I’d love to replicate this study in Minneapolis/St. Paul:
Billboards advertising unhealthy food are concentrated in poorerareas and areas with a higher proportion of overweight children in Liverpool, UK. These findings may also apply across the country.
Using a combination of artificial intelligence and street-view images, Mark Green and his colleagues at the University of Liverpool mapped the content and geographical location of more than 10,000 outdoor adverts in the city. …
He cycled on Liverpool’s streets between 14 and 18 January, wearing a 360-degree camera that was programmed to take images twice a second.
The camera collected more than 26,600 street-level images. To analyse them, the researchers first used an existing machine-learning algorithm that was trained to isolate advertisements from the surrounding environment. [NewScientist]
Although whether there’s data on the neighborhoods of overweight children around here is not known to me.
The unequal exposure to junk food advertising may result from the least deprived areas in Liverpool being leafy suburbs with few billboards, says Green. This trend is likely to be repeated in other cities. The team also found a concentration of food, gambling and alcohol ads around university student areas.
One of the challenges of data analysis is discovering if a trend is due to deliberate human choice, or other realities.
