modelling & sci/tech
Advances in Population Synthesis, the journal article
I’ve finally published my M.A.Sc. thesis as a journal article, under the title Advances in Population Synthesis: fitting many attributes per agent and fitting to household and person margins simultaneously. This article is the preferred citation going forward; I think it tells the story best: A brief summary of the key contributions described in detail in [...]
Greater Toronto Area transit map
Many years ago, when Google first released Google Maps and revolutionized online mapping from the stagnant MapQuest era, I put together a few quick demos showing the Vancouver and Toronto transit maps. I’ve made a few updates over the years since then, but not much more. The Vancouver one is still quite popular – more [...]
Canadian Government Scraps Long-Form Census
An appalling decision from the Canadian federal government today, reported by the Globe & Mail here: “Tories scrap mandatory long-form census” The census is a vital data source for all sorts of transportation and land use planning. A voluntary census is nearly useless, since the sample will suffer from voluntary response bias. This will do [...]
Transportation Research Board template for LaTeX
Last summer, I submitted my first paper to the Transportation Research Board (TRB) conference (ultimately accepted, and presented in January 2009). They have recently started accepting papers in PDF form instead of requiring a Word file—and this meant that I could write my paper in LaTeX, my preferred document processing system. However, TRB doesn’t provide [...]
Thesis: Synthesizing Agents and Relationships for Land Use / Transportation Modelling
I finished my M.A.Sc. degree at the University of Toronto in August. In a past post, I discussed some of the coursework that made up the first year of the degree, but I haven’t really discussed the core research here before. I did win an award for some interim results presented at a local conference, [...]
Award Winning
At last weekend’s conference for the Canadian Regional Science Association, I presented a paper on Understanding Iterative Proportional Fitting Using Log-Linear Models. At day’s end, I received the Best Student Paper award (in a tie with Marianne Hatzopolous, a Ph.D. student in my lab). Sure, it’s just a small regional conference… but I’m still happy [...]
The Science Commons
I’ve been writing a short report on open source transportation software, and I ran across an interesting website along the way. Apparently, the Creative Commons people are trying to kickstart a new Science Commons for factual information. Unlike creative content, facts are not covered by copyright protection, but collections of facts (i.e., databases) fall into [...]
Scholastica
I haven’t actually written much about my school experience here yet, so I thought I’d at least put up a few sentences on my experience with transportation planning here at U of T. Last term was crazy busy, although in retrospect much of the burden was self-imposed. Since I was starting a new discipline, I [...]
Virtual City
The Globe and Mail had a story today about a very cool website for techie urbanists like me: Virtual City. They’ve digitized streetscapes for a ton of Toronto and Montreal cities, and you can use Google Maps to bring up photos of the street. Great idea, and reasonably well implemented. It clearly still needs a [...]
Narscissism
No, that’s not a typo. I spent the last three days at the North American Regional Science Conference (NARSC), here in Toronto at the Royal York hotel. It’s probably not the type of conference I would normally attend – the focus is more on regional economic models than transportation or land use – but it [...]
