August 16, 2018
Briefly
- From the Guardian: Mapping the world’s cities where you can live comfortably without heating or air conditioning reveals how few boast such ideal climates. Among the cities that apparently don’t need heating or AC are Auckland and Melbourne. Not entirely convincing.
- From the Herald: Scientists accidentally discover pill which could stop weight gain. What they actually discovered was a way to genetically engineer mice not to gain weight. There’s a drug used to treat glaucoma that affects the same biochemical mechanism that the genetic engineering did — but it’s used as eyedrops to treat glaucoma, so that’s not great evidence it would be safe and effective as a pill.
- Peter Ellis has been analysing petrol-price data after the Auckland tax was imposed: “after the spike caused by the tax, fuel prices in Auckland and in the rest of the country are converging somewhat (although much less than the full cost of the tax), and plausibly this is because of companies’ price adjustments down in Auckland and up elsewhere to spread the cost of the tax over a broader base.”
- I’ve written a program to produce a map of Wellington-area buses showing how many are late. It’s not quite real-time; it shows roughly the past hour. The map is here (you can click on the markers); the (more-technical) blog post explaining how it works is here.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
I wish you could do a map of the number of buses that go past a bus stop without picking up passengers because it is already full.
Since the change, my average is being able to get on the third bus that pulls up – and I work until 6:30 at night. Before the change I was almost always on the first – say once a month getting onto the second.
Paradoxically, it used to be the morning buses that were like that and now I almost always get on either the first or the second bus that turns up. I am in Karori.
Margaret
6 years ago
I don’t think that information is in the automated feed, sadly.
6 years ago
I was thinking about that too. Anecdotally, loading times are making the buses late. So it would be interesting to look at distance/time between updates and colouring the map based on speed through those points.
It’s not altogether clear because buses going fast are either not picking up or have noone to pick up. Although at peak time it’s more likely to be the former.
6 years ago
Way, super cool map.
If you’re looking for things for your students to refine.
a) It would be useful to have an arrow on the circles pointing in the direction of travel. It takes a lot of zooming-in to see which side of the road the buses are on – there are problems with buses getting late and then traveling in a convoy with an empty-ish bus/es behind so being able to see easily which way they are traveling would be useful.
b) Being able to look at one route only – the main routes 1 and 3 are really problematic so it would be good to see if it’s just one bus on the route (random chance) or systematic failure. Some of the other buses are feeder buses on short routes so aren’t often late – their main problem is leaving before the feeding bus turns up i.e. being in time is bad.
c) Buses sitting at terminals should probably be another color because they aren’t actually traveling so they can’t be early or late. Colouring them green gives the impression that things are better than they are.
d) when it refreshes, it refreshes at maximum zoom out, so if you are zoomed in then it’s a bit of a pain.
6 years ago
Great map, very cool. If it was a 5-minute job some of us would probably love to see a colour-blind friendly version of the map – at the moment with On-schedule and 10+ being green/red it is impossible for me to get the information from the map at a glance.
6 years ago
Ok, I think I’ve fixed this — at least, the dichromat package thinks the colours are now distinguishable.
6 years ago