Crowdsourcing the Robin Hood effect in cities

Socioeconomic inequalities in cities are embedded in space and result in neighborhood effects, whose harmful consequences have proved very hard to counterbalance efficiently by planning policies alone. Considering redistribution of money flows as a first step toward improved spatial equity, we study a bottom-up approach that would rely on a slight evolution of shopping mobility practices. Building on a database of anonymized credit card transactions in Madrid and Barcelona, we quantify the mobility effort required to reach a reference situation where commercial income is evenly shared among neighborhoods. The redirections of shopping trips preserve key properties of human mobility, including travel distances. Surprisingly, for both cities only a small fraction ($\sim 5 \%$) of trips need to be altered to reach equity situations, improving even other sustainability indicators. The method could be implemented in mobile applications that would assist individuals in reshaping their shopping practices, to promote the spatial redistribution of opportunities in the city.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures + Appendi

Turbo EP-based Equalization: a Filter-Type Implementation

This manuscript has been submitted to Transactions on Communications on September 7, 2017; revised on January 10, 2018 and March 27, 2018; and accepted on April 25, 2018 We propose a novel filter-type equalizer to improve the solution of the linear minimum-mean squared-error (LMMSE) turbo equalizer, with computational complexity constrained to be quadratic in the filter length. When high-order modulations and/or large memory channels are used the optimal BCJR equalizer is unavailable, due to its computational complexity. In this scenario, the filter-type LMMSE turbo equalization exhibits a good performance compared to other approximations. In this paper, we show that this solution can be significantly improved by using expectation propagation (EP) in the estimation of the a posteriori probabilities. First, it yields a more accurate estimation of the extrinsic distribution to be sent to the channel decoder. Second, compared to other solutions based on EP the computational complexity of the proposed solution is constrained to be quadratic in the length of the finite impulse response (FIR). In addition, we review previous EP-based turbo equalization implementations. Instead of considering default uniform priors we exploit the outputs of the decoder. Some simulation results are included to show that this new EP-based filter remarkably outperforms the turbo approach of previous versions of the EP algorithm and also improves the LMMSE solution, with and without turbo equalization

Scaling of city attractiveness for foreign visitors through big data of human economical and social media activity

Scientific studies investigating laws and regularities of human behavior are nowadays increasingly relying on the wealth of widely available digital information produced by human social activity. In this paper we leverage big data created by three different aspects of human activity (i.e., bank card transactions, geotagged photographs and tweets) in Spain for quantifying city attractiveness for the foreign visitors. An important finding of this papers is a strong superlinear scaling of city attractiveness with its population size. The observed scaling exponent stays nearly the same for different ways of defining cities and for different data sources, emphasizing the robustness of our finding. Temporal variation of the scaling exponent is also considered in order to reveal seasonal patterns in the attractivenessComment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Mining Urban Performance: Scale-Independent Classification of Cities Based on Individual Economic Transactions

Intensive development of urban systems creates a number of challenges for urban planners and policy makers in order to maintain sustainable growth. Running efficient urban policies requires meaningful urban metrics, which could quantify important urban characteristics including various aspects of an actual human behavior. Since a city size is known to have a major, yet often nonlinear, impact on the human activity, it also becomes important to develop scale-free metrics that capture qualitative city properties, beyond the effects of scale. Recent availability of extensive datasets created by human activity involving digital technologies creates new opportunities in this area. In this paper we propose a novel approach of city scoring and classification based on quantitative scale-free metrics related to economic activity of city residents, as well as domestic and foreign visitors. It is demonstrated on the example of Spain, but the proposed methodology is of a general character. We employ a new source of large-scale ubiquitous data, which consists of anonymized countrywide records of bank card transactions collected by one of the largest Spanish banks. Different aspects of the classification reveal important properties of Spanish cities, which significantly complement the pattern that might be discovered with the official socioeconomic statistics.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to be published in the proceedings of ASE BigDataScience 2014 conferenc

Evaluation of CO2 carrying capacity of reactivated CaO by hydration

[EN] Steam hydration has been proposed as a suitable technique for improving the performance of CaO as a regenerable sorbent in CO2 capture systems. New hydration experiments conducted in this study, confirm the reported improvements in the capacity of sorbents to carry CO2. An examination of the textural properties of the sorbent after hydration and mild calcination revealed a large increase in the area of reaction surface and the formation of a fraction of pores ≈20 nm diameter that enhance the CO2 carrying capacity and increase the carbonation reaction rate. However, these changes in textural properties also lead to lower values of crushing strength as measured in the reactivated particles. Experiments conducted with a high hydration level of the sorbent (Ca molar conversion to Ca(OH)2 of 0.6) in every cycle produced a sixfold increase in the sorbent residual CO2 carrying capacity. This improvement has been estimated to be achieved at the expense of a very large consumption of steam in the system (about 1.2 mol of steam per mol of captured CO2). The trade off between the improvements in CO2 capture capacity and steam consumption is experimentally investigated in this work, it being concluded that there is need to design a comprehensive sorbent reactivation test that takes into account all of the hydration reactivation process.This work is partially supported by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (CaOling project). I. Martínez thanks Diputación General de Aragón for the F.P.I. fellowship and MICINN for the F.P.U. fellowship.Peer reviewe

Kinetics of calcination of partially carbonated particles in a Ca-looping system for CO2 capture

Post-combustion CO2 capture based on the Ca-looping process (CaL) is a promising technology under development based on the reversible reaction between CaO and CO2 to form CaCO3 and the regeneration of CaO by calcination of CaCO3 in a rich CO2 atmosphere. This work is focused on the study of the calcination kinetics with typical solid conditions expected in these systems. Calcination rates of carbonated materials derived from two limestones have been measured at different numbers of carbonation–calcination cycles, as a function of the temperature and CO2 partial pressure. It has been observed that the calcination reaction is chemically controlled for particles below 300 μm of particle size, because internal mass transfer is negligible even under the presence of CO2 in the reaction atmosphere. The calcination rate (expressed per moles of initial CaO) depends upon the calcination temperature and CO2 partial pressure, whereas the CaCO3 content and/or particle lifetime do not affect the reaction rate. The basic kinetic model by Szekely and Evans is shown to be valid to fit the new data. On the basis of these results, it is shown that calcination temperatures between 880 and 920 °C could be sufficient to achieve nearly complete calcination conversion at a typical solid residence time of circulating fluidized-bed calciner reactors (2–3 min) in the CaL system.This work is partially supported by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme (CaOling project). Financial support for I. Martinez during her PhD studies is provided by the FPU programme of the Spanish Ministry of Research and Innovation.Peer reviewe