Blog – Page 3 – Eldan Goldenberg

One island of the archipelago

2018-Feb-42018-Feb-4 / borders • colonialism • migration • politics / 1 Comment

Today I watched the People’s Tribunal outside the Northwest Detention Center. The testimonies were all stories about individuals currently detained there, told by people who had interviewed them this weekend, because the detainees aren’t allowed to speak for themselves. We heard painful accounts of the petty reasons people end up detained there, the barriers to their getting a fair hearing once caught up in the punitive immigration system, poor conditions in detention, and above all how the system dehumanises detainees and guards alike. I was reminded alternately of Josef K and Ivan Denisovich, two archetypes this country likes to pretend it’s above creating.

But that’s not what I want to tell you about. Hopefully you already know about the evils of the US immigration system, and the abuses at detention centers, and if you don’t then NWDC Resistance has a better backgrounder than I could write. I want to look at a question of geography: the location of the center itself, and all the ways it reminds us that the immigration system does not value our fellow prisoners.

Continue reading “One island of the archipelago” →

DACA

2018-Jan-222018-Feb-4 / borders • colonialism • migration • personal • politics • turkey / Comments Off

When I restarted this blog, I decided to focus on geography, and generally steer clear of either really personal posts or the political issues of the day. But sometimes that distinction doesn’t really hold up. The US’s treatment of people who were brought here as children is an example: it’s just the sort of current-politics issue I didn’t want to be talking about here, but it’s also somewhat on topic and so intensely personal for me that I can’t leave it alone.

I’ll start with some biographical information for context. I was born in Turkey, but when I was very young the country went through a period of political violence that my parents very reasonably decided that we should get away from. Because my great-grandfather had shrewdly taken advantage of the brief period when İstanbul was colonised, we had EU citizenship, so we were able to move to Britain as legal, documented, above-board immigrants. Thus my lifetime of being the most privileged sort of immigrant began before I could even speak in sentences. Continue reading “DACA” →

Navigating within Palestine

2017-Dec-142018-Feb-4 / borders • colonialism • getting on the map • gis / Comments Off

Palestinians in the Palestinian-administered parts of the West Bank live in a completely separate reality from Israelis just a few miles away, to the point that many roads are only open to one of those populations. This turns out to be a real challenge for crowdsourced navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps. Although the linked article makes much of the countries each service is based in, I find this more interesting as a study in the accidental politicisation of maps. I don’t think Waze is trying to handicap Palestinians; it’s stuck in a model of trying to show one consensus reality, when what’s a great route for one driver may be illegal or unacceptably dangerous for another.

Clues in cuneiform

2017-Nov-142017-Nov-14 / gis • turkey / Comments Off

I just read about some very cool big data archaeology. A group of economists and historians constructed a dataset from 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablets, adding up to hundreds of records of trade transactions between cities. They treated trade volumes as proxies for the distance between cities, presumably calibrated using trade between pairs of cities with known locations. But many of these cities are lost to modern people, and that’s where this gets really interesting: if archaeological site A traded with lost city B, the researchers could plot a radius around A for the likely distance to B. With enough known locations, they can start to narrow down where the lost cities must be:

Source: Washington Post. Original paper: Trade, merchants, and the lost cities of the Bronze Age.

What would it take to predict climate change inundation well?

2017-Nov-122017-Nov-12 / climate • gis • seattle • whulj / Comments Off

Last week I ranted about a poorly executed report claiming to show which properties around the US are at risk of climate change driven flooding. Peter Abrahamsen responded with:

Also, mean sea level, however it’s measured, doesn’t tell you who’s at risk of flooding.

and then pointed me at a couple of much better examples, most notably the Victoria, BC Capital Regional District’s climate change modeling project. I think it’s worth looking at all the other questions that would have to be answered to really get this right. Before diving in, I want to make clear that I’m not piling on Zillow any more: last week’s post was about flaws they should have figured out as a real estate data company, while most of what’s below will be details that they never claimed expertise in or took a position on. Continue reading “What would it take to predict climate change inundation well?” →

Fair Voting Systems map

2017-Nov-92017-Nov-9 / bit parts • my projects / Comments Off

I contributed some small pieces of code to the Fair Voting Systems map that Sightline Institute just published:

This was really COREGIS’s project – I just helped Matt with some JavaScript and CSS to handle the complexity of all the intersecting categories they needed to display. But it was fun finally getting to work on something for an organisation I’ve looked up to since first moving to Seattle.

And from the context article, I learned of yet another delightful place name:

Blindly trusting data will leave you all at sea

2017-Nov-52017-Nov-9 / climate • data crankiness • gis • seattle / Comments Off

Zillow recently published a report on how many houses are at risk from sea level rise around the US. It’s a good idea, but looking closely at where I live reveals some… issues in their analysis. Here’s a screenshot from the Seattle Times’ article with the local angle on the report:

If you know Seattle, you can probably spot the first problem. For those who don’t: the Eastern shore, and the cluster N of the word “Seattle” on that map are all lakefronts, separated from the sea by the rather large Ballard Locks. The local article’s been updated to mention that, but Zillow’s downloadable data hasn’t. And even the local article misses a detail: if sea levels were to rise by a foot more than the analysis assumed, the highest tides would still only be 4¾ inches over the lock gates—a problem for some houses for sure, but nothing like the 7 feet of flooding we’d have on our sea side, and much less than the amount the lake is already allowed to rise and fall by.

But there’s another problem, unrelated to quirks of Seattle’s Herculean engineering, and much more worrying for the reliability of this analysis. Continue reading “Blindly trusting data will leave you all at sea” →