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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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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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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…
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History of Telephony: Funded PhD Award with King’s College London, BT and the Science Museum Group
Applications are invited for an AHRC-funded doctoral student to join King’s College London, BT Archives, and the Science Museum Group in late September 2015 or early January 2016 to investigate the impact of the telephone landline network on British society and culture(s). The project is informed by the rise of the Internet and social media,…
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Pint of Science: Curious About the Housing Crisis?
As a follow-on to my earlier piece on Hex-Binning Land Registry Data, here’s a talk I gave on the housing crisis as part of the Pint of Science Festival a couple of weeks back.
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Hex Binning Land Registry Data
One of the known problems with choropleth maps is that small zones, even if they contain very significant values, tend to get lost in amongst much larger zones. A current example is that the ridings in London are much smaller than those outside of London, so it can be hard to tell what’s happening in…
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2 Funded PhD Positions at King’s
It’s been a long time coming, but I’m really pleased to be able to share details about two PhDs at King’s for which I have funding: one to look at the growth and evolution of the UK’s landline network, and one to look at the interface between smart city systems and urban governance. Read on for…
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‘Mapping the Space of Flows’: the geography of the London Mega-City Region
I’m pleased to be able to post here the penultimate version of an article that Duncan Smith and I recently had accepted to Regional Studies. In this article we look at ways of combining ‘big data’ from a telecoms network with standard BRES employment data to generate a more nuanced understanding of where ‘work’ happens…