The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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 »As the costs of recent droughts spiral from USA to Australia, West Africa to India, we’re getting a taste of what a significantly warmer climate would be like. Critically as the scientific evidence mounts up that climate change is occurring, global carbon dioxide emissions are soaring. Why is this? I’ve designed a new website Carbon … Continue reading →
Science Songwriter OF THE FUTURE reached the Green Man festival this summer, as competition winners Jamie Ough and Vincent Lim joined me in Einstein’s garden to lead science songwriting workshops every day. Children and adults joined us to write songs … Continue reading →
Despite the litany of sins levelled at the automobile- it’s woeful energy efficiency, harmful pollution, congestion, road casualties, damage to public space, contribution to obesity- we are still wedded to the car. In the UK the car accounts for over three quarters of trip miles. The flexibility, security and door-to-door convenience of automobile travel remains … Continue reading »
This article is the first of a few I hope to write about visualisation and Processing, a graphics tool created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas back in 2001. In this one I’ll introduce Processing and get into some hard-core navel-gazing about visualisation. Next time I’ll look at ways to use the Processing library as …
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London's most popular names: interactive map displays capital's ethnic make-upTelegraph.co.ukJames Cheshire, a lecturer at the university's Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, took name frequency data from electoral rolle and displayed th…
Continue reading »Phil Ball’s little book is one of the best summaries I have come across on complexity theory and its applications. This little triumph of clarity argues that society’s problems are those of highly connected systems. The book has been written … Continue reading →
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This map is produced by The Green Traveller in collabor […]
Continue reading »London’s most popular names: interactive map displays capital’s ethnic make-up Telegraph.co.ukJames Cheshire, a lecturer at the university’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, took name frequency data from electoral rolle and displayed th…
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In a post entitled “A New Kind of Social Science For The 21st Century” from Edge.org, Nicholas Christakis talks about how Computational Social Science is going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. To quote from the article:”In the 20th&nb…
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In a post entitled “A New Kind of Social Science For The 21st Century” from Edge.org, Nicholas Christakis talks about how Computational Social Science is going to change the social sciences in the 21st century. To quote from the article:”In the 20th&nb…
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Many of the bike share operators whose systems I’ve mapped have accounts on Twitter – but do they use them to reply to customers, notify of system changes, or just tweet promotional measures? Have they built up an appropriately large … Continue reading →
Continue reading »James Cheshire, a geography lecturer at the University College London, mapped common surnames in London.See it on Scoop.it, via Spatial Analysis
Continue reading »TweetBusan, Korea, 26-31 August 2013 Call for Papers and Posters – Deadline for Submission: 15 October 2012 Scientific Programme The Conference will open on Monday 26 August 2013 and conclude on Saturday 31 August 2013. It will include 270 regular scientific sessions, poster sessions, and training sessions, as well as plenary and debate sessions, side meetings and […]
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If you are interested in the applications of mathematical models especially those of spatial interaction models the movie below from a Open University Course called Modelling by Mathematics might be of interest. It discusses how to compute the impacts …
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If you are interested in the applications of mathematical models especially those of spatial interaction models the movie below from a Open University Course called Modelling by Mathematics might be of interest. It discusses how to compute the impacts …
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[Updated] This map of London districts, was intended to […]
Continue reading »Since I’ve recently been in the business of making general rules, here’s another: the geniuses who can write brilliant R packages still write documentation like it was the 1990s. Anyone old enough to have lived through the horror of 1990s … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The first rule of academia: never talk to anyone from the ‘real world’ about your research. I was reminded of this rule yesterday when I spoke to my flatmate about what I’m trying to do with complexity science-style modelling and … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Of all the different types of data visualisation, maps* […]
Continue reading »I never thought I’d say this, but Stata rules the roost at at least one thing: lagging a column in panel data. What does that mean? Imagine you’re looking at test scores, and you think this year’s test score depends … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Over the fortnight of the Olympic Games, London became a bastion of cultural diversity.See it on Scoop.it, via Spatial Analysis
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I was in Vancouver at the end of June for the Velo-City conference – which is the cycling industry’s conference on bike sharing and urban cycling. The lead sponsors were PBSC who are behind the technology for many of the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Robert Kosara has produced some really neat maps of connected places on his blog ‘eager eyes’ where he connects “all the ZIP or postal codes in a country in ascending order”. The UK is rather integrated it seems compared to other countries. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »So far so simple in terms of reading data into the R environment (I’m using the wonderful RStudio by the way). Download a little library, run about 5 lines of code and, boom, my PostgreSQL view is available as a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Someone from ETH Zurich Future Cities Lab showed me a fascinating book by Serge Salat called Cities and Forms (Hermann Editions, Paris, 2011). Haven’t managed to get it (ugh! French Publishers!) but downloaded his paper “Systemic Resilience of Complex Urban Systems: … Continue reading →
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Ollie here in CASA has just posted a new temporary panel on the London CityDashboard which shows Twitter activity at the London 2012 venues. The panel is using data from new Twitter collector tools in the Big Data Toolkit, developed by Steven James Gray, again CASA, as part of his PhD. As Ollie…
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There’s a new, temporary panel on the London CityDashboard which shows Twitter activity at the London 2012 venues. The panel is using data from new Twitter collector tools in the Big Data Toolkit, which being developed by my colleague Steven James Gray as part of his PhD. For each venue, the collectors count the number […]
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As the athletes have been training for the London 2012 Olympic Games so has been our Twitter Collectors. You may have saw the maps we created from data collected by the very first iteration of the Big Data Toolkit’s Twitter collector which produced some great visualisations. Over the past few weeks I re-wrote some of […]
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Researchers from UCL have analysed millions of Oyster Card journeys in a bid to understand how, why and where we travel in London. Professor Michael Batty (UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis) and Dr Soong Kang (UCL Management Science and Innovation) applied the techniques of statistical physics to their mountain…
Continue reading »In 1977, we made a movie about how you build retail spatial interaction models which compute the impacts of new shopping centres on their surroundings. It was made for an Open University Course called Modelling by Mathematics (TM281). It was … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Future Internet has published the latest paper as part of the Special Issue Government 2.0 entitled Raising Risk Awareness on the Adoption of Web 2.0 Technologies in Decision Making Processes by Marco Prandini and Marco Ramilli of the Università di Bologna: Abstract In the recent past, the so-called “Web 2.0” became a powerful tool for decision making processes. Politicians and […]
Continue reading »The way we get around is changing. We increasingly combine bikes and transit. And in many cities we’re seeing a birth of whole new modes of transport like bike-share and carshare. Over at OpenPlans they build open source tools that are responsive to these changes and let us imagine new ways of moving and with […]
Continue reading »I’ve described this as “radar for trains”, but it now also includes a real-time view of bus and tube delays. The idea is to produce a single visualisation highlighting where there are problems with the transport system: Status of London’s transport system at 13:00 on 8 August 2012. The green squares are bus stops showing …
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The most stupidly named database management system is, sadly, also the system of choice for my research group, the powers that be having apparently no interest in the fact the you can’t pronounce the name, can’t remember how to write … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Go Pro HD Hero is one of the best timelapse cameras out there for 24 hour imagery, its wide angle lens, the ability to power via USB and mount on an outside facing glass window via its suction cup makes it easy to set up and leave. The camera copes well with changes in […]
Continue reading »CASA has a new EU (FP7: Future and Emerging Technologies) project called EUNOIA which is about Evolutive User-centric Networks fOr Intraurban Accessibility. The project will run from October 1st 2012 and is worth 268K Euros. It is part of a … Continue reading →
Continue reading »What have the Olympics got to say about social justice and health inequalities? CrikeyIf the Olympic Games can be used to promote anti-health industries, then why can’t they be used to promote discussions about human rights, social justice a…
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