MIT's "Hot Or Not" Site For Neighborhoods Could Help Shape Cities 103
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."
Re:Um.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:MIT Researchers have created a Starbucks counte (Score:2, Interesting)
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.