Google’s 3D London gets better

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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Gender in urban workplaces

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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British National Grid transformation and reprojection in R

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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British National Grid transformation and re-projection in R

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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The New Science of Cities, by Mike Batty

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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Cities, Brains, Percolation

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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Gravity v Radiation Models

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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A hive plot of hospitality received by Coalition Special Advisers

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 – […]

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Stickcrowd modelling

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 […]

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Simulating elevation data in R

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 […]

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Shortest network path calculation

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 […]

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A Week in the Life of London’s Public Transit System

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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