Monday, November 24. 2008

Times-Picayune: How New Orleans is Shrinking

One key stat in the first few paragraphs of an article exploring the challenges of managing the shrinking city:

ESRI, a leading market research firm, projects New Orleans will gain only 15,000 residents in the next five years.

Friday, October 17. 2008

Best Name So Far for iPhone LBS Apps: Carticipate

Carticipate is a free LBS app for finding other with whom to share rides. Only a few weeks old it suffers from the big challenge for LBS: reaching critical mass.

- Huffington Post

Friday, August 29. 2008

Location of Katrina Deaths Upends Previous Assumptions

The work was done by Knight Ridder and suggests that many of the assumptions about those who died in Katrina are perhaps misplaced.

Knight Ridder took addresses where bodies were recovered from data from Louisiana state officials and and plotted them on maps of Orleans and St. Bernard parishes. Those locations were then compared with census data on income in those neighborhoods. A number of bodies were excluded including those recovered from hospitals and nursing homes, and body collection points.

What does the study show?

- the victims weren’t disproportionately poor
- they also weren’t disproportionately African American
- the elderly were disproportionately impacted though many had cars in the driveway

- Knight Ridder via The Olympian

Thursday, August 21. 2008

Junk Mail Mashup Reveals Rebuilding in New Orleans

AdAge explains how Greater New Orleans Community Data Center (GNOCDC) is using "junk mail" to help map where the current residents of New Orleans reside. The nonprofit GNOCDC has been working with Valassis Communications' owner of the RedPlum direct-mail operation. Red Plum sends out basically nationwide mailings each month. By luck the company had a 2005 data with which to compare the current state of mailing addresses today. The data is being used to use funds for rebuilding and has saved quite a lot in manual surveys of "who is where."

GNOCDC has linked the data to a Google Map (James Fee and Co worked on this, per a tweet yesterday; I didn't follow up then because he noted a publication called "Adage," of which I'd not heard!). Also of note: Valassis provided much of the data at cost and the historic data and consulting gratis.

Bottom line:

Overall, the Valassis data indicates New Orleans had 146,174 households receiving mail in June 2008, still down 28% from the 203,457 receiving mail in June 2005, two months before the Aug. 29, 2005, hurricane and resulting flood.

Wednesday, June 18. 2008

New Orleans Population Resettlement

U.S. News and World Report for June 23 provided a detailed map of the resettlement progress in New Orleans in an article entitled, "The Road Back Home." The map is an "activity" index of areas rebounding from the pre-Hurricane Katrina levels based on utilities, mail service and building permits. The map was created by GCR & Associates and their more detailed analysis of the resettlement can be downloaded from their website (PowerPoint presentation). Neither source stipulates the geographic subdivision but it appears to be at the street block level.

Friday, August 24. 2007

New Hurricane Risk Prediction Site for New Orleans

The Army Corps of Engineers developed the Google Earth-based maps with the city, businesses and local groups.

In creating the Web site, the Corps of Engineers ran 152 future storm scenarios on supercomputers to estimate water levels that could be expected under different weather conditions across the Louisiana coastal area. The scenario variables included barometric pressure, maximum wind speed, storm size, how fast the storm was moving and direction of storm track.