Brandon Donnelly — Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly. — Page 919

I have been using Google Translate a lot on this trip. Few people here in Rio de Janeiro speak English.

It is an incredible app that also works without cell service. You just download whatever language(s) you need to your phone.

There’s a conversation feature that allows you to go back and forth with someone in real time (almost). 

There’s a camera feature that is invaluable for translating restaurant menus.

And there are a number of smaller features that I have also found really useful. 

For example, if you rotate your phone into landscape mode, it will show you your translation in big text like a flash card.

It looks like this (trust me it is useful):

I also just learned that, since November 2016, the Translate app has been using a neural machine translation system developed by Google.

It is capable of understanding and translating complete sentences, and that has reduced translation errors by about 60% compared to the previous system.

Rather than translate word-by-word or phrase-by-phrase, Google’s NMT network encodes the “ semantics of sentences .”

To learn more about GNMT, click here .

In 2015, Marshall Burke, Sol Hsiang, and Ted Miguel published a paper in  Nature that looked at the relationship between temperature (climate) and economic output. They examined the historical impact of temperature changes (1960-2010) on 166 countries and then used this data to try and predict the potential future impacts of climate change on GDP per capita.   

What they discovered is that temperature has a non-linear impact on economic production. Put differently, there’s an optimal annual average temperature. And it turns out to be 13 degrees celsius. If a country sits below this average number, then warming increases productivity. But if a country sits above this number, then warming has a negative impact on productivity. And the impact gets worse (stronger negative correlation) at higher temperatures.

Some of you are probably wondering whether the correlations they found should be interpreted as causation. For what it’s worth, the study tries to correct for non-temperature related economic changes (such as a recession or policy changes) and it also looks at how individual countries perform against themselves during temperature fluctuations. So the control and treatment groups are arguably pretty tight.

All of this suggests that there are a number of countries that stand to benefit from climate change (at least from this perspective). They are the ones that are cold today. 

For more on the study, click here .

Rio de Janeiro has some pretty spectacular entranceways. Here is one that I found today on Rua Duvivier in Copacabana:

It is a magical front door located exactly one block from the beach.

The other gem I stumbled upon today was Rua Carvalho de Mendonça, pictured here:

Toward the left (above) is a narrow bollard-separated lane for cars. The rest of the right of way is dedicated to pedestrians and bicycles.

When I was there today the sun was shining and the retail was in full swing.

But perhaps my favorite thing about this street is the residential terraces sitting on top of the single storey “retail podiums.”

They add life (and eyes) to the street.