The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
We woke this morning to find Google has made some improvements to its 3D model of London in Google Earth. All the city’s buildings are now based on 45-degree aerial imagery, which should mean a marked improvement in accuracy of building shapes. So how much has it improved? Firstly to compare the new Google London […]
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In my previous post I plotted a map of London’s workplace (biological) gender divisions, which demonstrated some interesting spatial patterns of gender distribution across the captial. I decided to replicate this to get a more representative picture of how things look across the nation (in this case England and Wales given the extent of the […]
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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 […]
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Georeferenced UK statistical data typically comes in one of two spatial coordinate reference systems – either latitude/longitude points based on the World Geodetic System 1984 (‘WGS 84′), or in the eastings/northings system of the British National Grid (based on the 1936 Ordnance Survey Great Britain datum ‘OSGB 36′). The latter system has the benefit of […]
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Georeferenced UK statistical data typically comes in one of two spatial coordinate reference systems – either latitude/longitude points based on the World Geodetic System 1984 (‘WGS 84′), or in the eastings/northings system of the British National Grid (based on the 1936 Ordnance Survey Great Britain datum ‘OSGB 36′). The latter system has the benefit of […]
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In this book, I suggest that to understand cities we must view them not simply as places in space but as systems of networks and flows. To understand space, we must understand flows, and to understand flows, we must understand networks—the relations between objects that comprise the system of the city. Drawing on the complexity […]
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At ECCS ’13 this morning, Elsa Arcaute, Lecturer in Urban Modelling in CASA, is talking about our work on city size using percolation theory which has analogies to Hernan Makse’s work on percolation and the brain. Click here for the programme and the paper in the Arxiv on which is it based. You can also […]
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For many years, almost from the time when Newton first presented his laws of gravitation, speculations and applications of the gravity model to human interactions have been made. In the 19th century, Carey and Ravenstein led the way with Reilly, Zipf, Stewart and Warntz and then Voorhees making major contributions in the early to mid […]
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With political transparency an increasingly topical subject in the wake of press scandals and allegations of official coverup, it is a useful exercise to examine any data reflecting the interaction between our leaders and our purveyors of news. Since taking power the UK coalition government has published records of hospitality received by Special Advisers – […]
Continue reading »I’ve written a very basic script to convert KML files into GeoJSON. This may be of use to any R users trying for the first time to get data from sources such as Google Earth or ScribbleMaps into the into webpages. Open the script in text editor first for instructions. Test the finished output in […]
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Google have been reworking their Maps, currently available by request to review in beta. The other day Ollie O’Brief blogged with a breakdown of the pros and cons of the new design, arguing it represents a visual improvement but functional regression. Here I’ve thrown a few screenshots together to illustrate the comparisons at different scales […]
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Having failed to find a useful working example of a Processing script that incorporates typical navigation functionality into a 3D model, I’ve had to develop one myself for a project I’m working on. Although not rocket science (3D developers will of course know all this), I found the mathematics slightly tricky and it took a […]
Continue reading »or “How to use RGL to plot 3d maps of API map tiles” OK more nerd than ninja. RGL is R’s box of power-tool for 3D object rendering, with functionality for creating 3d mesh objects and curved surfaces, and for using materials and directional lighting. For example the line: plot3d(rnorm(100),rnorm(100),rnorm(100)) creates a 3d scatterplot of […]
Continue reading »Commuting by train (if you’re lucky enough to get a seat) offers all sorts of opportunities for frivolous coding adventures (code-mmuting?). Having watched Andy Hudson-Smith’s review of Softimage crowd simulation.. … I decided to see how quick it would be (2 hours) to do something similar with stickmen, and at the same time develop a […]
Continue reading »I was looking for a quick way to create dummy digital elevation model (DEM) datasets in R, and a kind soul in StackOverload shared the following code. It is an implementation of the Perlin noise algorithm written by Ken Parlin in the early 1980s and is now widely used to create realistic looking CGI landscapes […]
Continue reading »I’ve just written a script for new-comers to R. Hope someone finds it useful. A crash course in R
Continue reading »Interactive version (currently Chrome or Safari only) A basic algorithm to calculate the shortest path through random networks between 2 nodes (without passing the same node twice). Networks with a higher ratio of connections to nodes (especially where connections cross each other) contain exponentially more possible paths. The algorithm uses a recursive nested logical process […]
Continue reading »After giving up on Gephi (again, I really should learn), I decided it was time to get to grips with Python and iGraph since I really need to produce multiple iterations of a graph. The matmos at CASA have, of course, been touting Python for ages, but I’ve just not had the time/incentive to install […]
Continue reading »An interesting movie is currently trending visualising the last thousand years of European history and conflict. Europe resembles a large game of Risk or Civilization. Such games typically end with a single large empire, whilst the dynamics of European history show the larger empires forming only fleetingly, soon to be dissolved by the re-emergence of […]
Continue reading »As I get to better grips with the full richness of the Oyster data set and the complexity of the TfL network it’s gradually getting easier to build better visualisations. One of the ones that I’ve wanted to revisit for quite some time was my original ‘pulse of the city’ animation (you can see it […]
Continue reading »I’ve been meaning to post this for ages but have had a great deal on my plate (more posts and visualisations to follow in the next week I hope) so this has kept slipping, together with the six or seven other ‘draft’ posts I’ve got going. Anyway, this visualisation shows average entries at each and every Underground, […]
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