Paul Rollo

make stuff | break stuff | figure out dinner ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ | 🏂 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

[Paul Rollo @paul]

there’s III sides to every story

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@searchmartin @SearchForRyan 💯

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@MikeDiplockre 😂

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@DavidGQuaid semantics - you’re just using different words for the same thing

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@timleunig if the claim is “destroying futures”, shouldn’t we test it against outcomes? 93.5% are in positive destinations at 9 months, vs 85.9% in 2009/10. how do we reconcile that? is PISA telling us something those outcomes miss, or are we mistaking a proxy for the thing itself?

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@timleunig are pisa scores the measure of a successful education system? genuine question.

[Paul Rollo @paul]

most of the pisa stuff on here is lazy or agenda-driven. the more useful debate is what scottish education has been optimising for, what we gained, what we lost, and whether we can keep the real gains while developing more depth.

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@L__Macfarlane and yet, many of the actual outcomes are better. maybe the interesting question is what scottish education has been optimising for - and whether pisa is the right metric to seize upon in isolation.

[Mike Galsworthy @mikegalsworthy]

New YouGov poll out.

Pretty damn clear what the public thinks on this one.

[Paul Rollo @paul]

haven’t we done well 😔

[UN Environment Programme @UNEP]

The planet will keep getting hotter, even with ongoing efforts to slow the temperature rise. But choices exist.  

Every fraction of a degree prevented, and every year by which the overshoot period is shortened, will save lives, protect ecosystems, and reduce economic losses. 

Find out more: https://t.co/TY9aUmoN7c

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@VoteBPB @twloat @NickNickEdin @PeaksDalesRail @norrie_rowan property developers, like yer pal norrie, benefit from infrastructure therefore let the people suffer. vive la revolution 😏

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@VoteBPB @twloat @NickNickEdin @PeaksDalesRail @norrie_rowan it’s to service working people who can almost afford to live outwith the city centre!! international capital, calm down.

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@VoteBPB @twloat @NickNickEdin @PeaksDalesRail @norrie_rowan lol, infrastructure eh, who needs it 🤷 what a chump

[Looking for Growth @lfg_uk]

Granton deserves a tram.

The question is how?

Option A: Roseburn Path – an old railway line, shut down decades ago, but approved for tram use 20 years ago.

Option B: Orchard Brae – 80% more expensive, 8 minutes slower, and will take longer to build.

The solution is clear. Now it’s time to approve it.

Next Thursday, Edinburgh councillors must APPROVE Option A.

Tell them.

[Yohan @yohaniddawela]

For six months, Google Maps sent a slice of drivers in ten American cities down deliberately slower routes.

About 30 seconds slower on average, and under 2% of trips were touched. The experiment ran on roughly 100 of the most congested road segments in each city, switching on and off day by day so each city acted as its own control. The results are out now in Nature Cities, from Google Research with collaborators at Berkeley and Stanford.

The reasoning behind it is old and slightly counterintuitive. Every navigation app does the same thing: it finds you the fastest route right now, for you alone. When millions of phones do that at once they all pour onto the same handful of arteries, and those arteries stop being fast. Transport economists have been writing about the gap between what's good for one driver and what's good for the network since the 1950s. Nobody had tested a fix at city scale with real drivers, because you'd need to steer routing for a large share of a city's traffic, and about three companies on Earth are in that position.

So Google put a penalty on the worst segments during their worst hours, which nudged the routing engine towards alternatives of similar road class and comparable travel time, then measured what happened across the whole network on weekdays between 7am and 8pm.

On the targeted segments, traffic moved roughly 2% faster in the median city. Los Angeles got 4.56%, Atlanta 3.30%. Fuel burn on those stretches dropped between 0.5% and 1%. Across every road that saw a change in traffic, which covers around 80% of each city's driving, speeds rose 0.35%, reaching 0.5% during the morning and evening peaks. Total travel time on affected trips fell 0.69%. Their Bayesian model put the probability that the speed effect was genuinely positive at 99.8%.

That adds up to more than 1,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent saved per year, per city, in most of the places studied. Cars and vans account for around 10% of global carbon emissions, and the average driver spends about 2.6 years of their life behind the wheel, so a fraction of a percent across an entire road network is a serious amount of fuel.

Per driver, the saving comes to about 0.25% of an average journey, roughly one fortieth of the normal day-to-day wobble in how long the same commute takes. Nobody in those ten cities noticed anything, in either direction, including the people sent the long way round.

The authors are careful about what they haven't shown. They measured the immediate effect, not what happens once drivers work out the freed-up route is quicker and pile back onto it, which is the standard way road improvements get eaten. Their penalty scheme was deliberately crude, so the ceiling on the approach is unknown. And the underlying Google Maps data is commercially confidential, so nobody outside can check the numbers.

The finding sitting underneath all this is that a private company's routing algorithm has become a piece of transport infrastructure, tunable in the way a traffic light or a congestion charge is tunable. The obvious follow-up experiments are the ones a city government would want to run, not the ones a mapping company would.

link to full article: https://t.co/RlRlDLCSER

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@2whazzuup aha, this is the way 👏

[Mhairi Hunter 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 🇺🇦 🇵🇸 @MhairiHunter]

Courage really isn't the issue here. It takes courage to jump off a cliff. That doesn't mean that anybody should. There is no peaceful democratic route to achieve independence other than through a process agreed with UK gov. Any strategy which seeks to bypass that is not serious.

[Kenny Farquharson @KennyFarq]

Edinburgh nimbys strike again. To me, it seems idiotic to object to an old trainline being used as a tramline.

[Paul Rollo @paul]

@Bill_Linnane top tier

[Ross Colquhoun @rosscolquhoun]

Sevilla FC was founded by a Scot, by its first president, Edward Farquharson Johnston from Elgin.