Our physical Tweet-o-Meter in the British Library, as part of their Growing Knowledge Exhibition, has received some nice coverage from WebBeat.tv. If you don't know about the Tweet-o-Meter, the clip explains all:
The analogue meters display the level of tweeting in 9 cities (San Francisco, New York, London, Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and New Delhi).
The exhibition is well worth a look, its free and runs until 16th July 2011.
Sometimes you have to take a step back and take a look around a science lab to appreciate the wealth of knowledge and research being carried out. Rank Clocks by Professor Mike Batty here at CASA, The Bartlett, University College London, is a prime example.
A rank clock is a device for visualising the changes over time in the ranked order of any set of objects where the ordering is usually from large to small. The size of cities, of firms, the distribution of incomes, and such-like social and economic phenomena display highly ordered distributions. If you rank order these phenomena by size from largest to smallest, the objects follow a power law over much of their size range, or at least follow a log normal distribution which is a power law in the upper tail.
Mike has examined the UK urban system from 1901 to 2001, the World System from 430BCE to 2000, and the Ancient World System from 3700BCE to 1000BCE. All these examples show quite regular stability in rank size at the aggregate Zipf Plot level but much greater volatility in terms of the Rank Clocks and this in an of itself throws grave doubt on the issue of universality and regularity in such systems. Moreover it opens up once again the paradox of why systems show such regularity at the macro level when everything is changing at the micro level.
We detail the rank clock illustrating how the rank of cities in the USA changed between 1790 and 2000 below:
In fact for cities and other phenomena such as the distribution of word frequencies, George Kingsley Zipf as long ago as the 1930s characterised such distributions as characterising pure power laws in which the size of an object seemed to approximate the largest object in the set divided by the rank of the object in question. Such strict power laws in fact seem to be the exception rather than the rule but many such rank size distributions seem to follow such laws in their upper tail, and hence these are taken as signs of system stability, self-organisation and universality.
Below we illustrate the animation of a rank clock of the top 100 high buildings in New York change between 1912 and 2008:
However, despite the fact that such distributions are so regular even through time, when one examines how objects within these distributions change over time, it is quite clear that somehow these systems remain stable at the aggregate level but with objects which composes them shifting quite dramatically from time period to time period.
I know your not meant to judge a book by its cover and it's something i tend to fight by i am a bit of a sucker for a good cover. The forthcoming book 'City A Guidebook for the Armchair Traveller' by PD Smith is one of the best we have seen in recent times. Of course PD Smith is also a very good writer so its bound to be a great read.
Over on his blog 'Kafka's mouse' Peter notes that writing a book is a solitary process. For months and often years, the book only exists in the writer's mind. Sometimes, as you write, that book can seem like a mirage on the horizon, its form shimmering and changing before your eyes. Believe me, it's disconcerting. But you press on.
Following the trend of Dizzy Rascal (Bonkers), Professor Green has created a 360 degree view music video:
Go to http://www.youtube.com/doritosuk to see the full, interactive 360° version of Professor Green's new video, personally we prefer the unwarped version above. Considering how long the technology has been around, its interesting that it has only recently been picked up by the music industry...
Creating a survey tool kit with real-time mapping and the ability to gather data down to country, continent, zip or postcode level along with the ability to drag and drop pins is all well and good, but it needs the ability to take the survey and put it direct into your own site. This is now possible with 1.2 of SurveyMapper.
Released today SurveyMapper 1.2 allows anyone to embed a survey, questionnaire or poll directly into their site and view the real-time results - by way of example:
Under each survey your see the ability to 'Embed Survey', simply type in your required width/height and copy and paste the code directly into your page.
We hope you like version 1.2, head over to http://www.surveymapper.com to take part in the current surveys, set up your own or grab a survey and put it on your site.
We are pleased to announce that our analogue tweet-o-meters have gone from a mere concept to fully fledged art deco style working versions.
On display in the British Library, as part of the Growing Knowledge Exhibition, the meters reside on the wall next to the Microsoft Touch Table. Detailing the level of tweeting in 9 cities (San Francisco, New York, London, Moscow, Shanghai, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney and New Delhi) around the world the exhibition is well worth a look, its free and runs until 16th July 2011.
Thanks go to Ben and Steve of CASA here at The Bartlett, University College London, for their work on the project, we are biased, but its outstanding.
Vladymi, an architect from Ukraine, got in contact to let us know that as a result of some of our blog posts he has decided to move almost entirely to game engines for visualisation.
His current 'engine' of choice is the CryEngine2:
Vladymi makes the point that such engines allow A0 size renders in seconds and export movies at above HD resolution in near real-time. The work load is also minimal in importing models, whats not to like?
The world of data is changing, vast amounts of free and open data are enabling innovative visualisations. Our new Bike-o-Meter could be seen as a case in point, it provides at a glance a view of how bicycle rental schemes in cities around the world are performing. It even allows you to view the percentage of hire bikes that would need to be redistributed to balance each scheme and here may lie the problem - it allows under performing cities to be clearly identified using their own data.
Sadly a number of cities, run by a common provider, have requested that we no longer use their data, stating use protection under the harmonised sui generis database right, as provided under Directive 96/9/EC: Chapter III Article 7 (1) and (2).
Below is how the Bike-o-Meter used to look:
We are of course happy to accept the request and as a result Paris/Dublin/Brussels/Valencia/Seville/ Vienna and Toyama are now sitting with empty dials. This is disappointing to say the least, we would be happy to add these cities back in but as ever with data its down to the providers...
Our now 'resident in the British Library Tweet-o-Meter' has been adapted to display Bike Hire in cities around the world - welcome to the latest out of the CASA, University College London : Bike-O-Meter. On a single screen, you can view via Google-powered gauges, how busy (in percent of use) the bike share schemes around the world are right now.
Most dials will move every two minutes, a few (the Velib ones) update every 10 or 20 minutes.
At the time of writing, the bike share schemes of the Spanish cities, particularly Barcelona, Girona and Valencia, are the ones being most actively used. Spanish rush-hours at lunchtimes seem generally to be as big as the morning/evening ones! Biking home for the siesta?
Central to this visualiation is Oliver G O'Brien of CASA, his map/visualisation of the London Boris Bikes is now available for fifteen more cities. The complete list:
There is a second mode in Bike-o-Meter, accessed here, detailing how unbalanced the schemes are – high values indicate that a lot of the bikes are concentrated in one part of the city, and there’s a lot of empty docking stations in another part. The metric is the percentage of bikes that would need to be moved to balance out the docking stations across the city.
We have added four more cities to 'Tweet-o-Meter': Hong Kong, New Delhi, Shanghai and San Paulo. Is it true that, New York is the city that never sleeps? Do Londoners send more Tweets than New Yorkians'? Is Oslo a bigger Tweeter than Munich? Is Tokyo into Tweets as much as Barcelona?
The Tweet-o-Meter measures the amount of tweets (measured in Tweets per Minute or TPM) received from various locations around the world. The gauges are updated every second giving you a live view of the TPM's in each location.
The system is designed to mine data for later analysis relating to furthering our understanding of social and temporal dynamics for e-Social Science within the Twitter demographic, its output allows new 'tweetography' maps of cities to be created.
The big news is that from October 13th you will be able to view our analog version of the Tweet-o-Meter at a notable literary venue in London, more details on that soon.
Grzegorz Rogala has used a Sigma 8mm fisheye and a Nikon D90 DSLR to capture some stunning timelapse sequences around London, notably within internal spaces rather than the normal external scenes:
Interior timelapse sequences are always tricky, mainly as tripod use is often prohibited and specific licenses for photography are required. As such, setting up with a DLSR with a fisheye lens can often attract attention. We really like this, especially the Natural History Museum sequence, it also turns out that Grzegorz works down our local pub, but that's by the by....
Uniform recently completed a short film for Foster + Partners, for their Hermitage Plaza scheme in La Defence, Paris. The film premiered to an audience including Vladimir Putin amongst others at the Russian National Exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris.
The film was integral to the launch of the development's campaign for planning permission and also building an international profile. When complete in 2016, the two towers will be the tallest mixed-use towers in Western Europe, at a staggering 323m!
Hermitage's CEO Emin Iskenderov had strong ideas for the film so Uniform worked closely with him to create a series of sequences that not only told the story of the scale and the architecture but also attempted to show the Paris lifestyle that the towers will bring to an otherwise quite area of the city's business district.
Within an ambitious timescale, Uniform delivered two aerial film shoots over Paris, a large scale Green Screen shoot, they even managed to squeeze in a spaceship and we love it...
We presented a plenary this week at the excellent AGI GeoCommunity'10 conference. With notable discussions on cloud based GIS, putting map libraries on the web and the balance between vector and raster data it was, as ever, a conference made by which streams you attended. The Cloud based stream was refreshing, especially after a few notable industry views that people simply don't get 'GIS' while subsequently carrying on to clearly illustrate where the whole problem lies. The AGI is a good crowd and hats off to the organizers, when you take a step back and look at the whole event, it was without question a notable success.
Getting back to 'Clouds' we were asked to create an inspirational movie for the opening session and decided to grab the HDHero, stick it on the outside window of a 5th floor apartment in Camden Town, London, and capture 10,000 images.
The result is below (best in 720p):
As plenary, part of the role is to provoke a bit of controversy to get people talking through the rest of a conference. Through shear accident this was suitably achieved and lessons learnt but as a side note the point was also raised that perhaps all the problem is within the industry is communication.
Our final call was to leave behind the term 'GIS' when communicating the benefits of geographical information to the wider audience and to be upbeat rather than consumed in postcodes, points, lines and polygons.
Stating the need to leave behind the term GIS is of course controversial but the same can be said of Neogeography (see our post, Come in Neogeography Your Time is Up). Terms come, terms go. Cyberspace, Virtual Reality, World Wide Web are all terms that nowadays look aged, perhaps its time to add GIS to the list...
