Placetique

Category: Data

  • Bridging the Qual/Quant Divide

    I’ve been in my new post in the Geography department at King’s College London for nearly nine months now and — together with another new-ish colleague — have been asked to design a programme to teach quantitative research methods to students who often seem to think that their interests are solely qualitative.

  • Big Data’s Little Secrets (Part 2)

    In my previous post I looked at some of the issues affecting the extent to which ‘big data’ gives a reliable picture of the world around us. In this post I want to take you through one of the least sexy—but most important—parts: the data itself. My point, again, is not to suggest that big…

  • Big Data’s Little Secrets (Part 1)

    The term ‘big data’ has been getting a lot of attention recently, some of it very complimentary (see ‘The End of Theory‘), and some of it not so much (see Mark Birkin’s report on a recent AAG session). On one level this is very exciting for me since much of my work with travel and…

  • Multiple MySQL Servers on a Single Machine

    Note: this was previously posted at simulacra.info, but I am in the process of (re)organising my technical notes and tutorials. A bit of a dry post here, but I thought I’d share my experience of trying to get two instances of MySQL (and two different versions, to boot) running simultaneously on a single piece of hardware…

  • The MapThing Processing Library

    MapThing allows you to perform a range of useful mapping (in the geographical sense) functions within Processing and offers a collection of classes for reading ESRI-compliant Shape files (a.k.a. shapefiles), CSV point data, and GPX files, and then displaying them as part of a sketch.

  • Microsoft’s Table-Top Computing: Shades of Mobile 5

    I know why I keep expecting Microsoft to produce something useful: they periodically manage to pull themselves together and release an Operating System that is a measurable improvement over its predecessors (e.g. the Windows 98 to XP to 7 trajectory). However, for the most part they have a real knack for developing (or buying) a…

  • Robot Wars: Android Off-line Mapping Face-Off

    I’ve got a few trips coming up to places where either: a) I don’t want to use data because it will be expensive (i.e. America), or b) I won’t be able to use data because I will have no reception (i.e. Skye). However, in both cases I would like to be able to use my…

  • Design by Committee

    A while back I upgraded to an HTC Touch (well, technically a T-Mobile MDA Touch Plus) because I wanted to try out a ‘Smart Phone’ and T-Mobile was willing to let me have it for £15 and helped me to adjust my account so that I get ‘unlimited’ (known is the real world as 1GB)…