The Physics of a Good Store Location

Roland Piquepaille writes, "In 'Atomic Physics Predicts Successful Store Location,' LiveScience reports that a French physicist has applied methods used to study atomic interactions for another task: to 'help business owners find the best places to locate their stores.' Pablo Jensen has used his method for the city of Lyon and is now developing software with the local Chamber of Commerce to help future business owners. Read more for additional references and maps of the city of Lyon showing for example the best locations to open a bakery, according to atomic physics." Jensen says that more research is needed to know if this method would work in other cities.

Roland Piquepaille Junk Science #2

[Anonymous Coward]

That's two Roland junk science articles that have made Slashdot today. I guess since people have stopped clicking links for him, Roland has to up the submission rates to the editors.

ONCE AGAIN, he is linking to the same zdnet blog that he has the last 4 times. Are you editors all dumb? Can you not figure out it's a ad-trap? I guess since we can't filter him, we have to make posts like this to bitch. Did I mention this is more junk science to ad rape us with? K...

So yea offtopic me all you want Roland (with your many accounts here), but since (as usual) this is a submission for ad clicks, I just want to say thanks for wasting my eyeballs again. Let's hope people realize this is crap before they post and click for him. Not that his links have anything to do with real science...which makes this whole submission offtopic.

Re:Roland Piquepaille Junk Science #2

[FhnuZoag]

While I can make no guesses as to the intent of the submitter, the article in question looks legit - it refers to a real future article in Physics Review E, which is a pretty well recognised peer reviewed journal dealing with Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter physics.

See http://scitation.aip.org/dbt/dbt.jsp?KEY=PLEEE8&Vo lume=74&Issue=3#MAJOR4 [aip.org]

Re:Roland Piquepaille Junk Science #2

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, and thank you for the link to real article, which was NOT linked in the summary. The above poster's issue was with the sites that WERE linked in the summary.

How To Block Roland Piquepaille

[Anonymous Coward]

For Firefox users, this Greasemonkey script will hide stories submitted by Roland Piquepaille:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/5738 [userscripts.org]

Re:Interesting - but not a general solution.

[Pink Tinkletini]

In urban planning and economics, this is called location theory [google.com]. See, for instance, "The Geography of Entrepreneurship in the New York Metropolitan Area," [frb.org] published last year in the Economic Policy Review, which describes one such model as you describe. (Warning, PDF with 3.4 MB of cool maps.)

Emergence

[Infonaut]

There's an intriguing discussion of geographic distribution of commerce in Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software [simonsays.com] by Stephen Johnson.

It's a great read, and it gave me all kinds of nonlinear insights into How The World Works that I hadn't really thought about before. It also definitely made me want to bust out Sim City again.