Author: roblevy

Anyone who has every applied for a job at the UN will feel a sweat break out on the back of their neck at the mention of the 90’s-style faux-Latin-named job application site “Inspira”. (Remember when things were all called “Exceptimus” and “Ignitor” and stuff? Ugh.) Anyway, the site’s been down for a few days […]

Everybody loves a good map projection, none more so that the nerds here at UCL’s CASA. I made a little toy visualisation of survey responses per global region for a pal of mine at Kings College, but knew he’d be unhappy with my choice of projection. So I decided to take the decision out of […]

The uncomprehending, blinking gaze: this is the default response when I tell people I’m “into” data. It’s like being into electrical wiring, or urban sewer systems – yes, we’re glad they’re there, and yes, we’re certainly glad they work as expected, but yes, aren’t we also rather glad it’s someone else who has to worry […]

In the early 1960s two American geography professors, John Nystuen and Michael Dacy, were working on a way to make sense of a huge database of telephone records in Washington state. Clearly the majority of calls were being made either to or from Seattle, the state’s largest city, but they suspected there was more underlying […]

Months of blood, sweat and tears (or rather, those all-too modern equivalents coffee, RSI and eye-strain) have been spilled in the last six months. I have an absolutely non-existent ability to concentrate on more than one thing at a time, and the one thing I’ve been thinking, dreaming and going on about non-stop for pretty […]

The great thing about having access to the entirety of the UN’s commodity trade database is that you can ask any kind of question you wish of the data. For example, here’s a network representation of trade flows throughout the entire world in agricultural products in 2010. Bigger, more purple nodes are the ones with […]

A recent meeting of minds at MIT, described as an “anti-disciplinary conference for the intellectually promiscuous,” can have left little doubt in the minds of its attendees: the network is the paradigm du jour. The whole event was awash with the edges and nodes of an on-trend way of thinking about the world. Either explicitly, […]

Anyone following either of the development world’s Twitter stalwarts, Duncan Green at Oxfam and Owen Barder at the Centre for Global Development (CGDev), (these guys are so prolific (and entertaining) on Twitter, you wonder how they have time to do … Continue reading →

Modelling the economy is easy, right? Here’s how it works: An increase in output increases employees’ wages (the more you make the more you earn), which leads to more consumption (the more you earn the more you spend). More spending … Continue reading →

Following the announcement of a new way of looking at how interest in development projects might have moved around Africa over time (see this blog post) I’ve produced a more subtle version with one particularly interesting twist: One of the … Continue reading →

In an attempt to find out a little bit about how development projects have been distributed between countries and types of project (health, education etc.) I have created a kind of trawler for Google information. You give the trawler three … Continue reading →

Let me start this post with a couple of disclaimers: 1) This post is of no interest to anyone other than myself and possibly a few of my colleagues at UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. It’s here as a … Continue reading →

After a long while playing with Google’s excellent Building Maker, a time-wasting toy for crowd-sourcing Google World’s 3D building library, I’ve completed my first attempt at rendering the offices of UCL CASA. The results are laughably poor, but mainly because, … Continue reading →