The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
Turn orange peel into plastic? It’s not as crazy as it sounds The IndependentBritish scientists are pioneering a novel way of recycling that turns orange peel into plastic. The technique relies on high-powered microwaves that can degrade …
Continue reading »Tweet It’s been announced today that the Alta Bicycle Company will be operating the huge New York City bike-share that will be likely launching next summer. An informative press release reveals the area of the scheme, which will be slightly … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The concept of entropy has arisen periodically during the course of my PhD study, both as an analog to thermodynamics operationalised by Alan Wilson in his ‘family’ of spatial interaction models and to Shannon’s entropy as formalised spatially by several scholars including Mike Batty. Alan Wilson’s models of urban systems work because modelling an entropy […]
Continue reading »Job No.: 492459 Area: Faculty of Science Salary: Advertised at multiple classifications Work type: Full Time – Continuing Location: St Lucia The School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management consists of a dynamic group of academics, researchers and students, with a focus in the disciplines of Geography, Environmental Management, Planning and Development. The School has […]
Continue reading »Megeastructures have a fascination of their own, blurring the attention to detail with the impression of now detail at all. Especially in the way such a structure manages to trick the impression of scale is in it self a fascination. The last century ha…
Continue reading »Unless you resolutely avoid reading the news then it can hardly . have . escaped . your . attention that we’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. Since I was living in New York at the time of the attacks and watched the towers collapse from my roof in Brooklyn Heights, this …
Continue reading »Singapore is an city state with about 5’076’700 inhabitant according to the 2010 census. The society is very technology interested and electronics make a lot of their business.Digital elements have a strong presence in everyday life, including online s…
Continue reading »I’ll be at ECCS 2011 next week in Vienna talking about visualising and characterising rank-value systems – I’m speaking at 3pm on Monday in the Policy session (which takes place in the Aula room). The talk will focus on how … Continue reading →
One of the things that I love about London is the easy access to relatively ‘wild’ (i.e. un-managed) areas from parts of the city that are wholly urban. We owe this, of course, to the existence of the green belt which, even as it allows me to scavenge for fresh, free food (see recipes below), …
Continue reading »The CRESC annual conference 2011 ‘Framing the City’ is now taking place from today, 07 September through to Friday 09 September in Manchester at the Royal Northern College of Music. It is organised by Sophie Watson (Chair), Gillian Evans, Elizabeth…
Continue reading »Stuart Eve here in CASA has been working away in the Unity gaming engine in terms of Augmented Reality applications for the iPhone and iPad. As Stewart himself notes it is surprisingly successful and with at least 3 different ways of getting 3D content…
Continue reading »Tweet Murray Gell-Mann says the “accumulation of frozen accidents is what gives the world its effective complexity.” These are events that define path dependence. The idea that a city is a sequence of accidents sharpens our sense of cities as patterns of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A short paper on key ideas that explain how patterns of urban morphology conceived in terms of networks and/or cells emerge from the bottom up and how cities restructure themselves in the same way. This tells in simple terms what this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Disaster management has become a more widely discussed topic in recent years. It is not necessarily that there are more devastating catastrophe happening, but that it is discussed and reacted upon in a different way. Word wide connections have grown st…
Continue reading »Flickr has newly introduced a feature to automatically limit geographical details of photographs based on criteria. The so called geofence is introduced on the Flickr blog and is a defined area within which the location of photographs is not shown. Fur…
Continue reading »Inspired by this, I’ve done a quick force graph of tube lines/stations.
Links are all set to 1; it would be nice to weight them by popularity, but that’s for another day.
Continue reading »Exploring population analysis in geography: essays in honour of Professor Robert WoodsPaul Boyle and Allan FindlayJuly 2011 In 1979 Bob Woods published a landmark text Population Analysis in Geography that boldly stated that ‘traditional methods used for studying population geography are out of date: simple analysis and description are no longer adequate’ (Woods, 1979, 279 […]
Continue reading »Tweet I’m a sucker for alternative maps of the London Underground, and here’s a great one – the Twisted London Underground Map by Francisco Dans (see the original in high-resolution on Flickr) – it’s perhaps not going to be useful … Continue reading →
Continue reading »I’m a sucker for alternative maps of the London U […]
Continue reading »The Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference 2011 is under way this week in London. It opened yesterday under the topic The Geographical Imagination and is chaired by Stephen Daniels, University of Nottingham.javascript:void(0)As ever…
Continue reading »This week I feature on the 4th Episode of the Global Lab podcast. The podcast is a great new initiative led by Martin and Steve from CASA where they talk about cities, global connectivity and the impact of technology on people’s lives. Episode four features some horrendous physics jokes, Einstein’s Garden at the Green Man festival …
Continue reading »I work a lot with flows and spatial interactions, one thing that I’ve wanted to do for a while is compute a mean flow direction surface. Unfortunately, arithmetic means don’t work for angular data, this is because it cannot account for the circular nature of the distribution of angular measurements. For instance the angles 5 […]
Continue reading »Mapping and maps as the contextual representation and abstraction of an environment is a very diverse, complicated and very challenging disciplin. With the current ongoing trend of spatialisation the understanding and suitable interpretation , but also…
Continue reading »Many interesting approaches were presented at Strathclyde Complex Transport Networks meeting this week, ranging from slime mould networks to more conventional transportation geometries. Our paper using London Oyster Card data can be downloaded from presentations on this site or by … Continue reading →
Continue reading »We are pleased to announce that Tadas Nikonovas from the Department of Geography at Swansea University is the winner of this year’s QMRG Undergraduate Dissertation Prize. Tadas’ dissertation entitled “Artificial light emissions in Europe. Trends from a DMSP satellite fifteen year record” was applauded for its interesting and relevant topic, its use of complex quantitative […]
Continue reading »I recently attempted to visualise the labrinthine UCL departmental structure in the form of a Force-Directed Graph: It has been remarked (not unfairly) that this is the sort of pattern that I might wear, were it printed on a shirt. … Continue reading →
It is ten years since the 9/11 attacks in New York in 2001. Quite a lot has happened in the mean time and something unbelievable has become accepted as part of lives that will go on. The attacks with two passenger panes crashed into the World Trade Cen…
Continue reading »Swept up in the wave of the mid-2000′s property boom, planning authorities signed-off a series…
Continue reading »A map doing the rounds at the moment (thanks to a plug from flowingdata) is Derek Watkin’s brilliant map of “generic” terms for rivers in the United States (above).The map shows how different cultural and linguistic factors have influenced the naming of geographic features in the US. For example French settlers named the streams they encountered “bayous”.
Continue reading »A couple of days ago I saw a post on twitter about the proof that 1 + 1 = 2 by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell. It appears in…
Continue reading »Gender stereotypes have changed in the past twenty years and in many areas of professional live the gap between the sexes has started to close. The western society has started to accept that both men and women can do the same jobs and should be rewarde…
Continue reading »London was the first city we collected Twitter data for when we started to create the New City Landscape (NCL) project, monitoring location based Twitter activity in urban areas. This was back in May 2010 and since we have collected data for a lot more…
Continue reading »Motion is both elementary and fleeting; it is a fundamental precondition to our survival and our civilization. Motion is the functional basis to the discovery, measurement and exploration of the world that we live in. Elucidating and calculating motion…
Continue reading »2011 is fast becoming one of the most tumultuous years in recent memory, with revolutions…
Continue reading »Use the Player Bar above for Audio. A Webinar to the Urban Systems Collaborative organized by the IBM Smart Cities Group in Armonk, NY focusing on CASA’s work on tracking, measuring, modeling and visualizing city systems. For a glance at the Slides, … Continue reading →
Continue reading »After four-and-half years of exploring, analysing, procrastinating, and writing, writing, writing, it’s finally done. Here’s the…
Continue reading »“Treemaps display hierarchical (tree-structured) data as a set of nested rectangles. Each branch of the tree is given a rectangle, which is then tiled with smaller rectangles representing sub-branches. A leaf node’s rectangle has an area proportional to a specified dimension on the data. Often the leaf nodes are colored to show a separate dimension of …
Continue reading »The focus is shifting to real time analysis of city systems with many links between urban mobility, energy and ICT. Trantopoulos, Schlapfer and Helbing suggest that the nervous system of a city be explored using ‘Techno-Social Reality Mining’. References to … Continue reading →
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