Planet CASA

Extracts of Local Distance: A Unique Take on Architectural Photography

Skopje 2014 Visualisation

Cluster with high numbers of calls

Today I have shown the same graph that I published yesterday and highlighted my first cluster points in green. I have then mapped these grid squares below. These grid squares represent the the busiest areas for "I" calls in 2009. Within this cluster there is a small negative correlation between the two variables of -0.22 meaning there is a tendency for grid squares with more calls to have a better average response time than those with fewer calls. My initial hypothesis for this, which may be shown to wrong, is that these grid squares are ones with high numbers of pubs, clubs, shops and transport hubs - places where people congregate, that is, not predominately residential locations. This would account for the high number of calls and the fact that police respond quickly. These are places where police tend to patrol, they are easy to get to because they tend to be on main roads, and the call venues tend to be well known so there is no delay in finding out where they are.

Narrative and Time

Confidence in the Police and the Dizaei case

Processing: A 3D City in One Minute

Analysis of police response times to emergency incidents

Book Review – Installations by Architects

ESRI’s Free Maps

Following a slightly critical post about the map featured on ESRI’s Geomedicine website I thought I would balance things with a post on a good example (in my opinion) of a mapping service from ESRI. I was really impressed with their Free Embeddable Maps website. Users can select from a number of demographic measures such as population density,  median age, average household size and population change between 2000 and 2009 and map them at a range of scales. Maps can be personalised using a title and direct links to the creator’s website or their email address. My map of New York Median Household Income is here. It would be good to get more data and coverage beyond North America. It would also be nice to enable multiple overlays (perhaps using different forms of representation on the map). The page is only beta so these additions may follow.

I know this kind of thing has been done before, such as with the London Profiler Website, but ESRI’s contribution is remarkably simple to use. Users with no GIS experience will be able to create a map in under a minute.  It can then be embedded in a any web page or linked to via bit.ly. The interface is well-thought out and users can read additional information from the pop-outs that appear when the map when they click on an area of interest. The maps deserve to be utilised by a range of users, but I expect educators and their students stand to benefit most from this excellent free service.

Paper: Mapping for the Masses Accessing Web 2.0 Through Crowdsourcing

Panoramic Globes: Rapid HD Visualisation of Place and Space

Confidence in the Police and Geography

1. 1980-2000 policing performance is primarily centred on detecting and reducing recorded crime and responding quickly to calls from the public.
2. This led to police patrols being in vehicles rather than on foot and along with intelligence and investigation units, only treating recorded crimes as priorities.
3. Even though police were successful in achieving their performance targets the public was feeling unsafe, fear of crime was rising and confidence in the police was in jeopardy.
4. 2001 this mismatch between police priorities and the public's needs and expectations is identified by the police and termed the Reassurance Gap.
5. The potential consequences of allowing the Reassurance Gap to continue to widen hits the senior policy makers and strategists between the eyes.
6. They realised that if confidence in the police kept falling this would lead to non-cooperation with the police and the criminal justice system, lack of compliance with the law and ultimately communities and individuals taking policing into their own hands without reference to the legal system of the country.
7. 2003 Reassurance Policing was introduced to address fear of crime by introducing dedicated foot patrol community policing teams. In about 2005 this style of policing was rebranded as Neighbourghood Policing.
8. 2008 the overarching performance indicator of Increasing the Public's Confidence in the Police is introduced in England and Wales.
9. 2010 "Walking is Working" and single patrols are at the forefront of the Metropolitan Police Service publicity campaign.

Confidence in Police is measured by independent market research type companies by questioning a small sample of the population of London. These people are asked about their experiances of policing, crime and disorder in their local area. This means that local police are now most concerned about crimes that happen to adult local residents not to people that live elsewhere.

The priority of crimes types are now judged on this basis. Residential Burglaries become the number one priority with anything that happens in the home not far behind, for instance domestic violence and disputes. Similarly antisocial behaviour affecting residents goes up the hierachy.

This, perhaps is not an entirely predicted outcome of the confidence measure, is happily in my view positive due to the nature of the fear of crime. I will explain this in a later post. What I want to leave you with is the thought that policing is becoming even more geographical with this emphasis on what is local. This is a fertile area for mapping and spatial analysis. Again more thoughts on this later.

Google Earth – Creating a Zoom Movie

OpenLayers 101

Here’s a simple one-file way to get an OpenLayers map on a website. This is all the code you need, including the HTML, Javascript and CSS.

This particular example pulls in some custom tiles from a URL and overlays them on the “standard” OpenstreetMap map. You will need to change the URL (and attribution text) to point to the overlay you are interested in.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
    xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
    content="text/html;charset=utf-8" />
<title>NPE Scotland</title>
<script type="text/javascript"
    src="http://www.openlayers.org/api/OpenLayers.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var map;
var EPSG4326 = new OpenLayers.Projection("EPSG:4326");
var EPSG900913 = new OpenLayers.Projection("EPSG:900913");
var b = 20037508.34;

function init()
{
    map = new OpenLayers.Map ("map",
    {
        controls:[
            new OpenLayers.Control.Navigation(),
            new OpenLayers.Control.PanZoomBar(),
            new OpenLayers.Control.Attribution(),
        new OpenLayers.Control.LayerSwitcher(),
        new OpenLayers.Control.MouseDefaults(),
        new OpenLayers.Control.KeyboardDefaults()],
        maxExtent: new OpenLayers.Bounds(-1*b, -1*b, b, b),
        maxResolution: 156543.0399,
        units: 'm',
        projection: EPSG900913,
        displayProjection: EPSG4326
    });

    layerMapnik = new OpenLayers.Layer.OSM(
    	null, null, { numZoomLevels: 15 });
    layerOverlay = new OpenLayers.Layer.OSM(
        "NPE Scotland",
        "tiles/${z}/${x}/${y}.jpg",
        {
            transitionEffect: "none",
            isBaseLayer: false,
            attribution: "Imagery CC-By-NC-SA NPEMap.org.uk"
        }
    );
    map.addLayer(layerMapnik);
    map.addLayer(layerOverlay);
    var start = new OpenLayers.LonLat(-3.5, 56.5);
    map.setCenter(start.transform(EPSG4326, EPSG900913), 7);
}
</script>
</head>
<body onload="init();" style="margin: 0;">
<div id="map"
    style="position: absolute; width: 100%; height: 100%;">
</div>
</body>
</html>
 

Here’s what it looks like:

Miniature Tokyo City Timelapse