Nikhil Sonnad put together a nice interactive based on a working paper by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne from the University of Oxford. Overall, there’s a decreasing relationship between median wage and likelihood of the position being automated. In other words, the people who can least afford to be unemployed are the most at risk.

More troubling, though, are some of the job categories threatened by automation: food preparation and servers, waiters, retail salespeople, and cashiers. Those same categories are the ones where the economy is adding the most jobs, according to Annie Lowry, reporting for the New York Times:

The National Employment Law Project study found especially strong growth in restaurants and food services, administrative and waste services and retail trades. Those industries — which often pay wages at the federal minimum — accounted for about 40 percent of the increase in private sector employment over the past four years.

That’s not good news. Back in September 2013, when Frey and Osborne wrote their working paper, they said 47 percent of U.S. jobs are at risk of being automated. Given the tenor of the recovery, I can’t see that decreasing. Which means that, in the next decade or two, we could be facing another employment crisis.

Yours truly, writing at NOVA Next:

Despite the amount of effort sunk into exploration, little has been done to prepare for oil spills, according to a new report by the National Research Council. Much of what we know about oil spills comes from dealing with the disasters in warmer oceans, like the Gulf of Mexico. These regions not only have different thermodynamic properties from the Arctic—which helps disperse thick oil—but they also are surrounded by more infrastructure—the ports, ships, and supplies required to clean up the mess.

Brian Ries, writing at Mashable:

Russian users of Google Maps, who use the service through Google.ru, will see that Crimea is wholly a territory of Mother Russia. That black line is a border — the same style that marks all 1,426.07 miles from the Black Sea in the south to Belarus in the north.

Americans who visit the region on Google Maps through Google.com will see the disputed border — where it seems the two countries are still working things out.

But what for Ukrainians, who lost Crimea following Russia’s annexation last month? Nothing to see here. Users on Google.ua will hardly notice a nearly invisible grey dotted line that etches its way between Crimea and mainland Ukraine.

Anand Giridharadas, writing at the New York Times, notes how much the U.S. has changed in just 16 years:

The country has changed since “Seinfeld” signed off in May 1998, and Jerry has changed. His popular new online show, “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” dispenses with the observational examination of regular life that defined the old “Seinfeld.” In its place is a show, well suited to an era dominated by talk of inequality and its effects, in which the über-successful hang out together, and our inability to relate becomes the point.

(Via Seth Fletcher.)

Matt Novak:

American architect Philip Johnson designed some of the most iconic buildings of the 20th century. Johnson, who died in 2005, has long been hailed as one of the greats. But there’s one fact about the man that many people in the architecture community don’t like to talk about: Johnson was a fascist who openly supported Adolf Hitler and the Nazis for nearly a decade.

Tobias Frere-Jones:

I re-read Maurice Annenberg’s “Type Foundries of America and their Catalogs”, tracked down business directories of the period, and spent too much time in Google Earth. But I was able to plot out the locations for every foundry that had been active in New York between 1828 (the earliest records I could find with addresses) to 1909 (see below). All of the buildings have been demolished, and in some cases the entire street has since been erased. But a startling picture still emerged: New York once had a neighborhood for typography.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Fun quiz by Rose Eveleth for Nautilus. (I missed number nine, but at least I my guess was a city in a similar biome.)

When you’re done, come back and see if you can tell urban from rural.

Halley Docherty puts classic album covers like “Physical Graffiti” by Led Zepplin and the Beatles “Abbey Road” in context. 

Matt Novak:

In the early 1980s, Washington Post editor Joel Garreau outlined the nine different Americas he and his fellow journalists saw when they looked at a map of North America.

People just love redrawing boundaries. Researchers at an alphabet soup of institutions—AT&T, IBM, and MIT—are no exception. Where past flights of geographical fancy used currency or just plain whimsy, they used data from cell phone usage. 

(Via Ellie Kesselman.)

A Texas network is often included in maps of potential high-speed rail corridors, but given the freeway-friendly politics of the state, you’d be forgiven in thinking its a long shot. Apparently, some businessmen in Texas disagree, and they have plans to open a 90-minute link between Dallas and Houston by 2021 using Shinkansen technology.

This interactive from the Guardian takes a bit to get into (click “scroll down” a few times), but it’s worth it. I spent six days on the reef in 2002 after setting out from Gladstone, and it’s an experience I’ll never forget. I told myself I’d get back one day, now I’m not sure I’ll be able to make it in time.

Architect Mitchell Joachim, being interviewed by Diana Budds for Dwell:

Green technology has to be more affordable. We have to find systems that will leapfrog previous ones and are actually cheaper at the point of purchase. Moreover, we have to accept that we can’t change the American value system. Everyone wants to own property and have a sovereign or autonomous lifestyle. We have to react by innovating.

Stephen J. Smith, writing for Next City:

SFpark, the city’s variable-rate parking program, is perhaps the most complete implementation of Shoup’s ideas to date. Started three years ago, the program gradually adjusts rates on electronic parking meters in the most congested parts of the city. (All are near downtown.) Rates can differ by time of day and day of the week, and are adjusted every month or so. Even then, they can only rise or fall by 25 cents after each adjustment period and are capped at $6 per hour, which costs less than nearby garages, where hourly rates can reach into the double digits.

According to a study published last month in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, the program has worked. San Francisco’s occupancy goals have been met, and “cruising” for parking — driving around and clogging up streets after you’ve already reached your destination — is down by 50 percent.

Lily Kuo, writing for Quartz:

If higher density makes so much sense, why haven’t Chinese cities embraced it already? One major reason is that local governments are highly dependent on selling undeveloped land to developers. Redeveloping existing cities to make them more dense wouldn’t result in any local government revenue.

NASA’s Blue Marble series was inspired by the whole-Earth image taken by Apollo 17 in 1972, but aside from that, I haven’t heard much about why it was revived as a series in 2002. Well, Quartz has the backstory:

[Robert] Simmon and his colleague at NASA at the time, Reto Stöckli, created the iconic image that ended up on the iPhone in part to undercut what he saw as undeserving operators profiting in the marketplace for space imagery, he told Quartz. At the time, he recalled, similar falsely colored images rendered from older black-and-white NASA data were selling for up to $10,000. Simmon and Stöckli’s image, as a work created by US government employees, was in the public domain—free for anyone to use, for any purpose, without restriction. Simmon posted it on the NASA website and didn’t think much more of it.

Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix:

[O]n other big ISPs, due to a lack of sufficient interconnectivity, Netflix performance has been constrained, subjecting consumers who pay a lot of money for high-speed Internet to high buffering rates, long wait times and poor video quality. A recent Wall Street Journal article chronicled this degradation using our public data. 

Once Netflix agrees to pay the ISP interconnection fees, however, sufficient capacity is made available and high quality service for consumers is restored. If this kind of leverage is effective against Netflix, which is pretty large, imagine the plight of smaller services today and in the future. Roughly the same arbitrary tax is demanded from the intermediaries such as Cogent and Level 3, who supply millions of websites with connectivity, leading to a poor consumer experience.

Without strong net neutrality, big ISPs can demand potentially escalating fees for the interconnection required to deliver high quality service. The big ISPs can make these demands — driving up costs and prices for everyone else — because of their market position.

Yours truly, writing on February 24:

Many people have predicted (and feared) that the day would come when a content provider would pay an internet provider for priority access to broadband subscribers. Now that it’s here, I can’t help but wonder why it happened now and with Comcast, especially when you consider that Netflix and Verizon have also been duking it out over the same issue (arguably in a more public way).

The answer, I think, is that Netflix is using Comcast’s bid to buy Time Warner to its advantage. As a part of the buyout approval process, both the FCC and the Department of Justice will be scrutinizing Comcast’s moves and market power in the coming months. Having made this payment, Netflix can make the case to either the FCC or the DoJ that pre-Time Warner Comcast has used its dominance in broadband—about 27 percent of the market—to extract payments from content providers like itself. Netflix could argue that if the Time Warner deal goes through, Comcast will have nearly 50 percent of the market, and its bargaining power to demand such payments will further increase.

Nick Stockton, writing for Wired Map Lab:

Hudson Yards is the largest private development project in U.S. history, and it’s being built without footings or foundations. Instead, the project is going to sit atop 300 concrete-sleeved, steel caissons jammed deep into the underlying bedrock. Work on the platform broke ground last week, and will take roughly two and a half years to complete. In that time, there’s a lot of engineering to do.