(Spatial) Data Science: A Few Thoughts for Students
What do you say when someone asks: “I’m working on a course assignment… to gain insights into the [data science] industry”? Continue reading →
Continue reading »Author: Jon Reades
Seaborn Plots with 2 Legends
Posted here because I will inevitably forget this painfully worked-out answer for having legends for two different types of plots in Seaborn… import numpy as np import pandas as pd import seaborn as sns import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # We ……
Continue reading »The Full Stack: Tools & Processes for Urban Data Scientists
Recently, I was asked to give talks at both UCL’s CASA and the ETH Future Cities Lab in Singapore for students and staff new to ‘urban data science’ and the sorts of workflows involved in collecting, processing, analysing, and reporting on … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Land Registry Consultation #2: Reasons to Respond
In some circles (e.g. mine) news that the government is trying (again) to sell off the Land Registry has caused something of a stir. The curtain closed on the first act of this drama in March 2014, by which time 91% … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Installing PostgreSQL Extensions on Mac OS X
I’ve been making a lot of use of PostgreSQL and PostGIS for working with geo-data over the past year and, having finally gotten over my hatred of the non-standard administrative commands, I am seriously impressed with what this setup makes … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Peer Programming for Academics | King’s Geocomputation
My thoughts on the value of peer programming as a tool for academic use. Source: Peer Programming for Academics | King’s Geocomputation
Continue reading »Mapping the Changing Affordability of Manchester
Building on yesterday’s post about my London affordability maps, here are the equivalent maps for the Manchester area (sorry Liverpool, I’ll get there!) from 1997 and 2012. It’s obviously a very different picture in terms of price, volume and distribution; these … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Mapping the Changing Affordability of London
Last night I discovered how many of my friends watch C4’s Dispatches since quite a few of them texted me to say that they had seen me talking about property affordability on “The Great British Property Divide”. However, since Dispatches has to … Continue reading →
Continue reading »History of Telephony: Funded PhD Award with King’s College London, BT and the Science Museum Group
Applications are invited for an AHRC-funded doctoral student to join King’s College London, BT Archives, and the Science Museum Group in late September 2015 or early January 2016 to investigate the impact of the telephone landline network on British society … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Pint of Science: Curious About the Housing Crisis?
As a follow-on to my earlier piece on Hex-Binning Land Registry Data, here’s a talk I gave on the housing crisis as part of the Pint of Science Festival a couple of weeks back. And, credit where credit is due: this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Hex Binning Land Registry Data
One of the known problems with choropleth maps is that small zones, even if they contain very significant values, tend to get lost in amongst much larger zones. A current example is that the ridings in London are much smaller … Continue reading →
Continue reading »2 Funded PhD Positions at King’s
It’s been a long time coming, but I’m really pleased to be able to share details about two PhDs at King’s for which I have funding: one to look at the growth and evolution of the UK’s landline network, and one … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Bridging the Qual/Quant Divide 2: Flipping Out
So I hope that I made a decent case for why we need quantitative methods teaching in Geography in my last post. The next question is how to teach them, and for this I’m going to need two more blog … Continue reading →
Continue reading »‘Mapping the Space of Flows’: the geography of the London Mega-City Region
I’m pleased to be able to post here the penultimate version of an article that Duncan Smith and I recently had accepted to Regional Studies. In this article we look at ways of combining ‘big data’ from a telecoms network … Continue reading →
Continue reading »‘Mapping the Space of Flows’: the geography of the London Mega-City Region
I’m pleased to be able to post here the penultimate version of an article that Duncan Smith and I recently had accepted to Regional Studies. In this article we look at ways of combining ‘big data’ from a telecoms network … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Bridging the Qual/Quant Divide
I’ve been in my new post in the Geography department at King’s College London for nearly nine months now and — together with another new-ish colleague – have been asked to design a programme to teach quantitative research methods to students who often seem … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Bridging the Qual/Quant Divide
I’ve been in my new post in the Geography department at King’s College London for nearly nine months now and — together with another new-ish colleague – have been asked to design a programme to teach quantitative research methods to students who often seem … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Big Data’s Little Secrets (Part 2)
In my previous post I looked at some of the issues affecting the extent to which ‘big data’ gives a reliable picture of the world around us. In this post I want to take you through one of the least … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Big Data’s Little Secrets (Part 2)
In my previous post I looked at some of the issues affecting the extent to which ‘big data’ gives a reliable picture of the world around us. In this post I want to take you through one of the least … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Big Data’s Little Secrets (Part 1)
The term ‘big data’ has been getting a lot of attention recently, some of it very complimentary (see ‘The End of Theory‘), and some of it not so much (see Mark Birkin’s report on a recent AAG session). On one … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Big Data’s Little Secrets (Part 1)
The term ‘big data’ has been getting a lot of attention recently, some of it very complimentary (see ‘The End of Theory‘), and some of it not so much (see Mark Birkin’s report on a recent AAG session). On one … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Fear of Failure
An ongoing preoccupation of many governments, but perhaps most especially this one, has been the fostering of innovation and the training of the next generation of entrepreneurs. The positioning of tertiary education under Business, Innovation & Skills is one obvious … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Multiple MySQL Servers on a Single Machine
Note: this was previously posted at simulacra.info, but I am in the process of (re)organising my technical notes and tutorials. A bit of a dry post here, but I thought I’d share my experience of trying to get two instances of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The MapThing Processing Library
MapThing allows you to perform a range of useful mapping (in the geographical sense) functions within Processing and offers a collection of classes for reading ESRI-compliant Shape files (a.k.a. shapefiles), CSV point data, and GPX files, and then displaying them … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Plotting & iGraph on Lion and Mountain Lion
Note: this was previously posted at simulacra.info, but I am in the process of (re)organising my technical notes and tutorials. After giving up on Gephi (again, I really should learn), I decided it was time to get to grips with … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Extracting files from Moodle MBZ Archives with Python
These days it seems that just about every university is using Moodle, the “open-source community-based tools for learning”, to manage the delivery of course material and handling of deadlines, assignments, etc. Now I’m a fan of the OS community, but … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Satellite Meeting at ECCS 2012: Complexity in Spatial Dynamics
Satellite Meeting: Complexity in Spatial Dynamics (COSMIC) Location: Brussels, 5th of September 2012 Organizers: Peter Nijkamp, Michael Batty, Stewart Fotheringham, and Emmanouil Tranos Background New bottom up, digital data collected for entire populations, has started being utilised in urban science …
Continue reading »Open Data & Visualisation
In one of the more unusual invitations that I’ve received over the past few years, I was asked to speak about visualisation and open data at Transport Ticketing 2012, currently happening down in South Ken. Interestingly, in spite of …
Continue reading »MapThing v1.0 Processing Library
One of the objectives of the COSMIC project is to “extend our current techniques of visualising complex spatial systems… [to] enable a wide range of stakeholders to be involved both in understanding such complexity and using it in policy analysis.” Normally, …
Continue reading »Academic Presentations: the Anti-TED Talk
After a few months back on the conference speaking/attendance circuit, I’ve had something of a refresher course in the joys of academic meetings and decided it was time to write up the range of feelings — from irritation to rage … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Understanding the Financial Crisis
Although this is definitely a case of ‘over-egging the pudding’, it’s nonetheless a very nice, extended riff on how contemporary financial markets are effectively operating without any kind of buffers or controls and why this is leading to huge problems in such a complex system. vimeo.com/31210471
Continue reading »Place, Memory & Myth: Some Reflections on September 11th
Unless you resolutely avoid reading the news then it can hardly . have . escaped . your . attention that we’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Since I was living in New York at the time of the attacks and watched the towers collapse from my roof in Brooklyn Heights, this …
Continue reading »Wild Food from the Green/Brown-Belt
One of the things that I love about London is the easy access to relatively ‘wild’ (i.e. un-managed) areas from parts of the city that are wholly urban. We owe this, of course, to the existence of the green belt which, even as it allows me to scavenge for fresh, free food (see recipes below), …
Continue reading »Pulse of the City
I’ve been working with the TfL data over the past few weeks to better understand the geographical distribution of journeys and how this affects the load on individual segments across the transport network. In other words, we all know that …
Continue reading »Tech City ‘More than Doubled in Size’
Perhaps it’s careless wording by the Wall Street Journal, but Eric Van der Kleij appears to be claiming that: The number of start ups in the U.K.’s Tech City has more than doubled since the government-led initiative was launched last …
Continue reading »Microsoft’s Table-Top Computing: Shades of Mobile 5
I know why I keep expecting Microsoft to produce something useful: they periodically manage to pull themselves together and release an Operating System that is a measurable improvement over its predecessors (e.g. the Windows 98 to XP to 7 trajectory). … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Social Networks & Access to Opportunity
In my work on social networks, one thing that has been of particular interest to me is the way that social network structure seems to be correlated with access to opportunity — both for individuals, and (though I think this …
Continue reading »London’s Rail System as a Network
As many of you know, for quite some time I’ve been wrestling with a massive data set from TfL — I make it that I have 120 million trip segments across 88 million identifiable journeys in the course of just …
Continue reading »Specialisation & Internationalisation
Historically, the downtown of major cities is where the most highly-skilled and highly-remunerated work was done — think: Wall Street, the City, etc. But as space has run out in the core, secondary centres such as Canary Wharf and La …
Continue reading »Specialisation & Internationalisation
Historically, the downtown of major cities is where the most highly-skilled and highly-remunerated work was done — think: Wall Street, the City, etc. But as space has run out in the core, secondary centres such as Canary Wharf and La …
Continue reading »