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Last night a DB saved my life (Part 2)
Following on from my last post about what DuckDB makes possible, here’s a little more detail about how this works in practice… Installing DuckDB There are two ways to use DuckDB: via the Command Line (CLI/Terminal), and via a library for whatever language you’re programming in. I tend to use the CLI more intensively while…
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Last night a DB saved my life (Part 1)
Every so often, a technology comes along that is magical in how well it works, and transformative in terms of its impact on your work. Wifi was one of those: I *still* remember the first time I used it and the computer that I used it on. There was no going back to cat-5 at…
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(Spatial) Data Science: A Few Thoughts for Students
What do you say when someone asks: “I’m working on a course assignment… to gain insights into the [data science] industry”?
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Seaborn Plots with 2 Legends
Posted here because I will inevitably forget this painfully worked-out answer for having legends for two different types of plots in Seaborn… import numpy as np import pandas as pd import seaborn as sns import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # We will need to access some of these matplotlib classes directly from matplotlib.lines import Line2D #…
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The Full Stack: Tools & Processes for Urban Data Scientists
Recently, I was asked to give talks at both UCL’s CASA and the ETH Future Cities Lab in Singapore for students and staff new to ‘urban data science’ and the sorts of workflows involved in collecting, processing, analysing, and reporting on urban geo-data. Developing the talk proved to be a rather enjoyable opportunity to reflect on more…
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Land Registry Consultation #2: Reasons to Respond
In some circles (e.g. mine) news that the government is trying (again) to sell off the Land Registry has caused something of a stir. The curtain closed on the first act of this drama in March 2014, by which time 91% of respondents to the consultation opposed the Land Registry’s transition to a service delivery company.…
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Installing PostgreSQL Extensions on Mac OS X
I’ve been making a lot of use of PostgreSQL and PostGIS for working with geo-data over the past year and, having finally gotten over my hatred of the non-standard administrative commands, I am seriously impressed with what this setup makes possible. Even on a MacBook Air with just 8GB of RAM! However, one area where…
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Peer Programming for Academics
I recently wrote up some thoughts on the value of peer programming as a tool for academic use in course planning and administration. The short answer: really useful but, like all things, best used in moderation. Read more at: Peer Programming for Academics
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Mapping the Changing Affordability of Manchester
Building on yesterday’s post about my London affordability maps, here are the equivalent maps for the Manchester area (sorry Liverpool, I’ll get there!) from 1997 and 2012. It’s obviously a very different picture in terms of price, volume and distribution; these differences were well-known anecdotally but a lot of the detail was hidden until the Land…
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Mapping the Changing Affordability of London
Last night I discovered how many of my friends watch C4’s Dispatches since quite a few of them texted me to say that they had seen me talking about property affordability on “The Great British Property Divide”. However, since Dispatches has to somehow keep the running time down to just 30 minutes, there’s not much of a…