Uncommon Data

The housing crisis and credit collapse that together comprised the Great Recession disproportionately affected minorities in America in at least two specific ways. As recent research from Rice University and Cornell University has demonstrated, black households were widely targeted by predatory lenders. Building on a major joint report from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Treasury Department, the researchers found that more than half of home-refinance loans for poorer African Americans were subprime, while black households were more than twice as likely as white households with comparable incomes to receive subprime loans.

The Snow is coming!  The Snow is coming!   If you are a driver in NYC that parks on the street, you have probably dug out your car more than a few times.  With snow storms of this magnitude, it’s no small feat. 

But there is a trick that I’ve picked up over the years.  Always park on the left side of the street, not the right.  You’ll be happy you did. 

Since I quantify everything, I am going to make a fake attempt to quantify why this is.  I looked Google Images on “NYC Snow Plow”.  Despite the prevalence of oneway streets in the city, of the first 18 images of snow plows, 17 of them push snow solely to the right.  Only one seems to be plowing down the middle.

That makes a whole lot of sense because on a two-way street, you don’t want to push the snow into the middle.  So do yourself a favor and park on the side of the street that the snow is being pushed away from.

Note that I wish I could quantify the snow plowing in NYC for real, but sadly our city’s snow plow tracking website PlowNYC does not provide underlying data.  I hope, in the spirit of Open Data, this will change soon. Until then, this is about the best I can do.  Be careful out there!

When San Francisco architect Chris Downey lost his sight to a non-cancerous brain tumor in 2008, he was back in the office within a month. Giving up his practice was not an option—he just had to figure out how to do it. “The idea of tactile graphics became significant in my ability to produce work,” Downey says. “Within short order, we were able to get a embossing printer and start doing tactile prints of drawings.”

Now, Downey uses tactile plans at his busy architectural consulting firm,Architecture for the Blind. He’s collaborating on the design of a new space for the LightHouse, consulting on accessibility issues for BART, and working on plans for the new Transbay Transit Center and platform designs for AC Transit’s rapid bus system.

Tactile plans presented a steep learning curve. “I had a lot graphic understanding from my training, but I had no touch,” he says. “I had very little development of my fingertips as a graphical input for reading drawings. I really had to focus.”

Hi,

you might find this interesting: we’ve recently released a project about the limited accessibility of public transport (subway + commuter trains) in New York, London and Hamburg. The results are maps with an interactive slider that let you explore how thinned out the transportation network get’s when you’re handicapped e.g.

here’s a mapgif-preview:

and here all the information about the project http://mappable.info/blog/2014/2/8/accessibility

——

Transit Maps says:

The depiction of physical accessibility on transit maps of is something I’ve touched on before — see this great 2007 map of the London Underground with all the inaccessible stations removed (Nov. 2011, 5 stars) — but this is a fantastic and intuitive way to show the difference between all stations and only the accessible ones.