Modelling Africa’s trade routes

People talk a lot about how development aid might be used to improve a country’s attractiveness as a trade partner. (Mostly the World Trade Organisation, but not exclusively!) “Aid for Trade” is a controversial project because it has a distinctly globalisation-friendly vibe about it, and a fundamental belief in the kind of trickle-down economics so […]

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Fun with projections

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 […]

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Numbercrush

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 […]

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Researcher as software engineer

When you go into a career in research, you imagine that you’ll spend all your time thinking, reading and coming to know. In fact, whenever anyone talks to you about your job, it’s clear that that’s exactly what they think you do all day: think, learn, gain wisdom. My experience of my PhD so far […]

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Extracting the structures of economies

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 […]

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A model of global trade

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 […]

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Big data, big ball-ache

Big data, yeah? It’s great isn’t it? Doesn’t everyone just love to have loads of big data all over the place? Got 30 million customers in the UK, have you? Each of those customers purchasing thousands of products a year, yeah? Screw it, lets just store ALL that information in a massive database. It’s big […]

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What the flip is going on with global trade?

Similarly to many branches of statistics-gathering, the world’s trade statistics bureaux lack, in their communication style, a certain panache. The writings of such agencies are characterised by a complete absence of zing, lightness-of-touch and joie de vivre. I’ve blogged before about horrific diagrams like that shown here, and how the whole enterprise of gathering information […]

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Putting Networks into Economics: A Manifesto

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, […]

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