The latest outputs from researchers, alumni and friends at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA).
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 →
Continue reading »Welcome to the the new look Spatial Analysis blog. My last post was way back in March so I have a lot of catching up to do! The prolonged absence was due to all my energy being spent on completing my PhD thesis in order that I could get it out of the way before …
Continue reading »In the UK, August is exam results month for 16-18 year olds. Every year, photos of leaping teenagers clutching their results are accompanied by reports of record attainment rates, debates around how challenging modern exams are and, more so recently than ever, concerns for the number of sixth form and university places. Back in March …
Continue reading »The Guardian have been keeping track of the magistrate cases and convictions resulting from the recent rioting in England. Using this data I have produced the “tree map” below. For each magistrate I have grouped each offence committed and represented it as a square. The size of the square represents the number of people who …
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Imagine you want compare various locations in terms of the availability of a certain type of environment, such as fresh water. You might want to use a measure of the proximity of that environment — such as the nearest neighbour distance. You might want to use a measure of the quantity of that environment in […]
Continue reading »As I drove to work on my usual route last week I was faced with manoeuvring around burnt out cars, vans and melted wheelie bins which littered the road. This was a very odd experience, and one which I hope not to repeat. Many of those who lived in the vicinity of the riots here […]
Continue reading »As I drove to work on my usual route last week I was faced with manoeuvring around burnt out cars, vans and melted wheelie bins which littered the road. This was a very odd experience, and one which I hope not to repeat. Many of those who lived in the …
Continue reading »As I drove to work on my usual route last week I was faced with manoeuvring around burnt out cars, vans and melted wheelie bins which littered the road. This was a very odd experience, and one which I hope not to repeat. Many of those who lived in the …
Continue reading »The last week of trouble on the streets of British towns provides an interesting ‘field study’ of collective behaviour. While the media and politicians seek to simplify the argument, understanding is only reached by examining the full complexit…
Continue reading »Simulation models test theories against data we cannot reproduce in the physical environment their theory relates to. We cannot experiment on the real thing. But how different are simulations from experiments? In Science in Age of Computer Simulation, Winsberg presents … Continue reading →
Continue reading »When the Police.UK website was launched at the beginning of 2011 a reasonable amount of criticism was levied at the choice of representation used for the online mapping of the crime data. I wrote about this briefly over at Floating Sheep, and indeed spoke about it one very early morning on BBC Radio – thus […]
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When the Police.UK website was launched at the beginning of 2011 a reasonable amount of criticism was levied at the choice of representation used for the online mapping of the crime data. I wrote about this briefly over at Floating Sheep, and indeed sp…
Continue reading »
When the Police.UK website was launched at the beginning of 2011 a reasonable amount of criticism was levied at the choice of representation used for the online mapping of the crime data. I wrote about this briefly over at Floating Sheep, and indeed sp…
Continue reading »With all the media hype surrounding the use of social networking and the London riots, it left me wondering what was actually being said on Twitter in the UK. It was also a good opportunity to test out the new MapTube map creation software which can handle 35,000 clickable points on a map with ease […]
Continue reading »Lecturer in Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing University of Leeds – School of Geography Reference Number ENVGE0017 Faculty / Service Environment Staff Category Academic Grade University Grade 8 Contract Type Ongoing Full Time / Part Time Full Time Location Leeds – Main Campus Job Summary This post is available from 31 […]
Continue reading »I’ve been looking at web-based sources of geographic data and Wikipedia links are something I’ve wanted to try out for a while. I found the following page containing Worldwide fossil sites: List of fossil sites This gives a list of sites, but with no locations: The “Site” column contains href links which can be followed to pages […]
Continue reading »Tweet James Cridland has created and is updating a map of verified reports of looting and rioting in London – and elsewhere. I much prefer this to another map which is automatically updated from postcoded tweets (similar to the UK … Continue reading →
Continue reading »A complex system is often defined as ‘emergent’ when some process generates unexpected, surprising and ordered outcomes. The classic exemplar is segregation in Schelling’s model. But there is strong, weak, first order, second order emergence. Click to read Nigel Gilbert’s … Continue reading →
Continue reading » There is no doubt about the importance of social media in organising and directing crowd behaviour. But there has been little discussion of how these models maintain certain social structures outside of periods of group activity.
As far as I ca…
‘The Madness of Crowds’ was a book written by Charles MacKay in 1841, describing the formation of crowd behaviours such as hysteria, economic bubbles and mass panic. MacKay was among the first to begin to describe widespread phenomena that exis…
Continue reading »It’s a bit silly, and not exactly very helpful as […]
Continue reading »We have a bit of a ‘thing’ about 3D audio soundscapes. Over recent years it has become increasingly possible to analyse audio content and visualise it within a 3D package, there are solutions for most suites out there from 3D Max, Cinema 4D and through…
Continue reading »In our Boris Bike journey dataset, there is time and space explicit in it, but also implied networks which connect the nodes (bike stations) via edges (flows). Because those edges are defined by the number of bikes travelling along them, … Continue reading →
The TfL Oyster Card Tube and Train flow volumes over 24 hrs at 666 (don’t worry about the number) hubs reveal classic diurnal peaks but the profiles are far from power laws. If anything, they are lognormal. Watch the Vimeo Clip. … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Inspired by Jon Reades’ great visualizations of flows using the TfL Oyster card data, we are now starting to examine the statistical properties of the data, beginning with an analysis of what goes on in the nodes. The data yields …
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