6 ms·

Using data to find the middle of nowhere

35 points by SQL2219 9y ago

wglb 9y ago
I would suggest that the number 75,000 is east coast thinking. Glasgow an wolf point are not really nowhere. And the travel time criteria suggests an attention span deficit common to city life. I would suggest another metric. That is the percentage of people living in an area who have not seen the Milky Way. There is likely a whole seath of the Sprawl where that metric would be zero.
- jsjohnst 9y ago
  Funny, we had a discussion on Slack at work where numerous folks hadn’t ever seen the Milky Way yesterday. I think many on the east coast haven’t, especially in NYC, and it’s rather sad.
  - wgerard 9y ago
    > it’s rather sad. Why? The antipathy city dwellers feel for "flyover country" is silly, but the reverse is pretty silly too. I might think it's strange that some people have never gone hiking or camping, but they think it's just as strange that I had never seen a symphony performance until recently. People just lead different lives, I dunno that one's more sad than the other.
    - jsjohnst 9y ago
      > Why? You don’t think it’s sad that people don’t travel more than an hour from a major city and experience the world around them? > People just lead different lives, I dunno that one's more sad than the other. I don’t think one needs to be more sad than the other. If people had experiences outside their narrow sliver of their daily lives they might be more tolerant of others who live different lives.
      - wgerard 9y ago
        > You don’t think it’s sad that people don’t travel more than an hour from a major city and experience the world around them? Not to be too much of an armchair psychologist, but I think that says more about you than it does about them. Again, there are people who think it's sad that I've never been to a professional ballet performance. Or that I've never gone wheelin. Or that I have yet to go to the statue of liberty. Should we all drop everything we're doing to satisfy someone else's idea of a measured life? > If people had experiences outside their narrow sliver of their daily lives they might be more tolerant of others who live different lives. You can have an incredible wealth of experiences without traveling very far. Especially in a major city. A visit to Lincoln Center is very different from a visit to Flushing, and both are very different from a visit to Staten Island.
  - salgernon 9y ago
    I grew up about an hour north of NYC and fondly remember the Milky Way - our subdivision didn’t have streetlights. I can’t see it now from my house in the Santa Cruz mountains (15 miles from Silicon Valley) but the night sky is far more brilliant than just over the hill.
- justin66 9y ago
  The point of such a study (the KCUR article is essentially blogspam, someone below posted a link to the study in Nature) has nothing to do with "east coast thinking" or whatever culture war thing you're alluding to. It's this: Although DHS surveys primarily cover low-to-middle-income countries, and thus do not fully represent all socioeconomic contexts, our results illustrate reciprocal relationships between accessibility and key metrics of human wellbeing in many geographical, political, and economic settings. We found a clear association between higher household wealth and greater accessibility to population centres (Fig. 3a). Similar patterns emerged for measures of educational attainment (Fig. 3b) and treatment of fever among children under five (Fig. 3c). Although exceptions occurred (for example, there were wealthy household clusters far from cities and vice versa), and the selected metrics were strongly collinear, the association between accessibility to cities and indicators of human wellbeing in low-to-middle-income countries was unequivocal. Some of the small towns listed by WAPO probably are the statistical outliers mentioned in the paper. A town on a major freeway and with an airport isn't necessarily in the "middle of nowhere" in the way the paper's authors are really worried about, which is access to services and economic activity. (On the other hand, in a few measurable ways, like crime, such crossroads towns are sometimes worse off than towns truly in the middle of nowhere, so if you're looking for a place to live you'd want to take it on case by case basis rather than making generalizations.)
kayhi 9y ago
I guess they didn't want to include Alaska.
- wglb 9y ago
  And with Alaska you could add a new metric “can’t get there from here “.
- protomyth 9y ago
  or Wyoming I'm from North Dakota and when the friggin sign in Wyoming says there are no towns for the next 73 miles you believe them and make sure your fuel is good.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    73 miles is only about an hour.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Very much depends on the season. Also on services at that town being open.
      - protomyth 9y ago
        Its always fun to drive up to a gas station that closes early. You'll find that the various maps applications are really low data for rural areas. When I was young and a bit stupid 73 miles could be done in 45 minutes, but I've also had nights where 73 miles was a 3 hour drive.
        code_duck 9y ago
        This is less of a problem now that most places have 24 hour pumps with credit card machines, even in the sticks (really, they need it the most since it’s rarely profitable to pay an employee to be at the store).
      - 9y ago
megaman22 9y ago
The "ranked by travel time in hours" metric is a little weird. Travel by what? Trains, planes, or automobiles? There's also a huge chunk of the state of Maine that is more than 3.5 hours from either Boston or Quebec City (there are no cities in Maine larger than 75,000 people[1]) [1] https://www.maine-demographics.com/cities_by_population https://www.maine-demographics.com/cities_by_population
- torstenvl 9y ago
  Whether there are any cities in Maine larger than 75,000 people is irrelevant. The study is not based on city population. EDIT: The WaPo story is also not based on city population.
  - pessimizer 9y ago
    > The Post used simple criteria: “towns that are farthest from any metro with more than 75,000 people, ranked by travel time in hours.” This story isn't about the study, which also wasn't to find the towns most in the middle of nowhere, but about a WaPo story, which was.
- DFHippie 9y ago
  If you read the Washington Post article it goes into considerably more detail. It is based on certain assumptions about what modes of travel are available at different locations on the globe, so in much of Greenland or on Ellesmere Island it is assumed you are traveling by foot.
- stephencanon 9y ago
  The Portland metro area is well over 75k, but Portland's barely closer than Boston, and there are large areas of Maine that are more than 3.5 hours from anything. Huge parts of Aroostook don't even really have "towns" per se (which may be why they're not on the list, since it purports to list the most in-the-middle-of-nowhere towns).
grzm 9y ago
I suspect a lot of questions regarding the metrics used can be found in either the WaPo article this references or the Nature piece the WaPo article is based on: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/20/using-the-best-data-possible-we-set-out-to-find-the-middle-of-nowhere/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/20/using... http://www.nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature25181.epdf?referrer_access_token=ymbRxnz9zrlLgXUIZSErjdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0Nro_3a2_QnHhoi4tmpV4YMThej2zn3HuD6JN5yUCKyoEn8Hh54UuPRPq31j83atkeBxCzjyGlSHVauT5umbpzjjwPxv8_DF57JNW453vRpaF6geg9BYzab4Y9zEjEsT16chcsqI4VCZk9gIFqK6-mJV7EOGvlR-LeGKSQp5in2YUKRIwjexV8tsh70tlGczDxwGz_oJ6S0R5nu2oANwAwdpCkf2FqC-kdm-JKYuIGE_Yw2otVw_AIRbsvfzqIxKpXCUGJHQ7sgF8vYeH7nfTWHkU6HJwAGyrPt04f1Ioc7DFwyGtap8E7hIPCP6WRE3EaoXSZOaRMDTxjJxEX1333_5dDfp9fRI3_meJr263ljp2O3uuJXthpUkT5v-R3-l6SaMqYEmImS6ww7QXXYGaqz&tracking_referrer=www.washingtonpost.com http://www.nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature25181.epdf?...
chrissnell 9y ago
Funny, I live just a couple of miles from where that photo is taken. While it's true that we're a long way from a big city, this place does not feel all that isolated. I've been to towns in Utah and Nevada that are hours of dirt road driving from the nearest grocery store: Jarbidge, NV, Trout Creek, UT. Those are truly in the middle of nowhere. I've asked folks in these towns where they get their food and the answer is the same: occasional drives into town but mostly Amazon Prime.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Would love to hear the background of what brought you to these towns. Sounds like an adventure!

35 points by SQL2219 9y ago

wglb 9y ago

I would suggest that the number 75,000 is east coast thinking. Glasgow an wolf point are not really nowhere. And the travel time criteria suggests an attention span deficit common to city life. I would suggest another metric. That is the percentage of people living in an area who have not seen the Milky Way. There is likely a whole seath of the Sprawl where that metric would be zero.

jsjohnst 9y ago
Funny, we had a discussion on Slack at work where numerous folks hadn’t ever seen the Milky Way yesterday. I think many on the east coast haven’t, especially in NYC, and it’s rather sad.
- wgerard 9y ago
  > it’s rather sad. Why? The antipathy city dwellers feel for "flyover country" is silly, but the reverse is pretty silly too. I might think it's strange that some people have never gone hiking or camping, but they think it's just as strange that I had never seen a symphony performance until recently. People just lead different lives, I dunno that one's more sad than the other.
  - jsjohnst 9y ago
    > Why? You don’t think it’s sad that people don’t travel more than an hour from a major city and experience the world around them? > People just lead different lives, I dunno that one's more sad than the other. I don’t think one needs to be more sad than the other. If people had experiences outside their narrow sliver of their daily lives they might be more tolerant of others who live different lives.
    - wgerard 9y ago
      > You don’t think it’s sad that people don’t travel more than an hour from a major city and experience the world around them? Not to be too much of an armchair psychologist, but I think that says more about you than it does about them. Again, there are people who think it's sad that I've never been to a professional ballet performance. Or that I've never gone wheelin. Or that I have yet to go to the statue of liberty. Should we all drop everything we're doing to satisfy someone else's idea of a measured life? > If people had experiences outside their narrow sliver of their daily lives they might be more tolerant of others who live different lives. You can have an incredible wealth of experiences without traveling very far. Especially in a major city. A visit to Lincoln Center is very different from a visit to Flushing, and both are very different from a visit to Staten Island.
- salgernon 9y ago
  I grew up about an hour north of NYC and fondly remember the Milky Way - our subdivision didn’t have streetlights. I can’t see it now from my house in the Santa Cruz mountains (15 miles from Silicon Valley) but the night sky is far more brilliant than just over the hill.
justin66 9y ago
The point of such a study (the KCUR article is essentially blogspam, someone below posted a link to the study in Nature) has nothing to do with "east coast thinking" or whatever culture war thing you're alluding to. It's this: Although DHS surveys primarily cover low-to-middle-income countries, and thus do not fully represent all socioeconomic contexts, our results illustrate reciprocal relationships between accessibility and key metrics of human wellbeing in many geographical, political, and economic settings. We found a clear association between higher household wealth and greater accessibility to population centres (Fig. 3a). Similar patterns emerged for measures of educational attainment (Fig. 3b) and treatment of fever among children under five (Fig. 3c). Although exceptions occurred (for example, there were wealthy household clusters far from cities and vice versa), and the selected metrics were strongly collinear, the association between accessibility to cities and indicators of human wellbeing in low-to-middle-income countries was unequivocal. Some of the small towns listed by WAPO probably are the statistical outliers mentioned in the paper. A town on a major freeway and with an airport isn't necessarily in the "middle of nowhere" in the way the paper's authors are really worried about, which is access to services and economic activity. (On the other hand, in a few measurable ways, like crime, such crossroads towns are sometimes worse off than towns truly in the middle of nowhere, so if you're looking for a place to live you'd want to take it on case by case basis rather than making generalizations.)

kayhi 9y ago

I guess they didn't want to include Alaska.

wglb 9y ago
And with Alaska you could add a new metric “can’t get there from here “.
protomyth 9y ago
or Wyoming I'm from North Dakota and when the friggin sign in Wyoming says there are no towns for the next 73 miles you believe them and make sure your fuel is good.
- code_duck 9y ago
  73 miles is only about an hour.
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Very much depends on the season. Also on services at that town being open.
    - protomyth 9y ago
      Its always fun to drive up to a gas station that closes early. You'll find that the various maps applications are really low data for rural areas. When I was young and a bit stupid 73 miles could be done in 45 minutes, but I've also had nights where 73 miles was a 3 hour drive.
      - code_duck 9y ago
        This is less of a problem now that most places have 24 hour pumps with credit card machines, even in the sticks (really, they need it the most since it’s rarely profitable to pay an employee to be at the store).
    - 9y ago

megaman22 9y ago

The "ranked by travel time in hours" metric is a little weird. Travel by what? Trains, planes, or automobiles? There's also a huge chunk of the state of Maine that is more than 3.5 hours from either Boston or Quebec City (there are no cities in Maine larger than 75,000 people[1]) [1] https://www.maine-demographics.com/cities_by_population https://www.maine-demographics.com/cities_by_population

torstenvl 9y ago
Whether there are any cities in Maine larger than 75,000 people is irrelevant. The study is not based on city population. EDIT: The WaPo story is also not based on city population.
- pessimizer 9y ago
  > The Post used simple criteria: “towns that are farthest from any metro with more than 75,000 people, ranked by travel time in hours.” This story isn't about the study, which also wasn't to find the towns most in the middle of nowhere, but about a WaPo story, which was.
DFHippie 9y ago
If you read the Washington Post article it goes into considerably more detail. It is based on certain assumptions about what modes of travel are available at different locations on the globe, so in much of Greenland or on Ellesmere Island it is assumed you are traveling by foot.
stephencanon 9y ago
The Portland metro area is well over 75k, but Portland's barely closer than Boston, and there are large areas of Maine that are more than 3.5 hours from anything. Huge parts of Aroostook don't even really have "towns" per se (which may be why they're not on the list, since it purports to list the most in-the-middle-of-nowhere towns).

grzm 9y ago

I suspect a lot of questions regarding the metrics used can be found in either the WaPo article this references or the Nature piece the WaPo article is based on: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/20/using-the-best-data-possible-we-set-out-to-find-the-middle-of-nowhere/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/02/20/using... http://www.nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature25181.epdf?referrer_access_token=ymbRxnz9zrlLgXUIZSErjdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0Nro_3a2_QnHhoi4tmpV4YMThej2zn3HuD6JN5yUCKyoEn8Hh54UuPRPq31j83atkeBxCzjyGlSHVauT5umbpzjjwPxv8_DF57JNW453vRpaF6geg9BYzab4Y9zEjEsT16chcsqI4VCZk9gIFqK6-mJV7EOGvlR-LeGKSQp5in2YUKRIwjexV8tsh70tlGczDxwGz_oJ6S0R5nu2oANwAwdpCkf2FqC-kdm-JKYuIGE_Yw2otVw_AIRbsvfzqIxKpXCUGJHQ7sgF8vYeH7nfTWHkU6HJwAGyrPt04f1Ioc7DFwyGtap8E7hIPCP6WRE3EaoXSZOaRMDTxjJxEX1333_5dDfp9fRI3_meJr263ljp2O3uuJXthpUkT5v-R3-l6SaMqYEmImS6ww7QXXYGaqz&tracking_referrer=www.washingtonpost.com http://www.nature.com/articles/doi:10.1038/nature25181.epdf?...

chrissnell 9y ago

Funny, I live just a couple of miles from where that photo is taken. While it's true that we're a long way from a big city, this place does not feel all that isolated. I've been to towns in Utah and Nevada that are hours of dirt road driving from the nearest grocery store: Jarbidge, NV, Trout Creek, UT. Those are truly in the middle of nowhere. I've asked folks in these towns where they get their food and the answer is the same: occasional drives into town but mostly Amazon Prime.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Would love to hear the background of what brought you to these towns. Sounds like an adventure!