The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
About a year ago, I wrote this post which rounded up some useful books showcasing and providing techniques for datavis. I should say that I’m primarily a programmatic visualator (i.e I tend not to deal with the GUI-style visualisation platforms, … Continue reading →
About a year ago, I wrote this post which rounded up some useful books showcasing and providing techniques for datavis. I should say that I’m primarily a programmatic visualator (i.e I tend not to deal with the GUI-style visualisation platforms, … Continue reading →
I feel like I’ve come a long way in the last year; written papers, applied for grants, read more, directed a course, improved my modules, created new ones, reflected a lot on my teaching – all the stuff a Proper … Continue reading →
I feel like I’ve come a long way in the last year; written papers, applied for grants, read more, directed a course, improved my modules, created new ones, reflected a lot on my teaching – all the stuff a Proper … Continue reading →
I’ve seen a lot of very unhelpful comments lately, by men, on blogs, by women, usually ones women have written about sexism or some aspect of the way women are treated in particular high-skill industries (tech, science, journalism, or academia) … Continue reading →
I’ve seen a lot of very unhelpful comments lately, by men, on blogs, by women, usually ones women have written about sexism or some aspect of the way women are treated in particular high-skill industries (tech, science, journalism, or academia) … Continue reading →
I just read Emma Uprichard’s excellent piece on big data in social sciences, I’d recommend doing the same. She argues persuasively that Big Data is not the panacea that will solve social ills, and drills into some specific concerns that … Continue reading →
I just read Emma Uprichard’s excellent piece on big data in social sciences, I’d recommend doing the same. She argues persuasively that Big Data is not the panacea that will solve social ills, and drills into some specific concerns that … Continue reading →
Being a jackass of n>1 trade is the lot of the roaming physicist who has a glimmer of self-awareness, and one regularly finds oneself exploring texts and topics in a way that undergraduate students of that discipline would find shallow. … Continue reading →
Being a jackass of n>1 trade is the lot of the roaming physicist who has a glimmer of self-awareness, and one regularly finds oneself exploring texts and topics in a way that undergraduate students of that discipline would find shallow. … Continue reading →
The paper we published in PLOS ONE last week covers bike share schemes from five cities: the large ones in London and Washington, DC, and smaller ones in Boston, Minneapolis, and Denver. It might seem odd that we’ve chosen these … Continue reading →
The paper we published in PLOS ONE last week covers bike share schemes from five cities: the large ones in London and Washington, DC, and smaller ones in Boston, Minneapolis, and Denver. It might seem odd that we’ve chosen these … Continue reading →
The paper we published in PLOS ONE last week covers bike share schemes from five cities: the large ones in London and Washington, DC, and smaller ones in Boston, Minneapolis, and Denver. It might seem odd that we’ve chosen these … Continue reading →
After much wrangling and rewriting, my first paper as a social physicist has finally been published! It’s one I wrote with the help of CASA’s Ollie O’Brien, Ema Strano at EPFL and Matheus Viana, currently at UC Irvine and appears … Continue reading →
Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a classic, one every urban planning undergraduate has read and one I read approximately two months ago because I was too busy reading Maxwell and co as an undergrad. … Continue reading →
I don’t really mind the label “Boffin”. I mean I think it’s trivial and pointless, but I don’t think anyone should consume any of their time with it when there are much bigger issues in science. Last January I wrote … Continue reading →
This year, the MRes group projects shifted theme from “a museum space” to “the living city” – and there was an accompanying shift in focus. I’d characterise this as a move away from a more portfolio-based approach that we saw … Continue reading →
I’ve spent the last couple of days at the Bicycle Urbanism Symposium at the University of Washington in Seattle, at which I presented visualisation and analysis work we’ve done on bikeshares in London and four north American cities. It’s been … Continue reading →
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, their retelling of the Jack the Ripper murders, is a fascinating book about man and woman, the powerful and the powerless, the mystical and the rational, but most of all about time. The … Continue reading →
Last week The Londonist kindly mapped out the locations of a variety of Dr Who themed spots in London, so the motivated nerd could plan a tour over Bank Holiday weekend. Some friends seemed keen, so I mapped out a … Continue reading →
CASA had a bit of a mini outing to TEDx LSE at the weekend – I was speaking (on the topic “Ideas are Sociable”), and PhD students Panos Mavros and Steve Gray ran workshops on cognitive geography and social media, … Continue reading →
Roll up, roll up! The first annual Bartlett postgraduate open day takes place on March 27th 2013, and now’s the time for prospective Masters’ students to grab their free tickets before they all get snapped up! The event is geared … Continue reading →
Our most recent urban ramble outing was around the murals of southeast London† – based on maps created by The London Mural Preservation Society, a volunteer group who since 2010 have been working to identify and preserve community murals around … Continue reading →
Nassim N. Taleb dropped some truth in his recent piece for Wired, “Beware the Big Errors of Big Data”, letting us silly scientists (of data and social flavours) and statisticians in on a startling observation: with more data comes more … Continue reading →
In December last year I delivered this lecture as part of of UCL’s lunch hour lecture series, with the title “Social Physics in the Big City” – one which let me bring in themes from Big Data, Open Data and … Continue reading →
I’m sure you’ve seen lots of variations on Harry Beck’s iconic tube map, but have you seen a forced-perspective papercut tube map before? If not, you haven’t lived. I bought a Silhouette Cameo for musical reasons last year, and Andy Hudson-Smith, … Continue reading →
Don’t walk the Greenway unless you like the smell of sewage. Let me rephrase that: unless you can tolerate the smell of sewage, a bit. I can’t think of many people who actively enjoy the smell of sewage*. Let me … Continue reading →
It’s high time I wheeled out my annual academic New Year’s Resolutions (if you think most people’s nyrs are predictable, read some academics’ – this year I’ll try to go beyond the litany of “Read more. Write more. Apply for … Continue reading →
Musician Frank Zappa famously coined the phrase “talking about music is like fishing about architecture” – a statement that surely applies just as well to visual design. Luckily, datavis is of a more analytical, logic-and-language bent, so we can start … Continue reading →
The Jugular Project, led by Shama Rahman, is one of those brave beasts that attempts to meld science and art – or as they have it, “the head and the heart” – with talks from physicists, biologists and gerentologists, among … Continue reading →
It was a CASA trip out this weekend as me, Steven Gray, Hannah Fry, Rob Levy, Pete Ferguson and Goldsmiths’ Francisco Dans showed off CASA’s Pigeon Sim, London Data Table and Roving Eye at The Building Centre on Store Street. … Continue reading →
This weekend (October 20th and 21st) CASA will be at large at the Bloomsbury Festival, showcasing a range of demonstrations designed to make our digital city physical, and asking what you think about them. We’ll be at the Building Centre on … Continue reading →
In case you’ve noy been following the whole SSOTF story – this is the precis… It all started with winning the Quantum Zone in I’m a Scientist, Get Me Out of Here in March – I’d rashly promised to use … Continue reading →
Science Songwriter OF THE FUTURE reached the Green Man festival this summer, as competition winners Jamie Ough and Vincent Lim joined me in Einstein’s garden to lead science songwriting workshops every day. Children and adults joined us to write songs … Continue reading →
The day is upon us! Yes, today we announce the results of The Science Songwriter of the Future! competition that we’ve been running over the summer. And those right there are the medals – lovingly crafted by Lynn at Tuck … Continue reading →
On June 15th I was lucky enough to attend the festival marking the launch of the UCL English department’s One Day In The City – a celebration of London from a more literary perspective than we at CASA are accustomed … Continue reading →
So, last week our students submitted their group projects for the CASA ASAV MRes*, following on from successful presentations the week before. This year there were two teams, unimaginatively titled Group A and Group B. Perhaps we could have thought … Continue reading →
Science Songwriter of The Future! is a national competition to find Britain’s best science songwriters aged 18 or under. Simply record a song about science and submit an mp3 to us at sciencesongwriter@gmail.com by July 13th. We’ve roped in some … Continue reading →
This is me playing a song about bike data at a recent conference in Germany; I’m a songwriter, and a scientist, but I’m certainly not very young. During “I’m a Scientist, get me out of here” earlier this year, school-age … Continue reading →
I blogged a few weeks ago about the students on our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, and their take on twitter data collected by Fabian Neuhaus and Steven Gray. Since then they’ve been hard at work visualising bike … Continue reading →