iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 4h

Obvious concerns about unmitigated ecological fallacy aside, this is a lot of fun to play with. (Pretty confident much of this would survive if this were handed properly, missed opportunity to put some methodological rigour behind this that would elevate this from toy to actual insights.)

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 18h

I guess in an environment where everyone gets used to highly discretionary permitting things like bribery and kickbacks just get casually referred to as getting someone to “work magic” and help “navigating” city hall.

He was, for decades, the city’s preeminent “permit expediter,” leaning on the many workers he placed within the city’s building department to work magic for clients navigating San Francisco’s treacherous construction landscape.

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Alberto Cairo @albertocairo.com · 28/09/2026

Lovely and deep visual op-ed by Giorgia Lupi: "A.I. is a different kind of technology, because it can deliver an end result before creative thinking has happened at all" www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

nytimes.com

Opinion | A.I. Shortcuts Are Ruining How We Think (Gift Article)

Anything worth remembering came from a person who did not know where she or he was going until arriving.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 28/09/2026

This reminds me of when the New Math movement argued kids don’t need to learn fractions because of calculators. Fortunately that got reversed, but only after a generation of children failed algebra. If you can’t manipulate fractions with numbers it’s hard to learn how to manipulate it with symbols.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

2025 fertility rate estimates came out yesterday, posting the obligatory annual graph. Overall Canada TFR remained steady at 1.26. (As a reminder, TFR is a synthetic measure and general cautions apply, especially if you want to write about this in the news media or have arguments about this.)

Total Fertility Rate across Canadian provinces

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

canpumf v0.6.0 is now on CRAN. This is version comes with major new features: * Discover and import PUMF from Borealis Dataverse * LFS monthly PUMF back to 1976 * LFS harmonization * more robust handling of StatCan mojibake, undeclared NA labels and other StatCan metadata issues

mountainmath.github.io

Parse StatCan PUMF Files

Facilitate working with Statistics Canada (StatCan) Public Use Microdata Files (PUMF). Enables downloading of available PUMF data, parsing of metadata from command files or other sources to infer the ...

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OneCity Vancouver @onecityvan.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Do you live in Vancouver, do you want a home of your own? What about just the dignity of renting without the fear of eviction? OneCity has a team and a plan for that, The Way Home & Housing for All www.onecityvancouver.ca/news/housing... #VanPoli

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Current status: mojibake warrior ÃƒÂ©, twice-cooked. I peel back one code page â€“ then another. Still Ã©.

GitHub issue documenting fix for mojibake en-dash shipped by StatCan

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

New quarterly population estimates out today. Important to note that StatCan made changes to how they estimate the non-permanent resident population in Canada. And that led to noticeable back-corrections, in particular for work permit holders.

NPR population in Canada by type of permit

Changes for this release
As part of this release, Statistics Canada is applying two new adjustments to the estimates of non-permanent residents to more accurately measure the presence of permit holders in Canada.

The first adjustment is based on data sources recently acquired by Statistics Canada. The second adjustment responds to a migration context that has evolved rapidly over the past few years.

For the first adjustment, data on entries and exits from the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) were used to estimate, at an aggregate level, the proportion of permit holders who left Canada before their permits expired.

At the same time, the increase in the number of permit extensions and the time required to process them has made it increasingly important to better account for individuals who remain in Canada while their extension application is being processed (i.e., on maintained status). The second adjustment therefore aims to better anticipate permit extensions that are not yet reflected in the Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) administrative data available when the preliminary demographic estimates are produced.

In September each year, with the release of demographic estimates for July 1, Statistics Canada updates previous estimates. For this release, non-permanent resident estimates, and consequently population estimates, have been updated from July 1, 2021, onward. The larger-than-usual update in 2026 to the previously released estimates of the number of non-permanent residents can be attributed to two factors. First, the more recent versions of IRCC's administrative data this year contain substantially more records reflecting permit extensions that were not yet present in the data used to produce preliminary estimates. Second, the new adjustments described above are now incorporated into the estimates.

These adjustments allow the demographic estimates to better capture the moment when permit holders are leaving—or not leaving—the countr…

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

2024 Canadian Housing Survey data came out today, lots of things to look through. One item that will likely get people talking is forced moves. It's a difficult metric to interpret, but there seems to be a COVID dip and now a jump in 2024 across all regions. canviz.mountainmath.ca/plot?v=13757...

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Lots of people raving about Jev, so I took it for a spin on a couple text classification and scoring tasks. My verdict: Super useful if your task fits their pattern, and it fits a lot more uses than I initially though it would. I could not find an R client, so I put together a simple one.

github.com

GitHub - mountainMath/JevR: R client for the TypeSafe Jev System One API

R client for the TypeSafe Jev System One API. Contribute to mountainMath/JevR development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

Quick example of nondeterministic nature of NTILE in sql. DuckDB optimizing and parallelizes queries that mess up row order. SQL: SELECT PPSORT, NTILE(10) OVER (ORDER BY SHELCO) AS shelter_bins (This can be made deterministic by providing more sorting columns that make the order deterministic.)

$```{r setup} library(tidyverse) library(canpumf) ``` ```{r} d <- get_pumf("Census","2021") nt1 <- d |> mutate(shelter_bins = ntile(SHELCO,10)) |> select(PPSORT,shelter_bins) |> collect() nt2 <- d |> mutate(shelter_bins = ntile(SHELCO,10)) |> select(PPSORT,shelter_bins) |> collect() full_join(nt1,nt2,by="PPSORT") |> count(shelter_bins.x==shelter_bins.y) close_pumf(d) ```$

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Alon (they/them) @alonlevy.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I so very much hate the comparison between Zohran Mamdani, a YIMBY whose killer app is that he doesn't rain hate on city civil servants the way previous mayors did, and Elif Eralp, a left-NIMBY who tries to reduce Berlin's housing production and promises unconstitutional confiscations of apartments.

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Peter Waldkirch 華彼德 @pwaldkirch.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

The defeat of Vancouver’s Villages Plan is a major setback for addressing our housing crisis and appears to mark the end of the Vancouver Plan, which has been the main focus of our planning department since 2018. Read more in my first piece for Sightline!

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Michael Wiebe @michaelwiebe.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

If you think rich tech workers moving in is bad for low-end rents, then you also have to accept that adding high-end supply is good. Supply and demand work symmetrically. www.buildingabundance.ca/p/housing-la...

buildingabundance.ca

Housing ladder spillovers

Rich newcomers can raise low-end rents, and adding high-end homes can lower them

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Randomly thought of this photo today taken by David Ley in 1974 of people protesting the construction of what would be the last mid-rise in Kitsilano before the downzoning. Apartments build in the 60s and 70s are now often celebrated as Vancouver's (relatively) affordable housing stock.

A bulldozer-blocking anti-high-rise protest in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kitsilano in 1974. Among the attendees, wearing a tie, is a city-paid community organiser. Photo: David Ley

Taken from https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2089031/david-and-goliath-priceless-vancouver-academic

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

cansim v0.5.1 is not on CRAN. This is a minor update that tweaks how the package notifies users when it sanitizes StatCan dimension and member names. Sanitizing labels is needed because raw StatCan data ships with hidden characters that can lead to silent data loss.

mountainmath.github.io

Retrieve and work with public Statistics Canada data tables in R

Searches for, accesses, and retrieves Statistics Canada data tables, as well as individual vectors, as tidy data frames. This package enriches the tables with metadata, deals with encoding issues, all...

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Dr. Mike P. Moffatt @mikepmoffatt.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

New piece at iPolitics, with Adam Mongrain (@adammongrain.bsky.social) of More and Better Housing. Canada joining the EU as an "Associate Member" could lower the cost of building a home in Canada while opening new export markets. Read here:

ipolitics.ca

Canada wants more trade with Europe. Start with housing

A well-crafted deal with the EU could also lower the cost of building a home in Canada, while opening new markets for suppliers and manufacturers of construction materials.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Update on this, cansim users should update to the latest version (v0.5.0). The issue with StatCan mixing "non-breaking white space" characters into dimension and member names persists and is getting worse. ⚠️People downloading data directly or using other tools should take note and exercise caution.

Updated summary of label issues in StatCan data.

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Kevin Wilson @kwilsonhfx.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

The year is 2032. Residents are angry that they weren't consulted about a new duplex four blocks over. After 14 public feedback sessions, an online survey, and an app that notifies residents about literally any change, people remain upset about the lack of community consultation.

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Peter Waldkirch 華彼德 @pwaldkirch.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Pro-actively building out a protected and CONNECTED bike network is a really great priority. Right now we rely a lot on development to build active transpo infrastructure, which is why so much of it is piecemeal, unconnected...and useless in getting less confident cyclists out of their cars.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

This is great! And a pleasant departure from the drop in response rates we have seen in many other StatCan surveys.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Pretty cool. Loving how we are increasingly getting complex models shipped as a web app. Turbocharged “data available on request”.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Reading older literature on housing, this one is from 1993, is always interesting. Things have moved very little since then.

ZONING IN INNER-CITY LOW-DENSITY RESIDENTIAL
NEIGHBOURHOODS
Perhaps the strongest evidence for the economic significance of land-use controls is the persistence of low-density residential neighbourhoods in the central areas of Toronto and Vancouver. In both cities, the unanticipated intrusion of high-density residential developments in middle and upper-income low-den-sity neighbourhoods in the 196os led to political pressures for more protective zoning. The result in both cities was a virtual cessation of high-rise development in existing low-density neighbourhoods where, moreover, citizen pressure on politicians has led to the progressive enactment of increasingly detailed regulation of low-scale redevelopment.7
The Vancouver and Toronto experiences provide illuminating evidence of the nature of the demand for certainty which underlies the pressure for zoning controls in existing neighbourhoods. On the margin, the shadow price associated with the density constraints built into zoning regulations would appear to be high. & Nevertheless, the demand for inner-city land used for single-family housing has been increased by the perceived stability of land uses in such areas, and this has encouraged substantial investment in the renovation of inner-city housing along with an increase in its market value.
The value of single-family housing in inner-city low-density neighbour-hoods has been increased by restrictive zoning, whereas the value of land assemblies has fallen. Because of the risks inherent in land assembly, much of the return from redevelopment to higher densities accrues to speculators who assemble land. Without restrictive zoning, the difference between the value of

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

CanViz graphs update automatically when new data is released, check out the new asking rents data that came out today by opening a previously made graph.

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John Lansing @pipedreaming.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

Canada joining the European Committee for Standardization and harmonizing the Canadian building codes with EN construction standards is probably the most viable path forward. CEN already includes non-EU countries like Türkiye and even the UK remains a member post-Brexit.

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Margie @margiesanderson.bsky.social · 06/09/2026

‼️My bike was stolen last night from 41st and Main in Vancouver ‼️ It's a tan electric Muli, very unique. No battery on it when stolen. Please keep an eye out in your alley, bushes, or Fb Marketplace etc. I rely on this bike and really hope to be reunited! project529.com/garage/bikes...

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I’d love to have in-depth discussions about differential privacy, I have conflicting thoughts. But this is just hijacking the term to ride a conspiracy theory. It’s not about the census or differential privacy. Yes, it’s just dumb. Glad we are not there (yet) in Canada, let’s keep it that way.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

PSA: Don't write about housing if you don't understand what a household is. "no major U.S. urban area experienced growth in household formation that exceeded its growth in supply, suggesting there were not significant differences in supply growth between regulated and unregulated regions" 🤡🤡🤡

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John Richmond @johnprichmond.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

It's Taiwan Fest 🇹🇼 in Vancouver peeps!

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Amazing chart, took me a while to decipher. It's annual (July 1st previous year to July 1st reference year) absolute population change for cities with quite different base population, only showing select years and dropping the others, but connecting with a line graph. Misattributed to BC Stats.

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Vincent Arel-Bundock @vincentab.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Big news! 🎉 𝚖𝚊𝚛𝚐𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚎𝚏𝚏𝚎𝚌𝚝𝚜 1.0.0 for #Rstats is out. It’s a big number and it feels like a big step. I wrote a blog on the challenges of interpreting statistical models, SPEED, cool new features, the future, and a 5 year package development and writing odyssey. arelbundock.com/posts/margin...

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Disband Metro Vancouver Regional District and start from scratch

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Amazing to see the level of maturity with which both parties in New Zealand approach housing. I am guessing this explains a lot of the progress that has been made so far, as well as the ability to improve and build on this.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

The grift that keeps on grifting… (Idle thought, grifting with Excel is hard to do well and relatively easy to uncover. Modern grifting tools are nearly impossible to detect this way. Researcher integrity matters, science is dead without it.)

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

The Lake Ontario discussion is tiring. People south of the border, get your shit together. Infantile renaming of bodies of water is the least of your problems. People north of the border, get your shit together. Quick check on where Digital Service Canada messed up:

Side by side view of google baseman as deployed by HICC and one with an added region parameter.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

TongFen v0.3.8 is now on CRAN. TongFen solves the problem of changing (census) geographies over time by creating a semi-custom tabulation on a slightly coarser geography. It addresses the same problem as the Longitudinal Tract Database or similar products without introducing their systematic bias.

mountainmath.github.io

Make Data Based on Different Geographies Comparable

Several functions to allow comparisons of data across different geographies, in particular for Canadian census data from different censuses.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

These visual symbols hit hard.Here is a picture I took almost exactly 6 years ago and it already did not reach the lake back then.

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Nice talk on key issues of our times. The information foraging angle is great.

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Alex Bozikovic @alexbozikovic.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

“Most desirable” places have shrinking populations and are the places where planning makes it hardest to build housing

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Jens von Bergmann @jensvb.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

Happy one year anniversary of the resurrection of this phone. Inadvertently dropped in ankle deep water of the rising tides, presumed dead, it faithfully notified its owner the next day when freed from the ocean’s grip.

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Stan Oklobdzija @stano.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

"Who Goes Nazi?" is something that resonates even 85 years after it was published. But when Trumpism has been beaten down in a few years, I think we're due for "Who Went Nazi?" Some of the defectors I've seen have surprised me.

share.google

Who Goes Nazi?, by Dorothy Thompson

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