The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
The news that Roger Tomlinson, famously ‘the father of GIS‘, passed away few days ago are sad – although I met him only few times, it was an honour to meet one of the pioneers of my field. A special delight during my PhD research was to discover, at the UCL library the proceedings of […]
This was the submission by the Mapping London editors i […]
Continue reading »We are big fans of maps based on a circle and of Adam D […]
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The Guardian’s Political Science blog post by Alice Bell about the Memorandum of Understanding between the UK Natural Environment Research Council and Shell, reminded me of a nagging issue that has concerned me for a while: to what degree GIS contributed to anthropocentric climate change? and more importantly, what should GIS professionals do? I’ll say from the start […]
I’ve been modelling the interconnected nature of the global economy by simulating a reduction in demand for various sectors in various countries. It’s a very simple little piece of analysis: What would happen if the demand for a given sector in a given country was reduced by a single US dollar? In answering this question […]
Continue reading »Science and the City is an annual weekend-long hackfest, co-organized by NYU’s ITP, the Interactive Telecommunications Programme, and CUSP, the Center for Urban Science and Progress. The theme is citizen science for exploring and improving our urban environment. Some of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Here is the topography slideshow, otherwise read on.. Over the past few years I’ve been looking at lots of relief maps – i.e. those showing geographical topography, specifically land elevation, and I’m generally struck by two things. Firstly how the colour schemes commonly used seem too dominant, which seems to reduce the brain’s capacity for […]
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Here is the topography slideshow, otherwise read on.. Over the past few years I’ve been looking at lots of relief maps – i.e. those showing geographical topography, specifically land elevation, and I’m generally struck by two things. Firstly how the colour schemes commonly used seem too dominant, which seems to reduce the brain’s capacity for […]
Continue reading »I was intrigued by this blog post of a lovely looking m […]
Continue reading »Robin Edwards, a researcher at UCL CASA, has created th […]
Continue reading »Model design is one of the most important stages of the development of any agent-based model. Get the design wrong and you might find yourself tied up in knots, battling against the structure of the project you defined months before. Get it right and you’ll leave yourself a extensible platform to develop into, allowing yourself …
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As an update to the last post, I’ve put the agent script model of the live tube trains on the web. This shows the “nearly” live positions of all tube trains in London. One warning though, you need to reload the page to refresh the data. I wasn’t planning on releasing this just yet, so …
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Tubes running up to 10am on 5 February 2014, during the first day of the tube strike The graph above is a stacked area chart showing the number of tubes running on each of the London Underground lines. The width of the coloured part represents the number of tubes (i.e. 150 is the total number …
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In the early 1960s two American geography professors, John Nystuen and Michael Dacy, were working on a way to make sense of a huge database of telephone records in Washington state. Clearly the majority of calls were being made either to or from Seattle, the state’s largest city, but they suspected there was more underlying […]
Continue reading »Travelling around London is a little harder today. With […]
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Learn the New Science of Cities at University College London with the MSc in Smart Cities at The Bartlett’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis from September 2014. APPLY NOW FOR SEPTEMBER ENTRY As Course Director, i am pleased to announce the new MSc and MRes in Smart Cities, here at…
Learn the New Science of Cities at University College London with the MSc in Smart Cities at The Bartlett’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis from September 2014. APPLY NOW FOR SEPTEMBER ENTRY As Course Director, i am pleased to announce the new MSc and MRes in Smart Cities, here at…
This time last year I published the first version of the 2011 Census Open Atlas which comprised Output Area Level census maps for each local authority district. This turned out to be quite a popular project, and I have also extended this to Japan.
The methods used to construct the atlases have now been refined, so each atlas is built from a series of PDF pairs comprising a map and a legend. These are generated for each of the census variable (where appropriate), with the layout handled by Latex. As with demonstrated in the Japan atlas, this also gives the advantage of enabling a table of contents and better description for each map.
Some other changes in version two include:
When the original project was picked up by the Guardian I made an estimate of the actual number of maps created, however, for this run, I counted them. In total 134,567 maps were created.
The maps can be downloaded from github; and again, the code used to create the maps is here (feel free to fix my code!).
A manual map might typically take 5 minutes to create – thus:
So, if you take a 35 hour working week for 46 weeks of a year (6 weeks holiday), this equates to 1,610 hours of map making time per year. As such, finishing 134,567 maps would take 6.9 years (11,213.9 / 1,610).
This would obviously be a very boring job; however, it would also be expensive. If we take the median wages of a GIS Technician at £20,030 then the “cost” of all these maps would be 6.9 X £20,030 = £138,207. This toy example does illustrate how learning to code can help save significant money, and indeed what a useful tool R is for spatial analysis.
A major problem in understanding contemporary (and future) cities is the fact that they ‘appear’ to be changing faster than we can keep up. Our theories which were culled in the last half century about how cities are spatially organised … Continue reading →
Continue reading »For reasons that may become clearer in future, I needed to use a bandpass filter in an iOS app. The DSP part of Apple’s Accelerate framework makes this lightning fast both for the programmer to implement and for the machine to execute … if the programmer knows how use vDSP_deq22, which is documented, at best, […]
Continue reading »For reasons that may become clearer in future, I needed to use a bandpass filter in an iOS app. The DSP part of Apple’s Accelerate framework makes this lightning fast both for the programmer to implement and for the machine to execute … if the programmer knows how use vDSP_deq22, which is documented, at best, […]
Continue reading »For reasons that may become clearer in future, I needed to use a bandpass filter in an iOS app. The DSP part of Apple’s Accelerate framework makes this lightning fast both for the programmer to implement and for the machine to execute … if the programmer knows how use vDSP_deq22, which is documented, at best, […]
Continue reading »Amazingly as far back as January 1967, we were quite literally talking about ‘a science of cities’, using the cliche. Jennifer Light’s book From Warfare to Welfare published in 2003 recounts the optimism of the 1960s in which many believed … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Following on from my previous posts on AgentScript and Google Maps, I’ve fixed the performance problem when zooming in and built a model of the London Underground to play with: An AgentScript model of the London Underground using data for 27 January 2014 at 15:42:00 I’m not going to include the modified code here as …
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London Tube Stats takes ten years worth of passenger en […]
Continue reading »London Tube Stats takes ten years worth of passenger en […]
Continue reading »Here at The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis we run a simple dashboard view of the weather in London. The background of the dashboard changes colour to a variety of pantone shades according to temperature. Via our CEDE project we are starting to experiment with the Philips Hue Wifi Lighting System. With the ability to…
