Health and Science Tidbits
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Annual Conference on Active Living took place in San Diego last week. Within one bloggers coverage (pretty interesting to anyone looking at policy and health) was this tidbit on data capture to evaluate changes in infrastructure and their impact on health. He notes cycling, but walking could be substituted, too:
For those who want to advance policies that encourage cycling, the greatest issue is how to calculate the benefit of each mile driven on the bicycle. Its health benefit, the monetary saving, the environmental benefit, and even the social benefit neatly expressed in dollar and cent. That is the Eldorado of non-motorized research and advocacy, and the foundations know that too. The Victoria Transport Institute has done some work in the area, at the conference Thomas Goetschi (Rails to Trails, now University of Zurich) presented an interesting paper on the Cost-effectiveness of Bicycle Infrastructure - The Example of Portland. More work is needed here, including GIS technologies and mobile phone applications, to gather the much needed data.
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The Food Environment Atlas, shows what “social factors have to do with American eating patterns and the obesity epidemic.” It was developed by the USDA’s Economic Research Service, and includes an interactive map “that allows users to create custom county-by-county maps based on 90 different “food environment factors” based on data culled from a wide array of sources—including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Cancer Institute, the University of Illinois, and more. This lets the user draw connections between demographics and food consumption—the relationship between median household income and rates of preschool obesity, for example, or between pounds of food eaten at home and rates of physical activity.”
You might want to look at that in conjunction with this tool. (APB coverage)
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The US Government is on a transparency kick. Several agencies not only rolled out new portals this month which asked for input on how to improve. A review of feedback in forums of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Department of the Interior (DOI), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Department of Energy (DOE) reveals high levels of agreement on several topics including GIS use:
Expanding use of GIS systems and the public’s ability to use such systems also is a popular idea among the several discussion forums. According to one commenter, “As they say, ‘a picture is worth a thousand words,’ so why not disseminate information contained in the hundreds and hundreds of stove-piped DOI databases, systems & applications, etc. to the public through more complete cross-cutting spatial viewers and portals.”
