The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
BBC Radio 4 ran a well-made item in Analysis this week on Nicholas Nassim Taleb, known for his bestselling book The Black Swan, and his relationship with David Cameron. More specifically, it was about Cameron’s relationship with Taleb’s ideas – … Continue reading →
I took a very pleasant urban ramble on Saturday, from Greenwich, east along the river and past the Thames Flood Barrier, under the Woolwich Foot Tunnel and then back west to Wapping (with a DLR trip through some of the … Continue reading →
Athene Donald posted recently on imposter syndrome, that feeling that we’re doing something way beyond our capabilities, perhaps due to clerical error or overenthusiastic “brand management”*. As I’ve touched on before, working in an interdisciplinary team exacerbates that. I’ve heard … Continue reading →
Science Sociologist/Policy Academic/Blogger Alice Bell has very kindly invited me to take part in the Sounds of Science event on February 29th at Charles Darwin House – featuring participants from the BBC, Audioboo and the BMJ. To celebrate world radio day, … Continue reading →
This term we’ve been running our Visualisation module as part of the CASA MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation. The flavour of this module is what you’d expect – finding interesting ways to communicate complex spatio-temporal data through static, … Continue reading →
This week Alice Roberts, newly appointed Professor of Public Engagement at Birmingham Uni, attacked the idea of “geek” being a badge of honour, even suggesting (gasp) that scientists study arts subjects during their education to make them well-rounded people. Setting … Continue reading →
What are your academic weaknesses? What would you like to improve? And in 2012, how will you resolve (see what I did there) to improve them? I suspect that many of my Academic New Years Resolutions are the same as … Continue reading →
One of the big concerns in the use open and public data lies around privacy – whether the information you provide and is collected about could be used to identify you personally. While this might be an issue with respect … Continue reading →
This movie shows a heatmap of London Bikeshare activity over the course of an average day – red indicates the density of arrivals, cyan the density of departures – and so white areas are where arrival and departures match. Animation … Continue reading →
This post was written for the LSE “Impact of Social Sciences” Blog: At the beginning of November I ran a rather fun workshop in Cardiff called “Podwhating?” (not my title) – dedicated to academic podcasting. Several years of podcasting and … Continue reading →
This article originally appeared on the UCL events blog here. Last Friday, I was lucky enough to be small glimmer amongst a constellation of researchers as Bright Club : Stars took to the stage of the Bloomsbury Theatre. For the … Continue reading →
I’ve only just had the good fortune to read Warren Weaver’s mission statement for the sciences (original paper; transcription), published in American Scientist in 1948, but I’m glad I did. Since I entered academia, I’ve felt that the standard of … Continue reading →
On November 11th I’m lucky enough to be performing at Bright Club: Stars, the Bloomsbury EXTRAVAGANZA. I’ve performed at Bright Club more than once, in the cozy confines of the Wilmington Arms and at the Green Man festival (in a … Continue reading →
Since the end of September I’ve been busy with CASA’s new MRes course, teaching, organizing, planning like a good lecturer does. The MRes, in keeping with the research themes of CASA, is a highly interdisciplinary affair – drawing upon techniques … Continue reading →
On Tuesday I was lucky enough to take part in the first ever Science Showoff (sso), a science communication “open mic” night, where people can sign up to perform 10 minutes about pretty much any aspect of science – there … Continue reading →
On October 4th I will have the great privilege of performing at the first ever Science Showoff event – a “scientific open mic” event put together by the incredible team behind the smash hit “Bright Club” nights. The evening will … Continue reading →
I’ll be at ECCS 2011 next week in Vienna talking about visualising and characterising rank-value systems – I’m speaking at 3pm on Monday in the Policy session (which takes place in the Aula room). The talk will focus on how … Continue reading →
Inspired by this, I’ve done a quick force graph of tube lines/stations.
Links are all set to 1; it would be nice to weight them by popularity, but that’s for another day.
Continue reading »I recently attempted to visualise the labrinthine UCL departmental structure in the form of a Force-Directed Graph: It has been remarked (not unfairly) that this is the sort of pattern that I might wear, were it printed on a shirt. … Continue reading →
In our Boris Bike journey dataset, there is time and space explicit in it, but also implied networks which connect the nodes (bike stations) via edges (flows). Because those edges are defined by the number of bikes travelling along them, … Continue reading →
I’ve previously talked about looking at Boris Bike data in a very first hand way, with few conceptual filters; and from that gone on to talk about some basic spatial processing, in the form of aggregating route numbers. Let’s now … Continue reading →
This week I’ll be at the InterFace conference, a meeting run by digital humanities in UCL which explores the meeting points between the humanities and computer science. I’ll be running a workshop on visualisation, so if you’re coming to that, … Continue reading →
There are lots of ways to visualise data, each of which giving a slightly different perspective. By now regular readers of this blog will have seen this London Bikeshare scheme animation rather a lot: These animated tadpoles give a fascinating … Continue reading →
July 19th marks my sophomore foray into the world of Bright Club – the research cabaret night at The Wilmington Arms in London’s Farringdon. People unfamiliar with Bright Club might reasonably find the concept a bit confusing – but it’s … Continue reading →
Yesterday was a busy day for CASA-UCL – after being featured by BBC technology we trotted down to Covent Garden in the evening to see the launch of Sense and the City – a London Transport museum exhibition featuring work … Continue reading →
Work from CASA features on the BBC Technology site today – full credits go to Jon Reades for Oyster visualizations, Joan Serras for national transport flows (more info on both here), Steven Gray for Tweet-0-Meters and me and Ollie O’Brien … Continue reading →
This is follow-up to two blogposts I’ve written on podcasting – the first was on why you should do it and the second on some of the basic technical and organizational issues. I’m writing this from the point of view of a … Continue reading →
So you’ve taken the decision to get podcasting: at this point, no number of “don’t”s are going to deter you from having a go. Good. I don’t really believe in “dos” and “don’ts” – for every rule there will be … Continue reading →
The Science Communication Conference last week afforded me and a panel of podcasting peers the opportunity to talk about science podcasting – but I feel that there were a lot of key things I didn’t really get across. I thought … Continue reading →
Yesterday, with a host of podcast luminaries, I ran a discussion session on science podcasting at the British Science Association Science Communication Conference – or a podchat, as my brain insisted on referring to it for reasons of brevity. The … Continue reading →
Nothing too new here, just a version of our London Bike Share video with no routing. While the transport experts amongst us will find little use for the straight-line travel model, I think it helps enormously in seeing tidal patterns … Continue reading →
An early plug, then, for the British Science Association Science Communication Conference, taking place over the 25th and 26th of May here in London. The theme for this year is “online engagement”, featuring high-profile figures like Cory Doctorow talking about … Continue reading →
Welcome to the ENFOLDing homepage. This site is currently under construction, but will feature news and static content from the ENFOLDing project.
Continue reading »In a change to our regular broadcast, last week marked the release of three records with a Songs about Science element, to which I had a significant contribution. The first was Songs from the Scientific Cabaret, my first full-length album … Continue reading →
Since early last April I’ve been working with a fascinating textual artist called Gethan Dick (who’s previously worked on creating text murals for Brockwell Lido, amongst other things). Gethan’s Wellcome-trust funded mission over the last year has been to visit … Continue reading →
(edit: I’ve updated the video to include the river and the larger parks – thanks again to Ollie O’Brien for this) I’ve been working with Ollie O’Brien here in CASA on this animation showing hire bike journeys on October 4th … Continue reading →
Showing data as a time series enables us to see “data paths” – to simultaneously observe past, present and future, and to begin to spot trends. However, sometimes overloading an already complex graphic with a persistent time series will make … Continue reading →
So, there is some real science/mathematics behind this visualization of Boris Bike activity earlier this month, but for now – doesn’t it look Xmassy?
[Data by Ollie O’Brien from CASA. Music by me.]
Jonathan Sanderson over at The Daily Grind recently wrote about the phrase “User Generated Content” and how irksome he finds it. Let me start with my own linguistic unpacking for the sake of completeness. User = person who uses the … Continue reading →
Prediction was not a major theme at RSWebSci this year, mainly because scientists are less in the business of predicting things and more in the business of making them happen (or at least commenting on them after they have happened…). … Continue reading →