UCL Quantitative Geography Blogs

We’ve Moved!

Administrator — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 20:42:06 +0000

UCL CASA Blogs has moved to a new server. You can find us here.

(N.B. This site is kept so that older articles can still be viewed.)

England and Wales Crime data heat maps (January, 2011 Crime data)

GIS & Technology — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 17:49:47 +0000

I created the heat maps application for England and Wales by using the crime data from www.police.gov. The Heat maps show all the crimes recorded by a police authority. There are 43 police authorities in England and Wales. You will need to select the name of a Police Authority from the drop down to see the heat map.

To view the heat maps please click here.

Popcode Apps

GIS+AR — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 16:10:00 +0000

Popcode is an augmented reality development tool kit.
The website provides a development manual as well.

Popcode at the Cambridge Science Festival from Cambridge University on Vimeo.

Augmented Reality Advertisement: Unilever

GIS+AR — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 14:52:00 +0000

Augmented Reality has become more pervasive in our life.
The video clip shows the Unileve company promoting their brand Axe using augmented reality in London's Victoria station.

This is a tag-based augmented reality. When travelers are located on the tag, the system superimposes a 3-D virtual angel object just around the travelers. It is a very interactive advertisement.

An interactive map of Poverty around the world

GIS & Technology — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 09:53:41 +0000

A UK-based charity “Christian Aid” has created a nice interactive world map of poverty around different countries, over a period of 200 years. The map can be viewed online at http://www.povertyover.com.

Global Migration Maps

James — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:53:21 +0000

Migrations of people have existed for millennia and occur at a range of scales and time-periods (from small-scale journeys to work through to intercontinental resettlement). As a geographer I have long been interested in these and thought it was about time I mapped them! Using data from the Global Migrant Origin Database (thanks Adam for the tip) and R, my favourite stats software, I have produced the maps you see here (click on them for higher resolution). Each line shows the origins and destinations of at least 4000 people in a given year (2000 in this case). The more red the line the more people it represents. I have used great circle distance to plot them onto the Earth. The map below shows the same magnitude of flows but just for Europe. The Earth has been flattened for this one so the flows are represented by arbitrary arcs.

These visualisations aren’t perfect. Firstly they are based on a dataset where many of the movements are best guesses rather than measured data. You can read more about this here. It would also be great to have actual flows rather than inferred flows based on the number of migrants in each country. If I made these maps again I might draw lines between capital cities or population centres to avoid the impression that the majority of migrations to/ from Russia start/end in Siberia for example. There are of course endless ways of partitioning the data/ selecting the colours. Despite this I am really pleased with effect and the maps go some way to showing the dynamism in many 21st Century populations.

Technical Details

I think Paul Butler’s Facebook Map threw down the gauntlet to the R community in terms of the quality of visualisations that can be produced with the software so I was keen to see what I could do. To produce the maps I calculated the great circle distances using the geosphere package, I calculated my own arcs for the second map and used the maps package for my World outline. The visualisations (including projections) were done using ggplot2. Over the next few months I plan to stick together a more complete tutorial (PhD write-up permitting!).

Twitter Wave in Honolulu

fan — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 13:26:00 +0000

The tsunami wave, generated by the 9.0 magnitude earthquake of the East coast of Japan on the 11 March 2011, spread through out the pacific threatening many coastal sections in different countries. The water fore strongest hit the Japanese coast shortly after the earthquake. All other countries had a little more time to evacuate and prepare. Hawaii, was one of the next destinations in the line of the wave. The arrival was expected by NOAA, the tsunami warning centre, around 13h17 the same day.

Looking at the activity on twitter during the tsunami we are on the search for clues about the relationship between twitter and an unfolding natural disaster. As an inspiration to serves the XKCD PhD comic 'Seismic Waves'.

In this close look at twitter activity related to the tsunami resulting from the earthquake, Anders Johanson has animated the messages for one hour before and one hour after the expected arrival time of the tsunami wave in Honolulu on Hawaii. The messages are collected through the usual NCL collection method and are focusing on actual geo located tweets that contain lat/long information. Johanson explains "At the time instant when each new tweet is posted, a bright red blob appears on the map, and this blob is then decaying in intensity and size. Re-tweets are shown as an arrow, pointing from the original source of information. Interestingly enough, the information wave has the same direction as the seismic wave. However, there are obviously way too few data points to enable a rigorous spatio-temporal analysis in this case."

IMage by urbanTick for NCL / The graph shows the number of geo located tweets sent per hour from Honolulu, on 2011-03-11, in a radius of 30 km on the day the tsunami resulting from the earlier earthquake in Japan was expected to reach the Hawaiian coast. In white are the overal tweets and in purple the tweets containing the key words wave, tsunami and earthquake or Japan. The first dotted line from the left is the expected arrival time of the wave on the coast of Hawaii at around 13h07 UTC. The second dotted line is the arrival time of the wave on the coast of Mexico.

The tsunami arrived in Hawaii and hit hard, causing damages estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars. On the twitter scape on the other hand, there is a slight increase of activity after the wave, but actually very little. However, as you can note in the graph above there are more tweets using the keywords related to the natural disaster unfolding than there are thereafter, especially after the wave arrived in Mexico.

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UPDATE 2011-03-18
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Processing the twitter data some further, the spikes on the keywords do fade out nicely in the hours afterwards. This time we are working with the larger data set containing all the located tweets including the geo located tweets. This data set differs from the one used earlier as that it included reverse geocoded locations, eg places, but not necessarily pure lat/long messages. This set contains some 260'000 messages as compared to some 20'000 geo located in the earlier dataset.

Looking at the event over longer period shows the pattern much clearer. There is a lot more activity around the expected tsunami wave and the dying out of the keywords can be observed in the following hours and days. However it also confirms that to some extend the purely geo located tweets, as a sub set, folow largely the same pattern and are not

Note, there is a baseline tweet containing the term 'wave' that we picked up as part of the collection. This is a weather boy just of Honolulu tweeting the current status of the water, wave and wind.

Image by urbanTick for NCL / The graph shows the number of geo located tweets sent per hour from Honolulu after 2011-03-11, in a radius of 30 km on the day the tsunami resulting from the earlier earthquake in Japan was expected to reach the Hawaiian coast. In white are the overal tweets and in purple the tweets containing the key words wave, tsunami, earthquake or Japan. The first dotted line from the left is the expected arrival time of the wave on the coast of Hawaii at around 13h07 UTC. The second dotted line is the arrival time of the wave on the coast of Mexico.

A postdoctoral position and 3 PhD studentships in Extreme Citizen Science

Dr Muki Haklay — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 11:39:23 +0000

Following successful funding for the European Union FP7 EveryAware and the EPSRC Extreme Citizen Science activities, the department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering at UCL is inviting applications for a postdoctoral position and 3 PhD studentships. Please note that these positions are open to students who meet the EPSRC UK residency criteria.

These positions are in the ‘Extreme Citizen Science’ (ExCiteS) research group. The group’s activities focus on the theory, methodologies, techniques and tools that are needed to allow any community to start its own bottom-up citizen science activity, regardless of the level of literacy of the users. Importantly, Citizen Science is understood in the widest sense, including perceptions and views – so participatory mapping and participatory geographic information are integral parts of the activities.

The research themes that the group explores include Citizen Science and Citizen Cyberscience; Community and participatory mapping/GIS; Volunteered Geographic Information (OpenStreetMap, Green Mapping, Participatory GeoWeb); Usability of geographic information and geographic information technology, especially with non-expert users; GeoWeb and mobile GeoWeb technologies that facilitate Extreme Citizen Science; and identifying scientific models and visualisations that are suitable for Citizen Science.

The positions that are opening now are part of an effort to extend Dr Jerome Lewis’ research with forest communities (see BBC Report and report on software development):

Research Associate in Extreme Citizen Science – a 2-year, postdoctoral research associate position commencing 1 May 2011.

The research associate will lead the development of an ‘Intelligent Map’ that allows non-literate users to upload data securely; and the system should allow the users to visualise their information with data from other users. Permissions need to be developed in accordance with cultural sensitivities. As uploaded data from multiple users sharing the same system increase over time, repeating patterns will begin to emerge that indicate particular environmental trends.

The role will also include some general project-management duties, guiding the PhD students who are working on the project. Travel to Cameroon to the forest communities that we are working with is necessary.

Complete details about this post and application procedure are available on the UCL jobs website.

PhD Studentship – understanding citizen scientists’ motivations, incentives and group organisation – a 3.5-year fully funded studentship. We are looking for applicants with a good honours degree (1st Class or 2:1 minimum), and an MA or MSc in anthropology, geography, sociology, psychology or related discipline. The applicant needs to be familiar with quantitative and qualitative research methods, and be able to work with a team that will include programmers and human-computer interaction experts who will design systems to be used in citizen science projects. Travel will be required as part of the project. A willingness to live for short periods in remote forest locations in simple lodgings, eating local food, will be necessary. French language skills are desirable.

The research itself will focus on motivations, incentives and understanding of the needs and wishes of participants in citizen science projects. We will specifically focus on engagement of non-literate people in such projects and need to understand how the process – from data collection to analysis – can be made meaningful and useful for their everyday life. The research will involve using quantitative methods to analyse large-scale patterns of engagement in existing projects, as well as ethnographic and qualitative study of participants. The project will include working with non-literate forest communities in Cameroon as well as marginalised communities in London.

Complete details about this post and application procedure are available on the UCL jobs website.

PhD Studentship in geographic visualisation for non-literate citizen scientists - a 3.5-year fully funded studentship. The applicant should possess a good honours degree (1st Class or 2:1 minimum), and an MSc in computer science, human-computer interaction, electronic engineering or related discipline. In addition, they need to be familiar with geographic information and software development, and be able to work with a team that will include anthropologists and human-computer interaction experts who will design systems to be used in citizen science projects. Travel will be required as part of the project. A willingness to live for short periods in remote forest locations in simple lodgings, eating local food, will be necessary. French language skills are desirable.

Complete details about this post and application procedure are available on the UCL jobs website.

In addition, we offer a PhD Studentship on How interaction design and mobile mapping influences participation in Citizen Science, which is part of the EveryAware project and open to any EU citizen.

Japan 2011 Shifting Scales – Time and Space

fan — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 12:04:00 +0000

The dramatic events of the last few days unfolding in Japan have definitely also had an impact on how we assess safety risk and stability. As the rescue and stabilisation operations are still in progress the full extend of the disaster is not as of yet to conclude. The scale of the destruction is massive, especially through the tsunami that followed the earthquake and which has basically washed away the whole North East coast.

Mappings are under way, from Google to open source projects. ABC news has put together, similar to the version of the Australian flooding, a before and after documentation. Etire villages and towns are flattened, the buildings simply gone. The force of the water can be seen in videos pushing houses down the road. An incredible force, something not imaginable and certainly not expected.

Image taken from Ann Fischer / Japan flag as a red ball with the tsunami wave rendered in 3d onto it. Data used from the NOAA image showing the expected wave hight.

The events have jumped out of scale very early on. The earth quake was the larges in Japan's recorded history. But in many other ways, is has also shifted scales. The dimensions with the multiplication of the earthquake and the tsunami and now, as a result the looming nuclear emergency.

On a very spatial scale the earthquake had shifted the whole of the Japanese coast line by some 2.4 meters. Who said the land is a constantly stable entity? It is unclear what the impact of this movement and remapping and redrawing the coast lines might be the simplest task. Infrastructure has definitely been hit hardest, the rigid installations of roads, train lines, bridges, pipes and cables. To what extend there will bean impact on navigation both on land and in the air is not as of yet clear. "At this point, we know that one GPS station moved (8 feet), and we have seen a map from GSI (Geospatial Information Authority) in Japan showing the pattern of shift over a large area is consistent with about that much shift of the land mass," said Kenneth Hudnut, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

Japan is located on the Ring of Fire, the falt line around the Pacific Ocean where constant earth movement result in hundreds of earthquakes a year. However this scale is ver unusual and the 2011-03-11 earthquake was the strongest ever recorded in the history of the country.
Because of the location Japan is putting in a lot of effort to be prepared, probably Japan is the best prepared nation on earth for the case of an earthquake. At this scale however things are a bit different, it is simply overwhelming and complications pile in.

This event of course also draws attempts to compare to earlier events and history is once more unrolled. There is a lot to uncover and the Japanese disaster history is long and the society pretty battered with events, in this sense a very strong nation always has been able to cope with the most dramatic of events.

Image taken from Wikipedia / The Great Hanshin earthquake, or Kobe earthquake, was an earthquake that occurred on Tuesday, January 17, 1995, at 05:46 JST (16 January at 20:46 UTC) in the southern part of Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. It measured 6.8 on the moment magnitude scale (USGS),[1] and Mj7.3 (adjusted from 7.2) on JMA magnitude scale.[2] The tremors lasted for approximately 20 seconds. The focus of the earthquake was located 16 km beneath its epicenter,[2] on the northern end of Awaji Island, 20 km away from the city of Kobe.

There are definitely two, that immediately draw up to this most recent one. The first one is the Kobe earthquake that destroyed the central part of Japan around Kobe on January 17 in 1995. The vast devastation included around 200'000 buildings the port of Kobe and large sections of an express way. The nation was unprepared and the disaster coincided with a economical down period making it even the more difficult to get the recovery on track.

The second event, also in relation to the unfolding nuclear aftermath of the distaster is the much older, but nevertheless very present, nuclear attack on Nagasaki and Hiroshima on August 9, 1945 and Monday, August 6, 1945 respectively. The attack not only destroyed with devastating impact the whole area, but contaminated the wider region. The impact reached far beyond structural damage and with long term effect through the radiation had vast social and psychological effects.

Image taken from News Flick / Above: A destroyed landscape in Otsuchi village, Iwate Prefecture in northern Japan. Below: Nagasaki following the August 9, 1945 dropping of the atomic bomb “Fat Man”.

All these events drag through parallels of disaster and trauma mix up the times and pull these events closer together ignoring the usually in linear fashion imagined timeline. Are we going in circles.

Of corse int his context another event is very present, the Chernobyl nuclear accident on the 26 of April 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian SSR. With Japan now struggling to bring the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant that was badly damaged during the earthquake under controle these memories and experiences come back to live. In fact telling from the government reactions through out the world, especially Germany and Switzerland, but also Russia and the EU, nuclear energy was considered save and sound. Probably it was secretly being promoted as the solution for many countries to the global warming and sustainability programs. No one really was in the game with a large majority to lobby against the very powerful nuclear energy consortiums. Many countries have only recently revoken legislations to abandonne nuclear energy, such as Germany or Italy in 2008. Most countries are now however, revising and revisiting their active plants and plans for new ones. The recent events in this sense were a sudden wake up call with a good stirrup of settled perspectives and believes.

Clearly this goes way beyond just Japan. The impact on many levels from economy to energy are global. Technology is save and well developed but only to some extend. Nuclear energy production has changed since and because of the Chernobyl disaster, but still a large number of reactors currently running are dated, were built in the seventies and eighties. The earthquake has also, according to calculations by the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy shifted the planet on its axis by nearly 10 centimeters. Similar movement was reported also from the 2004 Chilenian earthquake in a National Geographic article. "should have shortened an Earth day by 1.26 millionths of a second, according to new computer-model calculations by geophysicist Richard Gross of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. For comparison, the same model estimated that the magnitude 9 Sumatra earthquake in December 2004 shortened the length of a day by 6.8 millionths of a second." The Japan earthquake should be in about the same league. Even though this sounds very dramatic experts point out that such changes are part of the constant movement and changes of the planet. These measurements are based on mathematical models and not actual measurements. The changes are presumed to be much too small even for satellites to pick up.

Nevertheless, the fact and especially the idea of the ground moving and with it changing the duration of the day as our basic rhythmic unit is really disturbing. It again points out that there are more interconnections apparent with each event than we usually are capable of perceiving and willing to take into account. In this sense the ongoing development of the disaster in Japan is definitely active on many scales with the power to shift these scales. Rigid structures are moved, ground is shifted, areas contaminated, towns erased. More over, security is destroyed, routines buried and safety washed away. A lot of lives have been lost bringing with it great human tragedies. Whole towns are destroyed and large urban areas such as Tokyo with around 35 million people at risk from the nuclear fall out of the badly damaged power plant.

This sudden dimension shift on spatial but definitely also temporal scales are are considerable part of the extend of the disaster for the individual as much as society, the town as much as the city and the nation as much as the world.

For support and donations Google has installed a central webpage for Japan 2011 support as one of many ways to help.

Heatmap of Crime in London, December 2010

GIS & Technology — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:29:09 +0000

Oliver O’brien (A researcher in UCL) created a nice heatmap of Crime in London by using crime data for december, 2010. The map can be viewed by clicking here.

Word Count the Library – Google Ngram Viewer for the Google Books Stock

fan — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 09:13:00 +0000

How do terms compare in usage over the centuries. With the Ngram Viewer now available on the Google Labs the massive stock of scanned books as part of the Google Book project becomes available for search. It allows for the graphing of terms according to the frequency they are used per year. The data ranges from 1800 to 2000.

Image taken from Google NGram / Comparing the two search terms decades of the century. Interesting how the different decades peak some decades after. Some decades have a shifted or even two peaks, like for example the 'nineties' that peak already around 1920. Of course the continuos fascination with the sixties is visible, but also te thirties cling on.

Google has grouped it into several corpora, groups of books. Most of them related to different languages, currently these are English, Chinese, French, German, Hebrew, Russian, and Spanish, but also samples like the 'Corpora Million', where no more than 6000 books per year are samples for the result. There are of course difficulties with punctuations and muti words. Generally the search field is case sensitive and punctuation is treated as individual tokens. More details on this on the Google Ngram page.

Image taken from Google NGram / Comparing the search terms month, year, day, hour and week. The different time units are used differently with the word day leading the table throughout, diving however very low around 1960 where it almost was overtaken by the term year. Have things slowed down? Surprisingly the month and the week, both in planning terms very important words are nowhere compared to the terms, year and day.

However, the results are quite tricky to interpret even though things might look very cear through the simplicity of the graph. Google has managed to make it look very simple and clean, each term is shown as a graph with time on the horizontal x axis and frequency on the vertical y axis. It has to be taken into account however, that there are changes in the usage of words, for example 'the Great War' vs 'World War I'. Even more important is the fact that more and more books are written. This of course influences the results. Google points out that there is only a catalogue of around 500'000 English books before the 19th century. This means, that a search term can have a stronger peak early on than it would have later o, since this one book has more of an impact on the sample as a whole.

Image taken from Google Ngram / Comparing the two search terms rural and urban. As you would expect the word rural dominates and the urabn term only really comes in in the last century with a dramatic peak during the 70ies.

It is a great way to explore different terms especially in combinations. Even term that have a similar meaning can show a dramatic diversion on the graphs over time. Basically it show how trends in language change. Of course also the birth of terms can be observed as some terms only apear after a certain period or after the object has been invented as for example visible in this graph showing the terms used for different rooms in a house or flat. The invention of 'living' in architecture around 1900 brought along the terms 'living room' and 'dining room'.

If your are not satisfied with what you can get fromt he graphs, Google has some of the datasets available for download (or HERE for the two Billion Timeseries) and you can have a go at visualising and searching it yourself. Note the file structure thought.

Image taken from Google NGram / Comparing the two search terms twitter and facebook. This is of course ridiculous since both terms were invented after 2000, surprising however how twitter makes a dramatic appearance during the 19 hundreds.

Via The Atlantic

Jean-Baptiste Michel*, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, William Brockman, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, and Erez Lieberman Aiden*. Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books. Science (Published online ahead of print: 12/16/2010)

Can a Dodo Tweet?: QRator Museum iPad App Preview

Andy (Digital Urban) @ CASA — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 16:51:00 +0000

UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology is reopening on 15 March, allowing some of the rarest extinct animal specimens in the world to be displayed for the first time, but in contrast to the more traditional museum outlook, the new Grant has integrated iPads, QRCodes and twitter into the mix via a project known as QRator.

QRator is an iPad-based system that allows everyone to be a curator and share their views on an exhibition. Visitors can examine an object before leaving their thoughts about it on an iPad to create a digital, ‘living’ label that subsequent visitors can read and respond to. By downloading a free application to an iPhone or android phone, visitors will be able to see rolling updates to the digital label after they leave the museum, or via twitter.

We are horribly biased on this but we think the mix of iPads/QRCodes and Twitter represents a new step in models for interaction in museums. The iPads pull in unique twitter tags from the outside world, allowing the museum objects to be followed and conversations to take place beyond the museums walls.

QRator was developed with the Centre for Digital Humanities (thanks to Claire Ross), UCL Museums and in-house here in CASA (thanks to Steven Gray) with the idea behind digital signage linked to our wider project Tales of Things. The system goes live in beta tomorrow before a formal launch Thursday, we will have full details soon....

What is Geographic Information Science (GISc)?

Paul Richards — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:35:00 +0000

I am aware that I have not posted for sometime. This is because I have been trying to get my thoughts together to start writing my PhD thesis. I thought I would post part of my introductory section discussing Science and Geographic Information Science (GISc). Without GISc there would be no crime maps so it is quite important. Everything I know about the subject and a lot more is contained in the excellent bestselling book in the world on the subject, that has recently been published in its 3rd edition - "Geographic Information Systems and Science" whose lead author just happens to be one of my supervisors - Professor Paul Longley.

What I am trying to do is explain why GISc is undoubtaby a science (something I needed to be convinced about when I first approached the subject) and to start laying the ground work to justify creating and comparing classifications between areas using crime and policing data.

Science

This section discusses the scientific context of the research. The discussion adopts a simplified approach, guided by others who have studied and written about the nature of science, its definitions and its academic divisions. These processes of definition, simplification, clustering and classification, often in an inexact and overlapping way, are of course central to the scientific method and central to the research carried out in this thesis.

The word ‘science’ is derived from the Latin via Old French and Middle English to denote ‘knowledge’ (Oxford online Dictionary). The purpose of all science is to transform raw data by analysis and/or experimentation into knowledge (Oxford online Dictionary, Longley et al 2010). Knowledge in this sense is an understanding of the system that is being studied so that it can be described by relationships, laws or theories that model its key dynamics. This is a process that goes further than describing a system by providing an insight into how it works. Part and parcel of understanding a system is to be able to identify uncertainties and where possible quantify them; the statistical use of confidence levels of results is an example of this. This quantification of variables and relationships allows research to be reviewed by peers with a view to validation and the generation of new knowledge through further scientific research.

Geographic Information Science (GISc)

The over-arching methodology used by this thesis is Geographic Information Science (GISc). Geography is defined by the (Oxford online Dictionary) as;

“the study of the physical features of the earth and its atmosphere, and of human activity as it affects and is affected by these, including the distribution of populations and resources and political and economic activities.”

The use of the word ‘Information’ refers to the organised collection of data, for instance in a database. GISc relies on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for the storage of geographic data and organising it so that it can be used for scientific purposes. The data in GIS come from a myriad of different sources, some of which are specific to the creation of mapping the surface of the earth such as satellite imagery and others that are by-products of other data gathering activities such as census data and land-ownership. The data from the disparate data sources are linked by the fact that each row of data in every data set in the system is geo-referenced. This allows the joining of the different data by location or the keeping the data sets separate by layering the data by location or a combination of both. This leads to mentioning the special nature of spatial data that is based on the Tobler’s first law of geography;

“Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” (Tobler 1970).

Tobler’s law refers to spatial autocorrelation which affects the independence of variables which are analysed spatially. This spatial autocorrelation is two dimensional (unlike temporal autocorrelation which is one dimensional) because it radiates out from a fixed point. Both these facts necessitate the use of spatial statistics if the spatial nature of variables is being assessed. The complex nature of the application of Toblar’s Law to crime and policing data is discussed further in this thesis.

The creation of maps is a scientific process, representing the real world is a process of scale selection, data choice and emphasis based on purpose, generalisation and geovisualistion. These methods of representation are by their nature incomplete and imperfect as the only way to perfectly represent the real world is using a 1:1 scale which is pointless and totally impractical. This means that irregular lines on maps, such as coastlines and roads are simplified by excluding the smaller twists and turns; polygon zones are created to show features that are pertinent to the purpose of the map that generalise or amalgamate entities being represented. This can either be completely objective based on measurement and statistical criteria or purely subjective based on the eye of the mapmaker; often it is a combination, this where science meets art. Maps are designed to be intuitive (once the spatial language is understood) by duplicating how human-beings perceive and make sense of the real world both visually and intellectually. Our perception of things goes from the general to the more and more specific as the resolution increases; in a geographical sense, without the aid of maps, this involves travel, for instance moving from seeing a wood in the distance to entering the wood and only being able to see the trees. This raises the question, “Is it better to see the wood or the trees?” The answer is of course “It depends on your purpose.” The conclusion is that, in line with the saying “You cannot see the wood for the trees”, in many circumstances the general can be more important and informative than the specific.

Imperfect clustering and classification are fundamental to GISc. They can be applied to label areas on a map as forests even though there are areas within them of agricultural land or showing the residents of an area as “small town seniors” even though youth offenders are known to live there. The importance of this methodology to this thesis is that it allows hypotheses of relationships between different layers at the same locations to be proposed and comparisons between different locations to be investigated on a single or multi-layer basis. To continue with the tree example, it would be logical to have a polygon denoting timber production on a layer to spatially coincide with a polygon on a separate layer denoting forest but not necessarily all forest polygons spatially coinciding with timber production: If a polygon denoting timber production is nowhere near a forest polygon, this is worth further investigation and explanation.

GISc is a pure science because it is used to empirically measure and represent geographic characteristics and attempts to understand how they interact with each other. It is also an applied science because much of this knowledge is put to practical use, for example Internet crime maps for the public.

The Weeks Media Update

Andy (Digital Urban) @ CASA — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 12:17:00 +0000

A quick post with info on how the work of CASA (home of digital urban) has been used and featured in the media this week:

CNN USA and The Discovery Channel both made use of Tweet-o-Meter to demonstrate the use of social media after the earthquake in Japan, including an interview with Steven Gray:

http://www.discoverychannel.ca/Article.aspx?aid=31124 we of course wish the work used in happier circumstances.

Ollie's Cycle Network Map in Wired is now online at:

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/04/start/bike-routes-for-a-city-with-no-tube

Tales of Things was featured on ABC Australia, looking into Mass urbanisation: why do we flock together?

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/futuretense/stories/2011/3153206.htm#transcript

It was described as a mix of Facebook, The Antiques Roadshow and eBay.

QRator (our QRCode Museum interactive signage work in association with The Centre for Digital Humanities) featured on the New Scientist site:

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/03/a-new-lease-of-life-for-extinct-animals.html

Finally, QRator can also been seen on BBC Science with a nice video showing QRator in action:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12711455

To keep up to speed with the latest research, you can follow us on Twitter.

Songs about science (lots and lots of them)

martinaustwick — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 10:51:24 +0000

In a change to our regular broadcast, last week marked the release of three records with a Songs about Science element, to which I had a significant contribution.

The first was Songs from the Scientific Cabaret, my first full-length album as Dr Martin Austwick, featuring ten songs about science, and available as a pay-what-you want download or limited edition CD (presented in a petri dish, with accompanying sleeve notes in the form of a scientific paper):

Release two is Geekpop’s Geek Like Me mini-album, featuring a one-off band version of my song The Day of The Snail, along with tracks by Spirit of Play, MJ Hibbert, Helen Arney and your favourite geeky musos:

Last but not least is The Overdrive Orchestra’s Never Outnumbered EP, where I played guitar on all the tracks, alongside the other 5 guitarists. Yes, five – hence “The Overdrive Orchestra”. One of those tracks is “To light, you’re just the same as the sky”, written about my previous day job as a researcher in biomedical optics by Gethan Dick as part of the “Trying and Trying and Trying” project:

A lot of science. A lot of music. There will be a test.