Lexicon

I was killing some time on Facebook today and came across a feature that was able to capture and hold my attention enough to warrant a post. It is called Lexicon and it allows you to query words from posts made to people's walls. The results are plotted along a time line and you can perform searches on multiple words to compare trends.

With Lexicon we, the users of these mass social networking (read preference collection) sites, have the ability to mine some of the data we provide. Facebook, even give the data a first-cut cleaning to correct for common mispellings (sp.) and problems with apostrophes. Notwithstanding the absence of a scale on the y-axis, the conclusions we draw from the data are not always incredibly interesting. Take, for example, the graph below showing the appearance of each candidate's name on Facebook walls. You can add the word 'delegates' to your search and watch the peaks line up. You can pick out Super Tuesday (Feb 5) easily. More than that, you can see that Obama is getting a lot more free press out there in the Facebook-a-sphere.


I think this could be useful to get a rough idea about some associations we suspect to exist. Unfortunately the wall is not the best place to collect data as only certain topics are discussed and the makeup of the users is likely to screw up any generalizablity, and sometimes the scale of the two things you are comparing makes it difficult to find what you might be looking for (see 'cold' vs. 'bike'). Nonetheless it is fun to see you suspicions confirmed (no one mentions 'smog' in Dec or Jan)and to think a bit about what people are talking about. Remember that you will not be able to infer causation from anything you find here so be humble with what you discover. Here are a few more of my favorites.

Elevate

Over the weekend I had some time to sit down with some reading materials that I have not had time for recently.
This article was one that I particularly enjoyed and find myself bringing up to people over and over.

Like many of articles in the New Yorker it concerns a topic of only superficial interest (elevators) but covers it with penetrating detail. The article is built around an anecdote about a man who experienced one of the most dreadful thoughts many of us have about elevators: being stuck in one. A video of the ordeal is included below.


More than impressing me with this rare account, the article made me think of elevators as a legitimate form of transportation - enabling societies and furthering 'progress' for the last 150 years.

EWE 2008

In the middle of another late frost advisory I thought it was about high time to finally post something of the tornado we had about a month ago. It ran through downtown and then hit Cabbagetown, but little known to everyone is that it continued south and east into East Atlanta. We haven't attracted as much attention from the press and the volunteer corps but quite a few houses were hit hard over here.

Luckily we were about one block south of the real damage. We only lost a 'small' cedar in the front between our house and the neighbor. Several houses had damage from debris, if not a whole tree, hitting them.

We were out of town for a wedding but got plenty of calls and texts from family to check on us, from the neighbor about the tree, from Jorge about his first tornado and
from Mikey about the NCAA basketball in the Georgia Dome.

We expect that this type of event is a rarity and hope not to see our house crushed by the massive trees that surround it.

more pictures from Matt

ALR 2008

I have been away for awhile and as you may have guessed that means a lot has been going on. I have been accepted to the planning PhD program at Georgia Tech and have been awarded a three year assistantship to work on climate change and urban planning. I am still working out the details of it all but I will keep you informed.

This week I was in Washington DC presenting a poster on my thesis work at the Active Living Research Conference. Friday's schedule featured some activity for the participants in the form of walking tours, group runs and even yoga. I figured that I should disseminate some of the information I was exposed to at the conference. The theme related to linking research and policy and we heard from Oregon Rep Earl Blumenauer. He's a bike fanatic and you can see him on The Colbert Report below. Also are some of the best links I hear about.



Travelsmart a site from the Australian Government with information to help citizens make smarter travel choices. Also, the old guy at the top looks like he has the same helmet as me.

Perils for PedestriansThe guy who ran this was also at the conference. It looks like he puts out a show about the perils for pedestrians on some public tv station.

I first heard about Smart Growth America'sGrowing Cooler Report at APHA in November. It came up again in a talk from DC's director of planning on Friday morning. It relates directly to the type of questions I'll be asking about how climate change affects urban areas and vice versa.

The Participatory Photo Mapping Project at the University of Wisconsin was one of the coolest presentations I saw while I was at the conference. It combines photovoice with GPS and GIS to map the issues that residents identify themselves. Reminded me a bit of the work we started in Bogotá this summer and gave me some new ideas.

There was a lot of talk and presenting at the conference that related to schools and children. At times it seemed that we were always talking about tackling childhood obesity but not much about changing our own habits. CDC's SHPPS website has the baseline data to introduce you to this issue and to point out some of the weaker spots in the policy that guide school diets and curriculum. Some of the best slogans to come out of these discussions were
"you can't spell GPA without PA" and
"No child left inside"

There were plenty more informative speakers and tons of things I guess I could point you to but I hope that this gets you thinking and maybe even more active.