Category Archives: Web Article Review

bricks and mortar Amazon

We all know that traditional retail is dying because Amazon can deliver anything to your front door. Now, in a strange irony, Amazon is opening some physical stores.

Last year, Amazon opened its first physical bookstore in the University Village shopping mall in Seattle. The store features thousands of books, a tiny sampling of those on Amazon’s website, most of them with customer ratings of four stars and above.

The books sell for the same price in the store as they do on Amazon’s site. Because book prices regularly change on the site, visitors to the store scan books using a mobile app to find out how much they cost.

Although the store is called Amazon Books, it prominently features a growing array of Amazon-made devices, including the Kindle tablet, the Fire TV set-top device and Echo, its home speaker and virtual assistant.

mosquito bites

Here’s some practical advice from NPR on how to avoid mosquito bites. DEET works, and has been more or less proven safe. So, somewhat surprisingly, does eucalyptus oil.

I am fairly careful about mosquitoes, and yet I have been bitten by them in Florida, Thailand, Singapore, Indonesia and less exotic places on the U.S. eastern seaboard. So far I haven’t caught West Nile, St. Louis, dengue, chikungunya, Japanese encephalitis, and had never even heard of Zika until last month although it is supposedly common in places I have been. Then again, I could have an asymptomatic infection with one or more of these, who knows. If you talk to enough people from tropical countries, the majority have had dengue at some point, usually with a full recovery. But it can cause a particularly cruel and grizzly death in a few unlucky cases.

None of this is to make light of the horrible complications we are seeing with Zika. It’s just that like anything, your best bet is to take reasonable precautions and try to be as rational about the likelihood and consequences of unfamiliar risks as a human can.

containing technologies

This post is about CRISPR and gene drive, which are interesting in their own right. What I am going to quote is the author’s ideas on how to develop a promising but potentially dangerous technology responsibly:

For starters, public notification and broadly inclusive discussions should always precede and inform development of gene drive interventions in the lab. A clear description of the potential impact of an experiment – as my colleagues and I have provided for the technology as a whole – must be followed by transparency throughout the development process. This community-guided approach to research provides opportunities to identify and address potential problems and concerns during development. If a perceived problem cannot be adequately addressed, researchers should be prepared to terminate the project…

Another feature of a responsible approach would be a commitment by scientists to evaluate each proposed gene drive intervention – say, immunizing mice so that they cannot transmit Lyme disease to ticks – individually, rather than making a blanket decision on the technology as a whole. After all, the benefits and risks of each intervention would be entirely different.

A final safeguard against the irresponsible development of gene drive technology is to ensure that early interventions are developed exclusively by governments and nonprofit organizations. Given the potential of financial incentives to skew the design and results of safety tests, keeping the profit motive out of the development and decision-making processes will encourage balanced assessments.

dots moving around on a map

This is just dots moving around on a map, but I find these dots very engaging in helping me understand urban planning concepts and results of a simulation.

I found this on R bloggers, which talks about how the simulation and map were created.

Data Scientist Todd Schneider has followed-up on his tour-de-force analysis of Taxi Rides in NYC with a similar analysis of the Citi Bike data. Check out the wonderful animation of bike rides on September 16 below. While the Citi Bike data doesn’t include actual trajectories (just the pick-up and drop-off locations), Todd has “interpolated” these points using Google Maps biking directions. Though these may not match actual routes (and gives extra weight to roads with bike lanes), it’s nonetheless an elegant visualization of bike commuter patterns in the city.

El Nino and the blizzard of ’16

We kept hearing that it was the warmest winter ever, and then the blizzard came along and disproved it, right? Not exactly, according to NPR:

Scientists have been doing some forensic work to figure out what set this megastorm in motion. And they think they’ve found a trail that starts with the weather pattern called El Niño…

“A lot of climate change is actually going into the oceans,” he says.

He means the oceans are absorbing a lot of the extra heat from the atmosphere. That can alter their circulation, and where and when they release that heat back into the atmosphere.

“It’s changing the behavior of the oceans in a way that affects weather patterns around the globe,” Mann says.

fixing sidewalks at point of sale

You can require homeowners (actually home sellers) to fix sidewalks when they sell their property (“point of sale”). Los Angeles does this, which Donald Shoup says is a great idea. Philadelphia has a similar legal framework where the homeowner technically owns and is responsible for the sidewalk, but does not require point of sale repairs. The city can write you a ticket for a broken sidewalk if they want to, just like any other code violation, but that is not too often done because the public outcry would be pretty severe. Also, it’s the transportation agency that is supposed to do this and not the code enforcement agency, so may not fit clearly within their mission and priorities. One more interesting thing the article mentions is that if sidewalks were made more clearly a code violation, this would show up in real estate records, and there would then be some pressure from mortgage and insurance companies to fix them.

Another option, of course, would be for the city to take over the sidewalk, along with street trees and infrastructure up to the house line. This could be part of a grand vision for how to implement 21st century urban infrastructure – complete streets, better materials than tired old concrete and asphalt, urban forests, public spaces, modernized water, sewer, gas, electric, and communications infrastructure. I for one would be indifferent to paying slightly higher taxes rather than being ticketed for code violations for I have very little control over, and this would also be more equitable. But it’s easier for the politicians to pin in on the private owner and say it has “zero cost”.

more things you don’t want to be true

Actually I’m not sure if I want this to be true or not, but

John Kasich has reasonable views on immigration.

Why wouldn’t I want this to be true? I’m not sure. I suppose because I don’t want to like any conservative governor after the awful one we just survived in Pennsylvania. In four short years he destroyed public education across the state, especially poorer urban areas, allowed gas companies to gut the environment, and did nothing to fix our state’s pension woes or entrenched poverty (either of which gas royalties could have at least made a dent in when energy prices were so high, but it’s a little late now.) Trading natural capital for financial capital, and restoring fiscal responsibility, are things a true conservative would do. About all he gave us was an entertaining pornography scandal. But I digress – if Kasich has a reasonable view on one issue, you have to admit it’s at least possible he might have reasonable views on other issues too. And I’m about ready to settle for reasonable with this crop of candidates.