Tag: software

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Urban

The Lancet Global Health Series on Urban Design, Transport, and Health

After many years of hard work, our series of articles on urban design, transport, and health has been published by The Lancet Global Health.

The Lancet Global Health infographic on benchmarking healthy sustainable citiesIn our first paper, we analyzed urban policies and calculated built environment indicators for 25 cities across 6 continents to assess walkability and accessibility. Our policy analysis found policies inconsistent with public health evidence, rhetoric endorsing health and sustainability but few measurable policy targets, and substantial implementation gaps.

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Categories
Data

OSMnx v1.2 Released

OSMnx v1.2.0 has been released. It includes several new features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements. I encourage you to upgrade and take advantage of everything new. For more information, check out the OSMnx documentation and usage examples for demonstrations of all you can do.

Categories
Data

OSMnx v1.1 Released

OSMnx v1.1.0 has been released. It includes several new features, bug fixes, and performance enhancements. I encourage you to upgrade and take advantage of everything new. I’ll summarize some of the key improvements in this post.

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Categories
Data

OSMnx 1.0 Is Here

Happy new year! After five years of development and over 2,000 code commits from dozens of contributors, OSMnx v1.0 has officially been released. This has been a long labor of love and I’m thrilled to see it reach this milestone.

Much has changed in recent months with new features added and a few things deprecated. Most of this development occurred in a major overhaul over the summer, which I covered at the time in three previous posts. Among these dozens of enhancements were major speed and efficiency improvements throughout the package, better visualization, a new geometries module for retrieving any geospatial objects from OSM, topological intersection consolidation, and much more. I encourage you to read those posts to familiarize yourself with what’s new.

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Categories
Academia

Geospatial Tool Building

My new article “The Right Tools for the Job: The Case for Spatial Science Tool-Building” has been published in Transactions in GIS (free PDF). I originally presented this paper as the 8th annual Transactions in GIS plenary address at the AAG annual meeting last year. I argue that tool-building is an essential but poorly incentivized component of academic geography and social science more broadly. To conduct better science, we need to build better tools. Better tools and data models, spearheaded by academics, can help infuse theory into our field’s quantitative work where it is too often lacking. But if we want better tools, we have to build them. It is not ESRI’s job to satisfy all the theoretical needs of the spatial sciences.

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Categories
Data

OSMnx Summer Wrap-Up

OSMnx underwent a major overhaul this summer, with the development of several new features, improvements, and optimizations. This project concluded yesterday with the release of v0.16.0.

This post briefly summarizes what’s changed since the previous mid-summer updates. It covers the new k shortest paths solver, auto-selecting the first polygon when geocoding, better conversion of graph types, and the new geometries module that lets you flexibly download any OSM geospatial objects as a geopandas GeoDataFrame.

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Categories
Tech

Outlook to Google Calendar Sync

Ah, the travails of academia. Like many universities, USC uses Microsoft Outlook as its email and calendar provider. This presents some integration challenges for those of us, like me, who use Google Calendar everywhere else in life. It’s effectively impossible to sync an Outlook Calendar with a Google Calendar, so I had to juggle between both when trying to schedule anything. Chaos ensues.

So, I created a script to perform an ongoing one-way sync from my USC Microsoft Office 365 Outlook calendar to my personal Google calendar, handling new, updated, and deleted events. I had to develop my own solution because Microsoft/Google inexplicably can’t get their own acts together. For example, you can publish your Outlook calendar’s ICS URL and add it to Google, but it only syncs roughly once per day so you miss any new appointments in the meantime. Microsoft Flow used to work (clumsily) for syncing, but even their official recipes are now broken. So I had to roll my own.

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