Author: Shaunacy Ferro

W.E.B. Du Bois was many things in his lifetime: a civil rights activist—he was a co-founder of the NAACP—a sociologist, a historian, a poet, and an author. And, in a lesser-known role, he was a designer.

Du Bois, who was born on February 23, 1868, attended the 1900 Paris Exposition to present the Exhibit of the American Negroes, a look at the lives of African Americans.

Du Bois himself prepared charts, graphs, and maps to visualize the status and progress of black Americans, particularly in Georgia, where he lived at the time. His colorful, imaginative visualizations, recently discussed on the Public Domain Review, covered topics like income distribution, property values, city population statistics, and marriage rates among African Americans. Here are a few of the exhibition’s highlights:

[h/t Public Domain Review]
All images by W.E.B. Du Bois // Public Domain

Pedestrian culture varies quite a bit between cities across the world, especially when it comes to crosswalks, according to a new study in Royal Society Open Science (highlighted recently by Science magazine).

Japanese and French researchers teamed up to observe stoplights at four different intersections in Nagoya, Japan and three different sites in Strasbourg, France, hypothesizing that France’s individualistic society might encourage people to take more risks than Japan’s collectivist one.

They found that out of 1631 Japanese road crossings observed, only 2 percent of pedestrians crossed against the red light. By contrast, French pedestrians crossed against the light almost 42 percent of the 3814 crossings observed. Furthermore, even law-abiding French pedestrians stepped off the curb sooner than Japanese pedestrians when the light finally turned green.

In both countries, the number of jaywalkers increased when no one was around to notice. When no other people were nearby, French pedestrians crossed illegally 67 percent of the time. Japanese pedestrians jaywalked almost 7 percent of the time when no one was around to see it happen. The researchers hypothesize that people are more afraid of judgment from their peers than of getting a ticket from the police. The researchers write that “they are more afraid of being criticized than they are of being fined.”

But city culture isn’t the only thing that influences whether or not people decide to scamper across the street outside the safe confines of a walk signal. People are more likely to jaywalk when the streets have fewer lanes or when there’s a median, as well as when the wait time between lights is long, among other things.

This study only examined crosswalk culture in two countries, so it can’t really be extrapolated to the whole world, but perhaps other researchers are at work on international jaywalking behavior. It would be interesting to compare the difference between crosswalk behavior in a place like the U.S., where jaywalking is largely against the law, compared to the UK, where jaywalking fines do not exist.

[h/t Science]

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is one of the most notable presidential addresses in history, but that doesn’t mean other U.S. presidents haven’t had their fair share of memorable speeches. The podcast platform Acast gathered up one such speech from each president since John F. Kennedy, collecting audio from some of the most important addresses of the last 50 years.

Most are inaugural addresses, but a few notable speeches midway through presidents’ tenures made the cut, like the voting rights speech Lyndon B. Johnson delivered to Congress in 1965 and Jimmy Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech.

In honor of President’s Day, take a listen to some of the things our past leaders have had to say to the country. All 10 can be found here. And if that’s too modern, there are some audio files available of presidential speeches from the early 20th century here.

A new puppy is a lot of work. Even helping an adult rescue dog adjust to a new home can be time-consuming and stressful, much less a pup that doesn’t know anything about house training. The Scottish beer lovers at BrewDog understand the challenges new puppy parents are under, so the company is now offering “paw-ternity” leave, according to GrubStreet.

“Yes, having dogs in our offices makes everyone else more chilled and relaxed—but we know only too well that having a new arrival … can be stressful for human and hound both,” the company says in its press release on the subject. Now, on top of inviting its employees to bring dogs to the office, BrewDog is giving its workers a week’s paid leave to care for a new canine companion. (Don’t worry, the company says that it also offers “enhanced maternity and paternity pay for two-legged arrivals!”)

BrewDog is opening up a new Columbus, Ohio location, so if you’re in the area and considering adopting a pup, you should probably get a job there.

[h/t GrubStreet]

You don’t need to know how to play the piano to jam with Google’s latest musical experiment, A.I. Duet. The tool, spotted by Gizmodo, lets you plunk out a few notes on a virtual piano, and then artificial intelligence will churn out a melodic response.

The app was created by Google’s Creative Lab and Magenta, the tech company’s open-source research project on artificial intelligence in music and art. Using machine learning and neural networks, the A.I. Duet algorithm learned how to make music through analyzing melodies the Google coders fed it. After being given enough examples, the program learned how notes and timing typically function in a piece of music. When you play a note on the virtual keyboard, it analyzes that previous data and responds accordingly.

Check it out for yourself here. (Just be warned: Unless you’re a professional, the computer is probably a better musician than you.)

[h/t Gizmodo]

What, exactly, does a zookeeper do? Animal Planet’s new show, The Zoo, takes viewers behind the exhibits, where zoo workers do everything from playing matchmaker for rare birds to helping vision-impaired gorillas navigate the world. The show was filmed over the course of eight months at the biggest metropolitan zoo in the U.S., the Bronx Zoo in New York City, which is home to more than 650 different animal species and the headquarters of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

In the first episode, zookeepers diagnose and treat a silverback gorilla with glaucoma in what might be the first surgery of its kind. In another vignette, zoo employees, who have hand-raised two tigers abandoned by their mother, work to reintroduce the cubs to both the Tiger Mountain exhibit and other adult tigers they’ll share the space with. In a third, a senior zookeeper monitors two endangered birds as they are introduced as potential mates, and watches carefully to spot a laid egg before it gets crushed by its mother.

The Zoo is a rare look into the day-to-day conservation work that goes on at zoos, whose very existence some animal rights groups see as unethical.

“The series emphasizes that today’s zoos must do more than exhibit animals,” Jim Breheny, director of the Bronx Zoo, said in a press statement. “They must have a higher purpose and that purpose is conservation of species in the wild.”

The show premieres Saturday, February 18 at 10 p.m. EST. Trust us, it’s worth staying in for.

Facebook wants to help you find your next job. The company just launched a jobs page within the site to allow companies to advertise their career openings, as Fast Company reports. If you see a job you want to apply for, you don’t even have to leave the site to throw your hat into the ring.

The Facebook jobs page allows you to filter opportunities by location, industry, and time commitment (full-time, part-time, internship, etc.). The jobs bookmark gathers all listings in the same place, but if you’re looking for work with a specific company, corporate Facebook pages now have a jobs tab in the same toolbar where you’d look for their photos or their “about” section.

If you see a posting you like, you can apply within the site. Facebook will pre-populate the application with basic info from your profile, and then you can insert your cover letter and add relevant experience or education that isn’t on your Facebook profile as needed. You can also delete or edit information that Facebook auto-filled from your profile if necessary.

It’s a great deal for Facebook, since the social media network can now become even more intertwined with the rest of your life. Even if you tire of the social aspects of the site, you’ll need to maintain a profile in order to use its job-searching capabilities. And making it easier to apply for jobs is a good incentive to get people to share information about their education and past job experience on their profile, even if they previously didn’t think Facebook needed to know what high school they went to.

For users, the amazing convenience might be colored a bit by privacy implications. For one thing, you’re adding to the treasure trove of (sometimes creepy) personal information Facebook already has about you. And then there’s the fact that you’re throwing the doors to your social-media presence wide open for potential employers. Employers may have already looked up potential hires on Facebook to suss out any red flags that might make them think twice about a candidate, but when the job application itself is on Facebook, the process is that much easier. The jobs function lets applicants choose what information on their profile to share with the potential employers, but if you do forget to hide something damning, it won’t take any real effort on the part of your would-be boss to find it.

[h/t Fast Company]

Driving around Iceland is a great way to catch the Northern Lights. Unfortunately, staring up in wonder at the sky is not a great way to drive. According to Iceland Magazine, drivers in the Land of Fire and Ice should take heed: They could be pulled over for driving under the influence of the aurora borealis.

Icelandic police patrolling near the Keflavík International Airport recently pulled over two separate drivers who claimed their erratic behavior on the road was due to the celestial phenomenon, not drunkenness. Both cars were swerving on the road as their passengers—all foreign tourists—stared up at the sky rather than keeping their eyes on the road. Unfortunately, there’s no breathalyzer for natural wonder.

While it’s understandable to get a bit carried away while checking the aurora borealis off your tourism bucket list, that’s no excuse for treating lane markers as suggestions. The police skipped ticketing the distracted travelers and recommended that next time, they pull over to look up at the Northern Lights. Better yet, they should have booked a room in a glass igloo to watch them all night long.

[h/t Travel + Leisure]

You can build just about anything in Minecraft, and many users have taken it upon themselves to remake the physical world within the game, erecting pixelated homages to the entirety of Denmark, for instance. Now Minecraft tourists have a new destination to explore: the city of Chicago. A dedicated Minecraft user recently recreated the Windy City in painstaking detail at half-scale, as Curbed Chicago reports.

The project, posted on Imgur, took three and a half years to complete. Redditor Koodoo25 slowly built up the virtual city using data and images from Google Maps, Emporis, and Skyscraper Page, along with models from SketchUp 3D Warehouse to make the model accurate down to the details on the buildings’ facades. “There may be a few tiny details or dimensions a little bit off, but everything down to the placement of street lights and trees was done to recreate what I saw in Google Maps StreetView as accurately as I could,” the creator writes on reddit.

The city is at half scale because the model has to accommodate the Willis (Sears) Tower, which at a 1:1 scale would be far taller than Minecraft allows. The game has a 256-meter (840 feet) height maximum, and the building stands 442 meters (1450 feet) tall. And that’s without its spire.

Since the model is so exhaustive, it only includes buildings in the center of downtown Chicago. At this rate, it would take decades to visualize the entirety of the city’s 234 square miles.

You can download it and explore yourself via Planet Minecraft. It’s still in progress, though, so although it’ll never include every neighborhood in the city, expect to see a few more areas added in the near future.

[h/t Curbed Chicago]

All images courtesy Koodoo25 via Imgur

If you want to hop on a bus and set out on a last-minute adventure, a site called Wanderu could help make that whim a reality—and maybe even help you do it on the cheap. The fare aggregator pulls ground transportation schedules from operators like Amtrak and Greyhound, and as Thrillist reports, you can get pretty far on just a dollar.

The site’s Explorer section lets you input your location and the day you want to leave to show you where you can go for the cheapest price. Right now, $1 could get you to Boston or D.C. from New York City, and $5 could get you to Providence, Rhode Island. Well, assuming you’re fine with leaving on a four-hour bus trip at 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. (The site will also show you more luxe options, like express buses and trains.)

It’s a handy feature for getting ideas for your next weekend trip. Even if you aren’t looking for a ticket under $10, the site makes it easy to compare budget bus and train options that similar sites like Kayak or Expedia don’t offer. So even if you discover that yes, you really do have to pay $40 to cram yourself into a bus for four hours, you will at least have saved some time doing it. 

[h/t Thrillist]