Kornymunki

Yesterday, a group of masked terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda stormed into an upscale mall in Nairobi, Kenya and opened fire. At this point, 68 people have been killed and at least 175 have been injured—and the terrorists are still inside the Westgate Mall, holding 30 hostages. [ more › ]

Trying to fit new green space into Manhattan today can require extreme craftiness – say, by plopping grass and bushes on top of an elevated railroad spur. But it didn't used to be the case; during the early 1800s, much the island was still relatively undeveloped, a rugged warren of hills, grassland, and hissing snakes.

Manhattan's past as an arcadian wonderland is on view at the Smithsonian's website, which has borrowed an 1836 map from David Rumsey's collection and added a moveable oculus so viewers can compare the old geography with current satellite imagery. For people who want to see the document in one complete piece, though, I've pasted it below after a few zoomed-in historical highlights.

The Smithsonian asked Rumsey to talk a bit about this fantastic slice of cartography, which he calls one of his favorite maps (no small praise, given his collection has more than 43,000 pieces). Here's part of what he had to say about it:

Rumsey looks to the map’s delicate shading to tell much of its story, noting that the heavily shaded areas represent the most densely populated portions of the city at the time of the map’s drawing. "Pretty much everything past 14th St. is country," he explains, adding that much of what is considered Manhattan today wasn’t yet settled. In addition to the population shading, the hills of Manhattan are shown by hachures, an antiquated method of showing relief on drawn maps. "A lot of the history of Manhattan is the destruction of its hills," Rumsey says. "Basically that topography was obliterated, except for Central Park."

Indeed, Manhattan likely derived its name from a Native American term for ''island of many hills," at least according to The New York Times. Here's a cut from what is now Midtown and northward showing the difference in development between the lower 40s and today's Central Park-abutting neighborhoods:

What Times Square used to be (the north side of that "distribution reservoir" lines 42nd Street):

The wildly wooded Upper East Side. Imagine how happy modern-day dogs would be with this proliferation of timber:

Here's Mount Morris, nowadays more commonly called Marcus Garvey Park. According to James Riker's historical tome Harlem (City of New York): Its Origin and Early Annals, the Dutch knew it as Slang Berg, or Snake Hill, because of the "reptile tribes that infested its cleft rocks and underbrush":

The Bloomingdale Insane Asylum with its nice paths and orchards in today's Morningside Heights (near 117th Street at Amsterdam Avenue). The land it sat on until its demolishing in the late 1800s is now occupied by Columbia University:

And because it's never all about Manhattan, this is the relatively undeveloped Red Hook:

The full map from David Rumsey's collection:

Map courtesy of the David Rumsey Map Collection

The slightly warped facade in central London's Walkie Talkie is responsible for the burning rays. (Matt Dunham/AP)

Imagine parking your car downtown for an hour and coming back to find parts of it melted. That's what happened to London motorist Martin Lindsay, who told the BBC that the wing mirror and badge portions of his Jaguar had melted due to intense sun rays reflecting off the Walkie Talkie tower. The 37-story skyscraper, due for completion in 2014, has a mildly curved facade, which results in a convergence of sunlight and extremely strong beams.

The building's developers, Land Securities Group PLC and Canary Wharf Group PLC, were quick to respond, releasing a statement blaming the car-melting rays on a particular elevation of the sun in the sky that day. Based on preliminary computer modeling, they say the phenomenon happens two hours per day and expect it to go on for two or three more weeks.

The developers have already paid for the Jaguar's repairs and have blocked three parking spaces near the building. They're now working with the city of London to find solutions. According to the BBC, some possibilities may be applying a finish to the glass to reduce reflection or realigning the window frames slightly. 

Pedestrians walk in the reflection of sunlight from the Walkie Talkie tower (Stefan Werrmuth/Reuters) 

This burnt spot on the doormat of a shop across from the Walkie Talkie is believed to be caused by reflected rays from the building. (Matt Dunham/AP)

This isn’t the first time strong rays from extremely reflective building facades have caused harmful burns. When Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles heated a nearby sidewalk to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, the fix involved sanding down the especially reflective panels. When the “Vrada death ray” from Las Vegas's Vrada hotel scorched a pool guest’s hair and melted plastic bags, the building owner employed a low-tech fix by setting up umbrellas in the affected area. The architect responsible for the Vrada hotel, Rafael Viñoly, is, not coincidentally, the same architect behind London's Walkie Talkie tower.

But if computer models and sensor equipment can identify problematic panels after-the-fact, why can’t Viñoly and other designers fix the issue before construction?

According to William Braham, an architecture professor and director of the Environmental Building Design program at the University of Pennsylvania, the problem of preventing "death rays" from reflective buildings is a bit like the problem of medical diagnosis. "The limitations are largely time and resources, not the tools," he writes in an email.

So how can we prevent more Walkie Talkies and Vradas from being built in the future? Christoph Reinhart, an architecture professor at MIT, has been working on a paper on detecting glare from specular objects (i.e. PV panels, reflective glazings) based on computer simulations. Reinhart says the current guidelines for predicting glare are insufficient, citing limitations like the erroneous assumption that PV panels and glazings act as ideal mirrors, as well as the lack of readily available detailed data on the reflective properties of those surfaces. Reinhart hopes legislators and the design professions will adopt the more advanced modeling method explored in his forthcoming paper, which takes into account more accurate behaviors of reflective surfaces. 

It’s intimidating to move to a new city -- New York City, especially so.

Back in March, illustrator and t-shirt designer Nathan Pyle published a series of "tips and etiquette" GIFs to help tourists and newcomers navigate New York City. Now, he is back with a second set and even more wisdom to share.    

Pyle, who’s been living in New York City for about five years, writes via email that his inspiration for the series came from a love for airplane safety diagrams. But what about inspiration for individual drawings? Pyle writes, "Some mistakes I've made myself (breathing in the Garbage Scent Death Zone) and others I've seen friends make (mixing up Chrysler and Empire State buildings)." The usual process for creating these GIFs starts with a hand-drawn image, which is then touched up in Adobe Illustrator and finally animated in Adobe After Effects.

The first series of graphics had been so popular that Pyle got a book deal immediately. According to Pyle, most of the content in the book (now available for pre-order on Amazon) is still "super secret." However, he'll keep posting new content -- including graphics that didn't make the cut -- on the official Facebook page everyday until the book publishes in 2014. 

All images by Nathan Pyle and used with permission. 

It's no secret that San Francisco is a great city to walk around in, but given enough time everyone will choose a path that leaves your calves burning, your shins in pain, or your lungs pumping after accidentally tackling one of our steepest hills . Well, thanks to UC Berkeley student Sam Maurer those days are over. Sam has developed an interactive map that takes any guesswork out of your next chosen path. Simply input your location and the map indicates in red and blue what lies up and downhill from you. Steeper hills are indicated by a more intense color, and any change in location automatically adjusts the map. Sorry non-SF residents, this one only works in the city limits.
·Mapping Out SF's High Points [Mission Local]
·Hillmaprer San Francisco [Hillmapper]

This is the fifth in a series of posts examining the new geography of venture capital and high-tech start-ups.

As cities and metros around the country and the world try to bolster innovation, spur entrepreneurship, encourage venture capitalism, and generate more start-ups, an important question to ask is: What are the key characteristics of leading-edge start-up cities and their ecosystems?

In previous posts, I've mapped the geography of venture capital investment and start-up activity across U.S. metros and global cities. My task now is to break down the characteristics of metros that are associated with higher levels of venture capital investment and high-tech start-ups.

To get at this, my Martin Prosperity Institute colleague Charlotta Mellander ran a correlation analysis of the economic, demographic and social factors that are associated with venture capital investment across metros. Obviously, bigger metros will attract more venture capital on balance. To control for this statistically, Mellander ran a partial correlation analysis that controls for metro population. The two correlations I'll list in parenthesis below cover the number of venture capital investments as well as the dollar amount of these venture capital investments. As usual, I emphasize that correlation does not equal causation. Still, the results point to some interesting new patterns and insights.

Venture capital investment, it has long been said by those in the business, follows the quality of deals. So it is not surprising that we find venture capital investment to be significantly associated with both levels of metro innovation and high-tech industry, being correlated both with patents per capita (.51, .43) and even more so with the concentration of high-tech industry (.77, .70). This is squarely in line with studies that have found that venture capital investment is attracted to areas with large clusters of high-tech industries and high levels of innovation.

Also not surprisingly, venture capital investment is more likely in more affluent metros, being closely correlated with both metro incomes (.56, .50) and wages (.69, .60). My hunch is this relationship goes both ways, and also reflects the greater concentration of high-tech industry in venture capital metros.

Venture investment tracks the geography of talent, being correlated with the percentage of adults who are college grads (.55, .50) and the percentage of the labor force holding knowledge-work jobs in the creative class (.57, .50) — spanning science and technology, management, the professions, and arts, media and entertainment. It makes intuitive sense that venture capital is drawn to talent pools in great cities and also around great research universities and college towns.

More interesting is the fact that venture capital investment is associated with specific clusters of creative class occupations, according to Mellander's analysis. Venture capital investment, not surprisingly, is most closely associated with concentrations of science and technology workers (.46, .44). But venture investment is also closely associated with business and management occupations (.58, .52) and also with arts, media and entertainment occupations (.57, .47). These results likely reflect the increasingly multifaceted nature of great start-ups as attractive venture investments. Management talent is crucial to the success of start-ups. Venture capitalists point out time and time again that a solid management team is as important, if not more important, to business success as a having cutting-edge technology. Success in a growing number of high-tech fields demands not just great technology but innovative, user-friendly designs. Steve Jobs long credited his arts and design background and training as key to his success in creating market-defining products from the Macintosh to the iPhone and iPad, and Apple reflects the synergies that come from integrating scientific and technological, arts and design, and business management creativity and skill.

While many economic developers and mayors in cities across the United States and the world have pinned their hopes on the role of so-called "eds and meds" — higher education and medical institutions — in spurring high-tech development, Mellander's analysis finds no significant statistical association between eds and meds employment and venture capital investment across metros.

Venture capital and investment and start-up activity is also associated with the diversity and openness of metros. Venture capital investment is positively correlated with the share of adults who are foreign born (.49, .46) and also with the share of gays and lesbians (.48, .46) in the population. A number of studies have documented the large share of foreign-born engineers in high-technology fields, and immigrants make up a considerable share of the founders of high-tech start-up companies. My own research [PDF] with Gary Gates has previously documented the association between high-tech industry and diversity, including openness to toward gays and lesbians. The reason for this is not that gays and lesbians are more likely to start high-tech companies or attract venture capital investment, but that both high-tech start-ups and demand for venture capital are more likely in regions that are open to new ideas and accepting of varied sorts of people. These kinds of locations have the underlying openness to innovation and risk that attract entrepreneurs.

Venture capital metros are also more liberal in their political orientation, according to Mellander's analysis. Venture capital investment reflects America's red/blue divide. It is positively associated with the share of Obama votes (.40, .28) and negatively correlated with Romney's share (-.40, .-.29).  This result likely reflects that fact that more liberal political orientations are also associated with more educated, diverse metros.

Quite interestingly, Mellander's analysis suggests that venture capital investment and start-up activity are associated with urban form and structure, but not in the way many might predict. It's long been argued that start-ups and venture capital-financed high-technology prefer suburban office park locations, the "nerdistans" of California’s vaunted Silicon Valley, where Intel, Apple, Google and Facebook have their headquarters; along the Route 128 tech corridor near Boston; in Redmond outside Seattle, where Microsoft’s vast headquarters is located; in the suburbs surrounding Austin, and in the North Carolina Research Triangle.

But Mellander's analysis finds little evidence of this suburban nerdistan orientation for venture capital and start-up activity. For one, venture capital investment is positively associated with both density measured as people per square mile (.52, .38) and even more so with population-weighted or concentrated density (.64, .55).

In addition to this, there is an interesting connection between the way we commute and the geography of venture capital investment and start-up activity. Venture capital investment, according to her analysis, is negatively associated with the share of commuters who drive to work alone (-.49, -.45), a key indicator of sprawl and of nerdistans, and modestly associated with those who bike to work (.17, .19), another proxy for density of the sort found in big cities and college towns. Taken together, these findings are suggestive of an urban shift in venture capital and start-up activity. The reasons for this, as I've noted previously, include the urban preferences of a growing segment of tech talent, the changing nature and speed of technology, and the tight clustering of end-users and consumers in urban centers — a subject I will cover in much greater detail in upcoming posts which use area code and zip code-level data to look more closely into the micro-geography of venture capital and start-ups.

When all is said and done, venture capital and start-up activity today is associated with denser, more talent-driven, more diverse and innovative metros, reflecting the increasingly spiky nature of America's economic landscape.

Top image: Maryna Pleshkun/Shutterstock.com

Long time readers will remember our proposal for turning Valencia St from Cesar Chavez to Mission into a park:

 

It turns out that we were ahead of our time — the SFPUC, the SF Planning Department, and the SF Department of Public Works are seeking input on green plazas at Valencia & Mission, and at Valencia and Duncan.

In a rare move of solidarity, the imperialist Dominion of Bernalwood also seems to support this project in the Liminal Zone of Co-Prosperity. The right-hand turn from Valencia onto Mission is not exactly pedestrian-friendly.

The panel (SFPUC-PD-DPW task force?) is also considering other improvements on Tiffany, 29th and Duncan. A longstanding gripe of mine is some sort of improved traffic control at 29th and Tiffany. Annoying people making annoying u-turns, etc.

While I’d like a traffic roundabout, I don’t think there’s enough room. However, raised sidewalks like that on Shotwell by ODC would be nice.

So go to the meeting on July 9th and let them know that La Lengua appreciates the love.

What: Mission and Valencia Green Gateway Community Open House #2 
When: Tuesday, July 9, 2013, 4:00pm to 8:00pm 
Where: Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts

2868 Mission Street (between 24th and 25th), San Francisco, CA 94110