Archive for May, 2010

You see, Arizona really is concerned about privacy issues.

Citing the Constitution, that’s a nice touch — how much you wanna bet the biggest opponents of red light cameras are the biggest supporters of Arizona’s unconstitutional immigration law?

I wasn’t able to get up to the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference this year (though I wanted to, particularly as there were guys from Chelsea and Manchester United there), but as Traffic had both the Braess Paradox and Tim Roughgarden’s book The Price of Anarchy as touchstones, I was intrigued by a presentation from Brian Skinner, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota, which draws some parallels between network (in)efficiencies in roads and the running of successful basketball plays. The video above gives a short description but there’s more on offer at the paper (behind a pay wall):

Optimizing the performance of a basketball offense may be viewed as a network problem, wherein each play represents a “pathway” through which the ball and players may move from origin (the in-bounds pass) to goal (the basket). Effective field goal percentages from the resulting shot attempts can be used to characterize the efficiency of each pathway. Inspired by recent discussions of the “price of anarchy” in traffic networks, this paper makes a formal analogy between a basketball offense and a simplified traffic network. The analysis suggests that there may be a significant difference between taking the highest-percentage shot each time down the court and playing the most efficient possible game. There may also be an analogue of Braess’s Paradox in basketball, such that removing a key player from a team can result in the improvement of the team’s offensive efficiency.

(horn honk to The Transportationist)

Random fact of the day, via the WSJ:

State Farm, the nation’s largest insurance company, says that currently its auto coverage premiums for teenage boys are about 40% higher than for girls. In 1985, that gap was about 61%, says Vicki Harper, a spokeswoman for State Farm, which has more than 42 million auto policies. Most girls still get a break on premiums, she says, but “their premium rates reflect there isn’t as much of a difference as the rate for a teenage boy.”

When I first glanced at the headline, “GPD tracks percent of cars yielding to pedestrians,” I thought, in my jet-lagged haze, wow, here’s a study comparing GDP rates to pedestrian yielding, and I wondered, what’s the correlation — higher GDP means more driving, more exuberant driving, less yielding to pedestrians? A new kind of Smeed curve?

But it’s actually the Gainesville Police Department that’s been trying to make things better for those on foot — and, say it again, everyone’s a pedestrian, even if just leaving one’s car — and I was particularly intrigued by the updated feedback signs (pictured above).

Needless to say, 52% is pretty pathetic.

Photo by Tom Vanderbilt

I’m in Shanghai at the moment, hence the gap in communication. Yesterday I trekked out to the World Expo (the typically anodyne theme: “Better City, Better Life”), a frenzied display of national industry, easy-to-digest cultural narratives, and pinpoint logistics (all those teams of marching soldiers, all those Disney style queue management systems). I began with the choreographed uplift of the USA and finished, reeling from the sun, with an earnest summation, from some rump sub-deputy minister, of all that Turkmenistan, that curious Caspian outpost rich in natural resources and the government corruption that goes along with it, had to offer (in short, architecturally decadent monuments, nice rugs, and pipelines — miles of pipelines; and now, Air Turkmenistan).

Where most countries went with grand, overarching messages of prowess, benevolence, and inclusivity, the day’s most rewarding experience had to go to the Danish pavilion, designed by Bjarke Ingels (who’ve interviewed several times in the past). Rather than overwhelm with several dozen messages, the approach at the Danish pavilion was simple: A white circular building, with perforated brise soleil style apertures, housing a white corkscrew ramp, rising from a pool containing Copenhagen’s famous Little Mermaid, up which one could walk — or, as pictured above, cycle (and that’s me, rather baking in the Shanghai sun) — along the way picking up a few discrete messages comparing Denmark and China across various indices. The whole way up, meanwhile, a long curving bench ran along the edge of the bike path, so people could sit, drink a Carlsberg, and watch the bike and pedestrian traffic go by, much like in Copenhagen itself (and I know Mikael from Copenhagenize will object to the helmets accompanying the bikes, but they were very nice helmets). It was charmingly low-key (yet somehow dramatic at the same time) and a more purely enjoyable experience than the multimedia fireworks going on elsewhere. I was wishing I could take the bike with me when I left — the Oman pavilion, so close on the map, was endlessly far away.