New study on diabetes risk and neighborhood walkability

The reading for this week's GIS class on vector analysis discussed network buffer measures of neighborhood walkability, and the class came up with numerous components of the built and social environment that the authors didn't include in their land-use based walkability measure that also likely influence people's walking behaviors (e.g. destinations to walk to, crime/safety, trees and greenness, sidewealk quality and ramps, traffic, disincentives from parking costs, etc.). It was a great discussion! I just came acrosos this write-up about a recent article in the journal Diabetes Care that finds a strong relationship between neighborhood walkability and diabetes risk, especially for low-income immigrants. The UC Library doesn't have online access to the most recent one month of articles for this journal, so I haven't been able to look at the full methodolgy for their walkabilty measure. But, I wanted to note it here and will follow-up later with details. Or, if anyone finds access to the full article, please let me know!

Cool cartography--Risk mapping at a broad view

I came across this short blurb by  on some tricks for catchy large-scale maps. The bullet-points include:

• Interesting Topic.  The subjects of these maps inherently represent risk, which we want to understand.
• Unexpected Scope.  A forest view of something that’s usually seen at the tree-level offers satisfying perspective.
• Big and Clear.  A single dataset is conceptually simple, and when large enough, it provides its own context-promoting conversation in the wild.
• Sharable.  A static image is portable and paste-able, easily nestling into articles, blogs, tweets, and PowerPoints.
• Attractive.  The currency of design buys a second or third look.

There is often a push to make large datasets available through interactive webGIS portals, but I think this makes a good case that there is still also a role for skilled cartography to present information in captivating ways. 

Below is an example of one of the author's (John Nelson) maps, and more can be found here. 

Travel time and housing prices map

Our Bay Area regional planning agencies have just released a new interactive map that lets you visualize your housing options given your employment location, income, and desired commute time and mode. It's all part of the regional planning efforts that are happening statewide as a result of SB 375, which requires the integration of housing and land use planning to encourage people to drive less.

The press release gives more details: "If you're in the market to buy a home in the Bay Area, wouldn't it be nice to know how long it would take to commute from neighborhoods in your price range to your work place? Well, now you can, thanks to a new mapping tool on OneBayArea.org.

The interactive map shows you approximately how far you can get from any address within the nine-county region by car, public transit, bike, or on foot, at different times of the day. You can customize your view by the travel time between areas, and the median price of homes in each area."

walkscore & transitscore maps & methodologies

Following up on our lab discussion today about connectivity, here are the links for walkscore.com and the new transitscore site. Also, there is a walkscore wiki that details how the scores were calculated and rendered.

corridor analysis tools

Alan shared a link with me for Corridor Design. It includes downloads for various GIS Tools, overviews of corridor concepts, and reports on linkage designs. The stated goal is "to transfer everything we've learned about designing wildlife corridors to the general public to facilitate better conservation, science, and dialogue."  Check out the site's blog for info on their latest projects.

National Map of Food Deserts

I live in a Low Access Area! According to a new food desert webGIS, my neighobrhood around 58th & Shattuck doesn't have access to a full-service grocery store, has low car ownership, and low median household income. I have never considered my self to live in a food dessert because I go to Berkeley Bowl at least once a week on my bike ride home from campus, but according to these combined metrics I am more underserved by full-service food stores than most other neighborhoods. I think this is a really neat tool to start a broader conversation about how to measure and evaluate food access and what it means for individual and community health.

As Grist writes...."The point of the project isn't just to map food deserts, it's to help TRF and other investors, as well as policymakers, calculate how much money is "leaking" from an area (being spent elsewhere), so as to evaluate whether a loan for a new supermarket is a good idea -- financially, presumably. As Stephanie covered in her piece, food-justice advocates disagree on whether small, independently owned but somewhat limited food stores are the answer, or chain stores such as a Safeway or Walmart.

Alas, the tool does not include data for health care expenditures or obesity rates in these areas, which would be interesting comparisons to see."

GIS article database

I just came across a helpful bibliography of GIS literature created and maintained by ESRI. It indexes journals, conference proceedings, books, and reports fro the origins of GIS to the present. There are currently 78,400 entries. You can't download all articles directly from the site, but the keyword search is really helpful to get a list of articles on a particular topic that would be good to look into.

Democratizing Data

The Federal CIO Coucil has just launched Data.gov, a site that brings all federal data into one searchable place. You can directly download xml, csv, kml/kmz, and shp files and find links to tools for finding other data.

Here are some more details from the White House press release:

"Created as part of the President's commitment to open government and democratizing information, Data.gov will open up the workings of government by making economic, healthcare, environmental, and other government information available on a single website, allowing the public to access raw data and transform it in innovative ways.

Such data are currently fragmented across multiple sites and formats—making them hard to use and even harder to access in the first place. Data.gov will change this, by creating a one-stop shop for free access to data generated across all federal agencies. The Data.gov catalog will allow the American people to find, use, and repackage data held and generated by the government, which we hope will result in citizen feedback and new ideas.

Data.gov will also help government agencies—so that taxpayer dollars get spent more wisely and efficiently. Through live data feeds, agencies will have the ability to easily access data both internally and externally from other agencies, which will allow them to maintain higher levels of performance. In the months and years ahead, our goal is to continuously improve and update Data.gov with a wide variety of available datasets and easy-to-use tools based on public feedback and as we modernize legacy systems over time.

Democratizing government data will help change how government operates—and give citizens the ability to participate in making government services more effective, accessible, and transparent."

Tracking people and crime

This article describes how the LAPD online crime map mistakenly geocoded 1,380 crimes to a spot directly in front of the LA Times Office because it was the default location for unmatched geocodes. This mistake then lead to the popular site EveryBlock to rank that ZIP code as one of the most dangerous in the city. Lesson learned: don't believe every dot on a map is the absolute truth.

Another interesting article describes how analysis of an FBI database links long-haul truckers to serial killings. This shows that local data linked together can change the scale of analysis to reveal a "mobile crime scene".

helpful new features from ESRI

here are some gems I learned about at CalGIS:

1. Go to ArcGIS Online Resources to quickly, easily, and freely add in terrific basemap data and high res imagery to any .mxd. If you are logged in you will have access to a lot more options.

2. Arc 9.3.1 (to be released any day now) will include a "layer packages" feature. So, if you want to send someone your file exactly as you are looking at it, you can right click on the layer and select "save as layer package", and it will zip the .shp + .lyr into a .lpk to share more easily. Also, there will be free access to Microsoft Virtual Earth within your Arc desktop.