happiest cities in America. This latest study, also described by the authors on the Follow the Crowd research blog, takes a slightly different strategy and also dissects some of the correlates of "wellbeing" embedded in the language of our tweets.

The study examined 82 million tweets, mapped from nearly 1,300 U.S. counties and collected between June of 2009 and March of 2010 (each county had at least 30,000 twitter words geotagged to it). As the researchers found, Twitter can reveal a lot about wellbeing, not just among individuals (that's not such an impressive feat), but at the level of whole communities.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

(Image via Cienpies Design/Shutterstock.com)

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Yes, GIS Files Are Public Data, Too

Emily Badger and Sara Johnson, CityLab — Thu, 11 Jul 2013 12:38:11 -0400

Back in 2007, the Sierra Club requested a copy of what it thought was a public record from Orange County, California, covering information like the location and addresses of 640,000 land parcels in the county. The local government held the information in a geographic information system, or GIS database, a much more modern equivalent of the old spreadsheet, or the older-still stack of printed papers. In exchange for handing over a copy of the digital file, which can be used to map data, the county requested a $375,000 licensing fee.

As you can imagine, the Sierra Club balked – both at the price tag and the suggestion that this taxpayer-funded database of public information wasn't available under the state's open records law. Six years later, the California Supreme Court this week agreed with the Sierra Club [PDF] that digital mapping data is public data, too.

To underscore the strange nature of Orange County's logic, local officials had offered to hand over all of the information on printed paper. But they argued that GIS files were "computer software," and therefore exempt from the state records law (and open to a revenue stream that would help recoup the costs of maintaining the database).

Read the entire story at Atlantic Cities.

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Are Civic Hackathons Stupid?

Emily Badger, CityLab — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 12:31:18 -0400

No idea ever gets too popular without a bit of a backlash. And now this is happening to the once-obscure civic hackathon. Just a few years ago, such app-developing marathons were rare, and the idea behind them sounded even stranger: Who would willingly give up a weekend to code municipal data for free? As it turns out, lots of people. And lots of governments, from City Hall to the White House, have embraced the model as a way to connect to a younger generation of residents, and to leverage their (free) tech skills.

We've heard the argument before that hackathons aren't all they're cracked up to be, even that they're downright bad for you. Last year, Jake Levitas, the research director at the San Francisco-based Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, joked with us about their sudden ubiquity as a problem-solver: "We’re hearing from the mayor’s office like, ‘a cat got stuck in a tree, can we have a hackathon to get it down?'"

Now the critique, in particularly blunt language, is coming from the former chief technology officer of the tech-friendly city of Seattle. Bill Schrier writes on his personal blog this week that hackathons and the like were "kinda cool" when they were new in 2008.

Transit Agencies Fight Back Against an Infamous Patent Troll

Emily Badger, CityLab — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 11:02:48 -0400

For several years now, a curious company called ArrivalStar – which has no website, appears to produce nothing, and is oddly registered in Luxembourg – has been systematically suing public transit agencies in the United States. As we wrote last April, the company holds a collection of dubious patents tied to the technology of tracking vehicles in motion. And it has been using them to claim patent infringement by transit agencies that ... track vehicles in motion.

Any agency electronically monitoring its own buses and trains, or producing apps for riders to track them, has been at risk of receiving a foreboding letter from these people. It's a pretty classic patent troll story, but with a taxpayer twist. In this case, the company holding the patents has been targeting (among many others) cash-strapped public agencies that can least afford to pay them off, but that are also most likely to avoid litigation.

These transit agencies have understandably had a hard time banding together against ArrivalStar – anyone who signs a settlement with the company can't say much about it. Now, however, the American Public Transportation Association is countersuing on their behalf in federal court. APTA filed a lawsuit on Tuesday in the Southern District of New York trying to halt what it calls "frivolous" patent suits by ArrivalStar and its affiliate, Melvino Technologies Limited. APTA is arguing not only that ArrivalStar's patents should be invalidated, but also that public agencies are protected from such suits by the 11th Amendment.

Read the full story at TheAtlanticCities.com.

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Visualizing the Stunning Growth of 8 Years of OpenStreetMap

Emily Badger, CityLab — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:31:23 -0400

The U.S. OpenStreetMap community gathered in San Francisco over the weekend for its annual conference, the State of the Map. The loose citizen-cartography collective has now been incrementally mapping the world since 2004. While they were taking stock, it turns out the global open mapping effort has now mapped data on more than 78 million buildings and 21 million miles of road (if you wanted to drive all those roads at, say, 60 miles an hour, it would take you some 40 years to do it).

And more than a million people have chipped away at this in an impressively democratic manner: 83.6 percent of the changes in the whole database have been made by 99.9 percent of contributors.

These numbers come from the OpenStreetMap 2013 Data Report, which also contains, of course, more maps. The report, created by MapBox, includes a beautiful worldwide visualization of all the road updates made as OpenStreetMap has grown, with some of the earliest imports of data shown in green and blue, and more recent ones in white. You can navigate the full map here.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

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Every Library and Museum in America, Mapped

Emily Badger, CityLab — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:21:42 -0400

If you have ever felt overwhelmed by the ubiquity of McDonald's, this stat may make your day: There are more public libraries (about 17,000) in America than outposts of the burger mega-chain (about 14,000). The same is true of Starbucks (about 11,000 coffee shops nationally).

“There’s always that joke that there’s a Starbucks on every corner," says Justin Grimes, a statistician with the Institute of Museum and Library Services in Washington. "But when you really think about it, there’s a public library wherever you go, whether it’s in New York City or some place in rural Montana. Very few communities are not touched by a public library.”

In fact, libraries serve 96.4 percent of the U.S. population, a reach any fast-food franchise can only dream of. On a map, that vast geography looks like this:

Grimes built that map this past weekend during the National Day of Civic Hacking, using the agency's database of public libraries. Each of those dots refers to an individual branch library (and a few bookmobiles), out of a total of 9,000 public library systems.

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We're Only Beginning to Understand How Our Brains Make Maps

Emily Badger, CityLab — Thu, 23 May 2013 11:44:19 -0400

About 40 years ago, researchers first began to suspect that we have neurons in our brains called "place cells." They’re responsible for helping us (rats and humans alike) find our way in the world, navigating the environment with some internal sense of where we are, how far we've come, and how to find our way back home. All of this sounds like the work of maps. But our brains do impressively sophisticated mapping work, too, and in ways we never actively notice.

Every time you walk out your front door and past the mailbox, for instance, a neuron in your hippocampus fires as you move through that exact location – next to the mailbox – with a real-world precision down to as little as 30 centimeters. When you come home from work and pass the same spot at night, the neuron fires again, just as it will the next morning. "Each neuron cares for one place," saysMayank Mehta, a neurophysicist at UCLA. "And it doesn't care for any other place in the world."

This is why these neurons are called "place cells." And, in constantly shuffling patterns, they generate our cognitive maps of the world. Exactly how they do this, though, has remained a bit of an enigma. The latest research from Mehta and his colleagues, published this month in the online edition of the journal Science, provides more clues. It now appears as if all of the sensory cues around us – the smell of a pizzeria, the feel of a sidewalk, the sound of a passing bus – are much more integral to how our brains map our movement through space than scientists previously believed.

And the more scientists learn about how our brains construct cognitive maps of space, the more we may learn about how to design those spaces – streets, neighborhoods, cities – in the first place. Or, rather, we may learn more about the consequences of how we've built them so far. How could any urban planner, for starters, not love the idea that "place" is embedded in the brain?

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

(Image via takito/Shutterstock.com)

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The Potential Problem With Personalized Google Maps? We May Never Know What We're Not Seeing

Emily Badger, CityLab — Fri, 17 May 2013 12:53:01 -0400

Google has crammed a dozen notable updates into the revamped Google Maps that was unveiled this week at the tech giant's annual I/O developer conference. The new platform, currently invite-only, seamlessly folds the search function directly onto the map, eliminating the two-column display (search and directions on the left, maps on the right) that will soon come to seem quaint. The new map integrates air-travel routes, and Google Earth's 3D cityscapes, and better passage through Street View. And our favorite addition – a vaguely familiar one – allows users for the first time to simultaneously compare routes between any two locations by car, public transit, walking or cycling.

In fact, ask the new Google Maps to spit out directions to a coffee shop or a friend's house just a few blocks away, and it will assume, by default, that you want to walk there.

But the real game-changer in the new application has less to do with the aesthetic experience of using it, or the sheer power of its continuous toggling between 2D maps, real-life photos and satellite imagery. Google promises with this new product to build a customizable map for everyone, something that will be infinitely, constantly evolving according to your tastes and your clicks and your search history.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

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How Twitter Is Changing the Geography of Communication

Emily Badger, CityLab — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:07:07 -0400

Since academics first began studying communication, they’ve been trying to figure out who we talk to and how those networks change with the invention of new mediums of interaction. Who you could talk to, and even what you might talk about, obviously differed between the eras of the covered wagon and the cell phone. And now we have an instantaneous, global and (mostly) free platform for talking to virtually anyone: the Internet.

So how has it altered the real-world geography of communication? Some previous efforts to address this question have come out of the workplace (researchers can’t query Google for all of our gmail data, but large international companies can do this with their own employees). There’s only so much to be learned, however, from the email correspondence between a company man in L.A. and his coworker in China.

"The holy grail has been to look at people in real life, to look at people outside the workplace, to see when people are on their own, communicating as part of their general course of life, how has the electronic revolution changed that?" says Kalev Leetaru, a University Fellow at the University of Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science. "That has been a difficult thing to look at because there hasn’t been much data."

Now, however, there is more data than most computers can process coming from public social networking platforms like Twitter. We wrote in late 2011 about some early research suggesting that many Twitter users in fact follow other people located within their same city, evidence, Richard Florida wrote, that the Internet is reinforcing the value of place instead of eliminating it.

But now that Twitter is a few years older – and considerably more global – Leetaru and several colleagues have conducted a massive new analysis of the site that suggests the opposite: "In effect," Leetrau says, "location plays a much lesser role now in terms of who we talk to, what we talk about, and where we get our information."

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

(Image via Verticalarray/Shutterstock.com)

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A Live Map of the Manic Ways People Edit Wikipedia

Emily Badger, CityLab — Fri, 10 May 2013 14:03:07 -0400

In the last 35 seconds, as of this writing, someone in Gambier, Ohio, updated the Wikipedia page about Erykah Badu. Someone in Rostov, Russia changed the page for the movie Django Unchained, and someone in San Francisco had something to say about the Maserati Ghibli III, an as-yet-nonexistent car expected to be unveiled at the Shanghai Motor Show in 2014.

Also imperceptibly modified in this same sliver of cyber-time: John Dillinger's profile, Wikipedia's "List of fictional robots and androids," and a page on the Middlesbrough Football Club, known, of course, as Boro for short by fans of the English Football League Championship.

The edits come so quickly from across the globe that you'd best screen-grab this addicting liveWikipedia Recent Changes Map if you want to keep track of them.

Read the entire story at Atlantic Cities.

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How Much Do Automated License Plate Readers Know About You?

Emily Badger, CityLab — Thu, 09 May 2013 10:01:02 -0400

The information on your license plate is public data in the most literal sense. As you drive down the road, anyone can look at it, photograph it, jot it down. You have a right to try to keep plenty of other personal numbers close to the vest – your driver's license, Social Security or cell phone digits, for starters – but this one goes on display, by design.

So what's the problem with police cameras that photograph license plates in transit all around town? Civil liberties advocates have begun to raise the question as automated license plate readers have become a standard tool of law enforcement in cities across the country. Police now rely on these sophisticated cameras mounted from squad cars or static poles to identify scofflaws or stolen cars. But in the process, plenty of other cars are photographed too, in some cases many times. And when you put all that data together, it draws a picture of personal mobility that may reveal even more about you than a surveillance camera at a single intersection can see.

"Five years ago, this was very new technology in the U.S. that only the largest departments had even started to adopt," says Peter Bibring, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU. "Today, it’s everywhere. Even very small departments."

Read more at Atlantic Cities.

Image via Joy Brown/Shutterstock

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The Payphone of the Future Is Calling

Emily Badger, CityLab — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:53:47 -0400

The May issue of The Atlantic, on newsstands now, highlights two of our favorite finalists from a competition New York City held earlier this year to reinvent the payphone for an era when landlines (and quarters) now seem obsolete. The city's 15-year contract with its current payphone vendors expires next year. And in advance of that opportunity to re-create this classic urban infrastructure, New York has been inviting residents, designers and tinkerers to help dream up what the phone booth might become if it could be more than just a phone. What if it were also a WiFi hotspot? A bike rack? An electric car charging station? An emergency alert system?

In the late 1990s, New York's streets had about 35,000 payphones. Now that number is closer to 12,000. If these objects served so many of the city's other needs as well (while still enabling the occasional phone call), it's easy to envision the payphone – although we likely won't call it that – becoming ubiquitous again. Below are some of the many images and ideas from the competition that didn't make it into the magazine. New York is planning to incorporate some of these concepts into the request for proposals for the next generation of phones. But maybe you have one more idea that isn't covered here?

See the rest of this article at TheAtlanticCities.com.

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Mapping the Car Crash Near Misses That No One Ever Sees

Emily Badger, CityLab — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:23:34 -0400

Every day in New York City, car crashes nearly happen. Cabs barely avoid clipping pedestrians. Cars on poorly signed roads all but careen into each other. A biker, somewhere, veers onto a sidewalk and out of the way of a speeding truck.

These almost-events are even more ubiquitous than actual accidents, and in the aggregate they're meaningful signs of an unsafe street. But in the eyes of city officials and police reports, such close calls are more or less invisible.

"The near-miss and minor crash data just doesn’t exist," says Jennifer So Godzeno, the associate director for community research at the New York advocacy group Transportation Alternatives. "There is no way to capture it because it is, by nature, unofficial."

Such data, though, might have real value in helping to head off future more costly crashes.

"I’ve heard from so many citizens that ‘I see people almost get hit here all the time, and how come we have to wait until somebody gets killed in order to fix it?’" Godzeno says. Actual crash data, though, is the only metric officials have to prioritize where to target infrastructure improvements or stricter traffic enforcement.

So how do you document events significant for the fact that they almost happened? Transportation Alternatives recently rolled out a web platform, CRASH stories NYC, that invites New Yorkers to map their run-ins and near-misses.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

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Aggregating Cell Phone Data in Search of the 'Pulse of the Planet'

Emily Badger, CityLab — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:23:50 -0400

Transportation researchers have long suspected it to be true that you’ll only spend so much time commuting. You have a travel-time budget in your head – for most of us, it’s about an hour a day – and you’ll only commute as far as you can get in that time, given your mode of travel. Maybe you can train across town and back in an hour, or drive 20 miles in from the suburbs and home again in that time, or walk a mile-and-a-half to the office and back. The distances may vary, thanks to technology, but the "time budget" remains roughly the same. This thesis – called Marchetti's Constant – theoretically holds true going all the way back to the cave man who had to drag his knuckles with him.

"If technology allows you to go farther away, to go faster, you will go farther away," says Carlo Ratti, the director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT. "But the budget in terms of time is always the same. It was the same 2,000 years ago, it is the same today."

But how would you prove that some patterns of human mobility are universal across location, or culture, or even time period? Traditional measures for tracking commuter behavior certainly aren't constant across the world. Researchers now have some novel tools for studying commuting patterns, some of the most interesting of which revolve around cell phone data. But it's usually only possible to look at communications traffic from a single city, or one country, based on a data-sharing arrangement with a single telecom carrier.

Read more at The Atlantic Cities.

(Image via Oleksiy Mark/Shutterstock.com)

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