Today I am going to talk about 3 things that recently happened and/or that are on my mind. Sidewalk Labs pulled out of Toronto. I think this is sad. A lot of people have said that they’re surprised, but not surprised. The official reason is… Read More
The MIT Senseable City Lab recently asked: How does urban morphology affect the solar potential of cities? If you assume that transparent photovoltaic cells are on the way and that building facades are soon going to become a place where we generate solar energy, then… Read More
Koto Design, which I have written about before on the blog, has just announced both a partnership with Plant Prefab and two new home designs. Koto is based in the UK and is a designer of small and energy neutral homes and cabins. Plant Prefab… Read More
There’s a lot of speculation (that’s all you can really do) about what our world is going to look like on the other side of this pandemic. I think it’s easy to overreach at a time like this and prognosticate dramatic change — such as… Read More
The following video was published last week showing the “secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break.” Said differently, the company used anonymized mobile phone data to see where spring breakers went after they left… Read More
I just finished watching this TED talk with Bill Gates. For those of you who are up on their TED talks, this is not the one from five years ago where Bill predicted a pandemic and told us all that we were nowhere near ready.… Read More
Smartphone user data is hugely valuable at a time like this. Which is why governments all over the world from Israel to South Korea are using aggregated telecom data to try and track how their citizens are moving during this pandemic. Some are calling this… Read More
I have been debating whether I should continue writing about what is already on all of our minds, or if I should focus my attention on positivity and humor. The latter is hugely important at a time like this, which is why I have been… Read More
The Financial Times published the following chart last night. It shows the cumulative number of COVID-19 cases around the world, across the number of days since the 100th case in that particular country. The message here is that most western countries appear to be on… Read More
This recent paper by Miyuki Hino (University of North Carolina) and Marshall Burke (Stanford) makes the case that US homes situated within floodplains are currently overvalued by a total of $34 billion. And that’s because the associated risks are not being properly accounted for in… Read More
