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MIT's "Hot Or Not" Site For Neighborhoods Could Help Shape Cities
Daniel_Stuckey writes "When you walk around a city, there are things you can just sense, like if you've wandered into a dodgy neighborhood, or where the new happening spot is. Intuitively, we know that a city's more intangible characteristics, like class or uniqueness, play a big role in what it’s like to live there, but until now there was no way to actually quantify that idea.
Researchers from MIT Media Lab may have found a way to measure this 'aesthetic capital' of cities, with their website Place Pulse, a tool to crowdsource people's perception of cities by judging digital snapshots—a sort of 'hot or not' for urban neighborhoods.
Some 4,000 geotagged Google Streetview images and 8,000 participants later, the team found that by using digital images and crowdsourced feedback, they can accurately quantify the diverse vibes within a city (pdf), which in turn can help us better understand issues like inequality and safety."
I question anything that lists Washington DC as the safest place.
You would think MIT of all places would be able to put together a website capable of withstanding real traffic.
I just judge a neighborhood by the number of black and hispanic people in it.
And so do you. But YOU won't say it.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Statisically-speaking they often are. We can't let facts get in the way of our PC beliefs, right?
I see this turning into a lawsuit when real estate prices start to be affected by it.
That assumes that the "vibe" of a location correlates well with income, which I would consider a highly suspect assumption - we already know that income does not correlate with happiness, honesty, etc. much beyond the point where people can reliably keep a roof over their heads and food in their belly - i.e. very little within the US.
One example is artist communities - they have a tendency to spring up semi-organically in low-rent areas (the starving artist stereotype having a solid grounding in reality) and transform them into vibrant communities. I've heard firsthand stories of the transformation of Cannery Row in Monterrey - started out with a bunch of hippies moving into the largely abandoned fish-canning district because the rents were cheap, and once you had a bunch of creative, good natured people in one place things just sort of took off. Of course eventually people with money took notice of the new atmosphere and moved in, driving prices up, but for quite a while it was a cheap and desirable place to live, provided you didn't mind the smell of cannabis smoke.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
but for quite a while it was a cheap and desirable place to live
Cheap and Desirable are like water and oil. You can mix them for a while, but over time they separate.
Still the project has merit, as long as there were some method of continued crowed sourced voting, because
things change over time, but street-view images don't change that often.
There should be an app for this.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
When we first moved to Seattle and were house hunting my uncle gave me a really good piece of advice. He said, "Get a copy of 'The Stranger' (a local alternative lifestyle newspaper) and figure out where all the gays are moving to. It will be cheap, and as soon as they start renovating the neighborhood prices will go through the roof." Rosa fell in love with a house somewhere else, but those neighborhoods have quintupled in value.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You must be a joy in the Caribbean.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I do too. If the neighborhood is all-white, I don't want to live there. I am a Caucasian. I decided early on that I want a more diverse area for raising my kids. It has worked out very well. E pluribus unum.
I used to say that too, but then it took a few break ins before I realized you can't always tell the difference between "diversity" and "ghetto" until you live there. Multa adversus paucos.
My black neighbor drives a Mercedes, has a swimming pool, and a nicer lawn than I do.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
You're an idiot who is falling for the rich man's war against the poor's tactics. Racism (and you and the folks who modded you up are racists) is a tool to get you and your fellow idiots who are black and hispanic to fight each other so you won't realize that your poverty comes not from the blacks and hispanics "stealing your jobs" but in reality, it's the 1%ers who are keeping you, the black, and the hispanic down.
You do realise that there are more whites on food stamps than blacks, do you not?
If you see "ghetto culture"; that is, young, thuggish looking young men of any race, you see a bad neighborhood. If you see forty year olds you're seeing a good neighborhood. Race has nothing to do with it, age and poverty do. Most poor young men will be thugs no matter what their race.
My black neighbor drives a Mercedes, has a swimming pool, and a nicer lawn than I do.
Does he live in a black neighborhood?
I just judge a neighborhood by the number of black and hispanic people in it.
And so do you. But YOU won't say it.
No, I judge by the following, based on the images I saw and my previous thoughts:
If you've read this far, you can probably tell that all of these point to how affluent/rich the area is, but as a non-rich person myself, I find over-opulence off-putting and prefer the more upper-middle-class look. Amazingly, it would be pretty simple to codify the above in a hueristic and probably get it 80-90% accurate in a comparison test (given adequate sampling factor). Anyone got other hueristics they were using in the pulse website?
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