Sorting through The Big Sort

Maybe I spent too many years living in the same county as the authors, but I agree with everything Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing have written in their book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart.

My only problem with this book is that it is, well, a book. While the narrative is quite readable, most of the trends probably aren’t that surprising to most readers. What would likely surprise many readers though, is how such small changes in human behavior can cause such large changes in the cultural landscape. This is difficult to communicate in a text narrative. Models are better suited for this.

There is a Big Sort website, and it even has some maps. But the website is primarily geared towards selling the book. The authors have obviously collected a lot of data regarding cultural changes over the past 50 years, why not publish that too? That way, animated maps showing historic trends, plus agent based models could be developed.

The models would let readers users make small changes to agent behaviors and watch how those changes impact settlement patterns through time.

Agent based modeling has been applied to Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling’s game theory of how racial segregation occurs.

Allen Downing has written a free online computational modeling textbook, where he points out that Schelling’s model implies that “if you observe segregation in a real city, you cannot conclude that the people in the city are racists”.

Something that was new to me in The Big Sort was the research describing how the views held by a group of people become more extreme through time – more extreme than the average of the individuals in the group. This suggests that, for example, while people may not be motivated by racism to move, living in a segregated neighborhoods might slowly cause them to become racist. This too could be modeled, by having degrees of red or blue, based on how long an agent has been surrounded by similar colors.

Downing includes this exercise:

The mechanism Bishop hypothesizes is not that people, like the agents in Schelling’s model, are more likely to move if they are isolated, but that when they move for any reason, they are likely to choose a neighborhood with people like themselves. Modify your implementation of Schelling’s model to simulate this kind of behavior and see if it yields similar degrees of segregation.

If Bishop & Cushing would publish their data on their website, students working on this exercise would be able to publish models demonstrating the processes described in the book.

Who knows, maybe even the real estate listing sites might start including a scaled index to guide buyers who are consciously searching for a diversified neighborhood.

Time to Move Beyond Spatial Search: COGO for Silverlight

Let’s move beyond search.

At the UC, I recall ESRI stating that Silveright is only intended for “lightweight” editing.

After looking at Kirill Osenkov’s Live Geometry overview video, it sure seems feasible to write a silverlight COGO editing tool, leveraging his source code on codeplex.

While it likely wouldn’t be cost effective to do everything the ArcGIS Survey Analyst does, I suspect applying an 80/20 rule to the requirements would justify development costs. With web-based cogo editing tools, things like parcel databases could be more readily moved to the cloud.

Legos vs. Blocks

It must be a Danish thing: recognizing the importance of interfaces to construct large assemblies from small components.
Ole Kirk Christiansen started it all with his invention of Legos in 1934.

In 1979 Bjarne Stroustrup began extending this way of thinking into software with C++.

In 2000 Anders Helsberg brought the Legos aesthetic to Microsoft, when he came to lead C# development.

Except when I step on them barefoot, I prefer Legos over wooden blocks as a construction medium. Javascript reminds me a lot of wooden blocks.
While it is faster to stack blocks than snap Legos, the resulting Lego structure seems much more stable.

“Neglect” by Carlyle Micklus.

To make javascript sturdier, Duck typing and custom properties are every bit as useful as a hot glue gun. It’s not that javascript is necessarily bad – like legos, there is a certain flow about working with it – but I always wonder which browser might spring leaks.