Ok so its not urban and its not research but when your trying to write a paper sometimes you get distracted and find ‘The Secret Images in Google Earth’ on YouTube:
…. (?)
As we mentioned in a our previous posts on the real time visualisation of Twitters – Twitter is intriguing, part social network, part text message, part location aware it almost redefines communication in its purest sense. Limited to 140 characters and based around a simple text box – a text box, asking “What are you doing?” it is difficult to understand at first..
The realtime visualisation of Twitter is an interesting visualisation – but in terms of the city then Twitter Maps lets you get down to street level to view people posting their ‘Tweets’ (that’s Twitter language for messages). The screengrab below is the Twitter Map zoomed into London and there are a surprising number of people Twittering this morning:
Twitters are simply about what people are doing – for example in the image above Redmedicine posted ‘Finishing breakfast, mopping up a leaky cappuccino and staring down the barrel of another wonderful day. But the sky is blue!’ Simple yet addictive and by linking it to a mapping interface it provides a unique visualisation about what people are doing in the city right now.
Twitter is tipped to be the next important social network on the web, indeed CNN Money state that ‘the free service, which combines the instant voyeurism of personal blogs with the brevity of text messages, appears to be catching fire, doubling its user base every month. It had 10,000 users by December and expects to hit 100,000 by April. Users post pithy updates on their lives (in no more than 160 characters) via the website, their IM clients, or their mobile devices. These posts can be sent just to their circle of friends or, if the user allows it, they can be added to Twitter’s public time line. (A free desktop widget called Twidget also features the updates.)
You can join our Twitter network and take part in the emerging Twitter phenomoenon. At the moment on our side bar to the right are our current Tweets, once we get a network in place we will be able to display other peoples Tweets, which would be an intriguing insight into the readers of Digital Urban.
We will be posting more applications for Twitter networks over the coming weeks.
Cities and Complexity – Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models and Fractals
As urban planning moves from a centralized, top-down approach to a decentralized, bottom-up perspective, our conception of urban systems is changing. In Cities and Complexity, Michael Batty offers a comprehensive view of urban dynamics in the context of complexity theory, presenting models that demonstrate how complexity theory canembrace a myriad of processes and elements that combine into organic wholes. He argues that bottom-up processes — in which the outcomes are always uncertain — can combine with new forms of geometry associated with fractal patterns and chaotic dynamics to provide theories that are applicable to highly complex systems such as cities.
Written by Michael Batty, he begins with models based on cellular automata (CA), simulating urban dynamics through the local actions of automata. He then introduces agent-based models (ABM), in which agents are mobile and move between locations. These models relate to many scales, from the scale of the street to patterns and structure at the scale of the urban region. Finally, Batty develops applications of all these models to specific urban situations, discussing concepts of criticality, threshold, surprise, novelty, and phase transition in the context of spatial developments. Every theory and model presented in the book is developed through examples that range from the simplified and hypothetical to the actual. Deploying extensive visual, mathematical, and textual material, Cities and Complexity will be read both by urban researchers and by complexity theorists with an interest in new kinds of computational models.
As William J. Mitchell states Batty provides a powerful new way of thinking about cities in terms of cells and agents, demonstrating how highly organised spatial patterns can emerge from surprisingly simple simple rules and processes. The reviews of the book have been glowing, for example – “Batty is a master at presenting challenging material in ‘gentle though rigorous’ ways, judiciously combining text, graphics, and notation, and moving from easy-to-grasp toy problems to real examples.” from Helen Couclelis, Professor, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Professor Michael Batty’s Cities and Complexity is our current recommended read at digital urban. You can purchase it, currently at discount, via our associate store at Amazon – let us know if your reading it via the email link on our side bar.
Michael Batty is head of our lab at CASA, you can view more of his work via CASA’s main site.
Cities and Complexity – Understanding Cities with Cellular Automata, Agent-Based Models and Fractals
As urban planning moves from a centralized, top-down approach to a decentralized, bottom-up perspective, our conception of urban systems is changing. In Cities and Complexity, Michael Batty offers a comprehensive view of urban dynamics in the context of complexity theory, presenting models that demonstrate how complexity theory canembrace a myriad of processes and elements that combine into organic wholes. He argues that bottom-up processes — in which the outcomes are always uncertain — can combine with new forms of geometry associated with fractal patterns and chaotic dynamics to provide theories that are applicable to highly complex systems such as cities.
Written by Michael Batty, he begins with models based on cellular automata (CA), simulating urban dynamics through the local actions of automata. He then introduces agent-based models (ABM), in which agents are mobile and move between locations. These models relate to many scales, from the scale of the street to patterns and structure at the scale of the urban region. Finally, Batty develops applications of all these models to specific urban situations, discussing concepts of criticality, threshold, surprise, novelty, and phase transition in the context of spatial developments. Every theory and model presented in the book is developed through examples that range from the simplified and hypothetical to the actual. Deploying extensive visual, mathematical, and textual material, Cities and Complexity will be read both by urban researchers and by complexity theorists with an interest in new kinds of computational models.
As William J. Mitchell states Batty provides a powerful new way of thinking about cities in terms of cells and agents, demonstrating how highly organised spatial patterns can emerge from surprisingly simple simple rules and processes. The reviews of the book have been glowing, for example – “Batty is a master at presenting challenging material in ‘gentle though rigorous’ ways, judiciously combining text, graphics, and notation, and moving from easy-to-grasp toy problems to real examples.” from Helen Couclelis, Professor, Department of Geography, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Professor Michael Batty’s Cities and Complexity is our current recommended read at digital urban. You can purchase it, currently at discount, via our associate store at Amazon – let us know if your reading it via the email link on our side bar.
Michael Batty is head of our lab at CASA, you can view more of his work via CASA’s main site.