@ferderon
Assistant Prof @uoft.bsky.social @utsc-humangeo.bsky.social 丨neighbourhoods, social capital & policy丨papá de Lúa🌛丨 ENG ESP丨👨💻🗺📷丨he/él丨Piura 🇵🇪 📌Between Toronto 🇨🇦 & Bogotá 🇨🇴 🔗 fernandocalderonfigueroa.com
Very pleased to see the first article from my PhD thesis published in Planning Theory and Practice.
In the piece, I leverage the concurrent adoption of bicycle equity policies in Mexico City and Toronto to compare how intra-urban differences shape efforts to address infrastructural inequalities.
Govt’s Pride in Place targets areas with economic deprivation and weaker social infrastructure. Yet, our analysis reveals 2 challenges.
We find 430 doubly disadvantaged neighbourhoods in England (home to approx 3.5 million people) are unfunded, incl many ranked as facing the greatest challenges 1/3
I ran a simple model with new public data then used 1 prompt to make ChatGPT guess what the model would produce. With 10 seconds of "thinking," it was very close. The implications of this are catastrophic. The American Sociological Association should do something about this but it doesn't care to
/1
Fascinating that this counts as an unpopular opinion in North America. Turning right on red should be banned outright.
Unpopular opinion but turning right at a red light should not be legal in San Francisco (or anywhere else). Right on red makes horrors like this all too possible. sfstandard.com/2026/03/03/m...
U of T’s Maps and Data Library recently published a blog by Jeff Allen our Data Viz Lead, on a tool he built for viewing historial aerial imagery of Toronto collected from various sources. https://ow.ly/rqu150YfERX
Simulated null distribution for data with a sample size of 100, difference in group means of 5, and a p-value of 0.142
Simulated null distribution of a slope of 0.8 and p-value of 0.002
Finally, we have to decide if the p-value meets an evidentiary standard or threshold that would provide us with enough evidence that we aren’t in the null world (or, in more statsy terms, enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis). There are lots of possible thresholds. By convention, most people use a threshold (often shortened to α) of 0.05, or 5%. But that’s not required! You could have a lower standard with an α of 0.1 (10%), or a higher standard with an α of 0.01 (1%). Statistically significant The p-value is < 0.001 and our threshold for α is 0.05 In a world where there is no relationship between x and y, the probability of seeing a slope of at least 0.901 is < 0.1% Since < 0.001 is less than 0.05, we have enough evidence to say that the slope is statistically significant.
Evidentiary standards When thinking about p-values and thresholds, I like to imagine myself as a judge or a member of a jury. Many legal systems around the world have formal evidentiary thresholds or standards of proof. If prosecutors provide evidence that meets a threshold (i.e. goes beyond a reasonable doubt, or shows evidence on a balance of probabilities), the judge or jury can rule guilty. If there’s not enough evidence to clear the standard or threshold, the judge or jury has to rule not guilty. With p-values: If the probability of seeing an effect or difference (or δ) in a null world is less than 5% (or whatever the threshold is), we rule it statistically significant and say that the difference does not fit in that world. We’re pretty confident that it’s not zero. If the p-value is larger than the threshold, we do not have enough evidence to claim that δ doesn’t come from a world of where there’s no difference. We don’t know if it’s not zero. Importantly, if the difference is not significant, that does not mean that there is no difference. It just means that we can’t detect one if there is. If a prosecutor doesn’t provide sufficient evidence to clear a standard or threshold, it does not mean that the defendant didn’t do whatever they’re charged with†—it means that the judge or jury can’t detect guilt.
I just whipped up this little #QuartoPub site last week that demonstrates how I teach p-values/hyp-testing through simulation both with live OJS and with #rstats, and I think it's super neat! It has examples for diff-in-means, diff-in-props, and regression slopes nullworlds.andrewheiss.com #statsky
Poster showing speakers for the TPN seminar series
The Toronto Population Network @tpn-uoft.bsky.social Seminar Series is happening this semester, with a great line-up, including @lucampesando.bsky.social, Orsola Torrisi, @mdhayward.bsky.social, and @jnobles.bsky.social! Starts next Tuesday. If you're in Toronto please come along!
For social scientists interested in LLMs for text classification/coding, the process here is potentially very helpful (even if you don't use the product itself).
Their core technique: Contradictory Example Training
Their training method: Binocular Labeling
More details in the linked post below.
Announcing spopt-r: spatial optimization for regionalization, facility location, and market analysis in R.
My all-time favorite Python package is PySAL's spopt - and until now, it did not have an R equivalent.
Get started here: walker-data.com/spopt-r
Yo what the fuck short form videos are bad
Short-Form Videos Degrade Our Capacity to Retain Intentions
arxiv.org/pdf/2302.03714
Ht: HowTown
The Cities of Care conference aims to bring together academics, practitioners & decision-makers to deepen interdisciplinary research and foster a richer understanding of water, food and waste systems, thus enhancing pathways between evidence and practice https://ow.ly/R30V50XGAcf
Studying the long-run effects of a large public expansion of pre-primary education in Argentina, from Samuel Berlinski, Guillermo Cruces, Sebastian Galiani, Paul Gertler, and Fabian Gonzalez www.nber.org/papers/w34552
Logo of an image with some threads intersecting.
Today, I launch my Podcast, “Pluriversal Threads,” as a supplement to my book. If you want to know more about the Pluriverse and its relationship with language, communities and our place in the world, I invite you to join me and listen to.
open.spotify.com/show/5qeySLi...
You forgot to load the packages 734 times
Your most loaded package was tidyverse
You got "this package is not available for R version XXXX" 374 times
You hit "remind me later" for R updates 7492 times
Urban greenness in Metro Vancouver in 2025
Urban greenness in Metro Vancouver in 2025
Updated Urban Greenness data out from StatCan is out today, quantifying the "average greenness" on a 250m grid. Data is annual and goes back to 2000 and allows for some comparison (although some caution is advised).
🏛️ ¿Por qué seguimos obsesionados con resucitar ciudades que ya no existen? Lima necesita futuro, no nostalgia. No te pierdas la reflexión de Natalia Sobrevilla.
🧃Clic aquí: tinyurl.com/3vrbyyk4
A List of Things Said to Have Been Ruined by Women
🧵
You sure that's not @utsc.utoronto.ca campus? 😅
Inside the world of Kenya’s ‘shadow scholars’ paid to write essays for UK students
The right sets the terms of our political discourse in so many ways, one of which is the idea that there isn't enough "debate" and "free speech" on campus.
We need to push back on this. The truth is (speaking for myself as a history prof), I don't really emphasize debate much in my classes/
The biggest sporting event in the world is happening in our backyard. But most New Yorkers will be priced out of watching it live.
Sign our petition calling on FIFA to put game over greed: zohranfornyc.com/gameovergreed
JOB ALERT FOR #SOCIOLOGIST: Come work with me. We have FOUR Assistant Professor positions in the Sociology Department at the University of Calgary.
careers.ucalgary.ca/jobs/1672106...
Spherical photo of the interior of a university building. It shows three stories of the building connected through a mix-use wooden staircase and skylights at the top.
Amazing first time teaching @utsc-humangeo.bsky.social in the new Sam Ibrahim building @utsc.utoronto.ca Looking forward to this semester!
Maybe start calling them AI-DLs?
"I recommend SUDS as the perfect opportunity to gain research experience, experience life in the #DataScience workforce, and possibly even get published!”–Elise Corbin
@uoftdsi.bsky.social
datasciences.utoronto.ca/data-science...
#Python
#geosky
#EconSky
#sociology
More on `piccard` coming soon. Meanwhile, here's a preview: piccard.readthedocs.io
Photo of the author with two students in formal dressing. They are posing in front of a research poster.
Poster of the project "piccard: A graph-based approach to census data analysis". The poster includes an overview, sample workflow, QR codes for further information, next steps, and acknowledgements. More info in the documentation: https://piccard.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
A highlight of this summer: supervising Elise Corbin (UofT) and Abdulmohseen Al Ali (KAUST) during their Summer Undergraduate Data Sciences program at @uoftdsi.bsky.social. They did amazing expanding `piccard`—a Python package we've been developing—and prepared a fantastic presentation and poster!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (FREDERICTON, August 18th, 2025) A group of 413 Canadian and Canadian-based scholars, athletes, sports journalists, and sports officials have signed a public letter calling on Tennis Canada to cancel the Davis Cup tournament with Israel this September in Halifax. Signatories include three United Nations Special Rapporteurs, four-time Olympian distance runner Mohammed Ahmed, two members of the Palestinian women’s soccer team who compete for York University, a former Canadian Olympic beach volleyball coach, sports journalists Shireen Ahmed and Ian Kennedy, public intellectuals and activists Naomi Klein and Avi Lewis and some of Canada’s most distinguished and internationally-recognized scholars. The letter is signed by prominent individuals from 46 different academic institutions in Canada, as well as by Canadians at prominent global institutions. One hundred and six of the signatories are based in Atlantic Canada, where the event is slated to occur. The call to cancel the Davis Cup event comes amidst rising condemnation of Israeli conduct in Gaza and the West Bank, which leading legal scholars, activists and human rights groups have described as a genocide. Given the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the letter says that allowing the competition to go ahead is “unconscionable” and calls on the Canadian government to prevent Canadian athletes from competing against Israeli athletes in all international sporting competitions. Despite Tennis Canada’s claims that the event isn’t political and is just about playing tennis, the letter states in part that Canada should follow the lead of other nations who “refuse to legitimize Israel’s crimes” by withdrawing from international sporting competition. “This includes Jordanian tennis player Abdellah Shelbayh, who recently withdrew from a tennis competition in Greece after being slated to play an Israeli athlete,” the letter says. The letter points to the use of sporting sanctions in South Africa as a meaningful …
“Given the ongoing genocide in Gaza…we call on Sport Canada and Tennis Canada to forbid Canadian athletes to compete against Israeli athletes at the Davis Cup and all other international events.”
- 413 🇨🇦 academics, athletes + sports journalists, inc 3 former UN special rapporteurs + an Olympic 🥈ist
