Do Not Touch” signs in art exhibitions. Of the 15 responding museums that offered limited free admission days or hours, more than half reported a significant difference in visitor demographics: seniors, large family groups, school groups, disabled persons and drug or alcohol recovery groups were most likely to attend at these times. Museums in Seattle, Scottsdale, San Diego and the San Francisco Bay area all reported an increase in student visitors on free admission days. Sue Cake, a longtime docent at the Oakland Museum of California, observed that free admission days enabled teachers to assign a museum visit as part of a class lesson, likely a factor for increased student visitation at many museums.
David Bloom on 10 Apr 14This map shows the location of every independent coffee shop in Brooklyn and the walking-shed community associated with it. Independent coffee shops are positive markers of a living community. They function as social spaces, urban offices, and places to see the world go by. Communities are often formed by having spaces in which people can have casual interactions, and local and walkable coffee shops create those conditions, not only in the coffee shop themselves, but on the sidewalks around them. We use maps to know where these coffee shop communities exist and where, by placing new coffee shops, we can help form them. We applied two steps to generate the data displayed by the map. First, we used the Google Places API to locate all coffee shops in a given city. Second, for each point in the map we queried the walking route and distance to its nearest coffee shop using the Google Distance Matrix API. In the final map the colored areas represent a region which is walkable to a specific coffee shop (within one kilometer or 0.7 miles). The intensity of color at each point indicates its distance from its corresponding coffee shop.
