Trash | Track

Trash | Track from MIT's Senseable City Lab from: http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/

On the eve of the start of our annual high consumption season (and subsequent high waste), this video from Senseable City Lab at MIT shows how trash travels within the United States.  Five hundred people in Seattle put GPS tracking devices in 3,000 pieces of trash, and the trash was tracked over time to see where it all ended up, and how long it took to get there.  Watch the YouTube video and also check out the visualization on the Senseable City Lab website.  Thanks, Tom Paino, for pointing out the link to me.  I also love that the video starts out with a quote from one of my all-time favorite authors/books, Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities: 

“Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse.

Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands,

and the street cleaners have to fall farther back.

The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher,

become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fvTZc5hWBNY

How the project works. from: http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/how-it-works.php?id=3

 More about the project: http://senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack/

By the way, this visualization project won an award in the NSF (National Science Foundation) annual competition – International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.  Check out some of the other winners at: http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/winners_2010.jsp  

The Connected States of America

Phone Call Cartography 

THE M.I.T. SENSEable City Lab has once again put together some beautiful spatial data visualizations – this time it is a project about seeing how Americans interconnect through mobile phones. 

“If you analyze aggregated cellphone traffic, interesting patterns emerge.  Cities become connective hubs as people move to them from nearby counties and from far across the country. As a result, many calls originate and end in cities, connecting urban citizens to their families back home.  At the same time, communities emerge that have little to do with geographic boundaries.  While some follow state lines, others split states in half or combine them…. These patterns show that proximity is only one of many factors — both cultural and economic — that bring people together.”  From the New York Times article 7/3/11 at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/sunday-review/03phone-map.html

Watch the video they have put together on the research (1 Minute long)

  

This is the link to an interactive map that allows you to plug in your own location and see the mobile phone traffic. 

http://senseable.mit.edu/csa/interact.html

  

Check out their website for other projects they are working on.  There is a particularly nice project on Singapore, complete with some very cool data visualizations about the city’s local transportation network, urban heat island, the effects of being the “hub of the world,” the world’s largest trans-shipment container port and one of the busiest airports in the world, among other topics. Singapore is such a unique place, being one of the world's last city-sates.  

 Isochronic Singapore

“As vehicular traffic opens up and jams in the course of the day, the time we need to move in Singapore shrinks and expands. How long will it take you to go from home to any other destination? Find out with this isochronic map, where the deformations are proportional to travel time - and reveals the changes in the course of a weekend/week day.”  From M.I.T. SENSEable City Lab website

Check out the video and other visualizations at:

http://senseable.mit.edu/livesingapore/visualizations.html