Are you a young science songwriter?

This is me playing a song about bike data at a recent conference in Germany; I’m a songwriter, and a scientist, but I’m certainly not very young.

During “I’m a Scientist, get me out of here” earlier this year, school-age students asked me a lot of questions about my work that gave me a run for my money. Well, pretty soon they’ll have a chance to shine on the musical front too. With the help of the amazing people at Geek Pop and Einstein’s Garden, we’ll be running a competition to find the next generation of young science songwriters.

Young musicians will be able to upload recordings of their own songs for a panel of musical and scientific judges to pick the winner. These can be recorded in a studio, on a computer, or on a mobile phone! We want to hear the best songs about physics, biology, chemistry, neuroscience, palaentology, botany, engineering,… any type of science, in fact.  The winner will win tickets for them and a guardian to come to the Green Man festival in sunny south Wales. They’ll also take part in a workshop to write science songs in Einstein’s Garden, the sciencey corner of Green Man, putting their songwriting skills to good use.

People who know me will know I’m a very sociable physicist. And here at UCL-CASA, we’re always thinking of new ways to use things we’ve learned in physics and maths to understand cities and countries and the way people use them! So this year, there will be a special Institute of Physics prize for the best song about “The Social Physicist” – and entrants can interpret that however they want!

We’ll be putting up all the details of how to enter soon, and more information about the prizes and deadlines and so on, but please spread the word to all of those talented young would-be scientist-musicians out there. And the closing date for entries will be before Green Man in August – so get writing!

The competition has been made possible by the support of the Institute of Physics and I’m a Scientist, Get me Out of Here! So big thank yous to everyone involved.

[EDIT: This is aimed at students who are 18 or younger; if you are leaving school this year, you are eligible to enter]

Student vis galore!

I blogged a few weeks ago about the students on our MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation, and their take on twitter data collected by Fabian Neuhaus and Steven Gray. Since then they’ve been hard at work visualising bike data, cellular automata and agent-based models. Here are just a few examples of their work – you can see more on their blog aggregator.

Ian Morton‘s version of a 3D Game of Life Cellular Automata is particularly eye-catching, and his experiments with photographic techniques are really novel visualisation tools.

Meanwhile, Flora Roumpami produced a tool to take a raster image of a plan and turn it into an agent-based model which responds to the walls and boundaries of the architectural space. These are treated as a series of points with which the agents can interact and bounce off – an approach which simplifies the programming complexity but makes the computational cost quite a bit higher. In these situation, this is a trade-off. I thought this was an excellent tool – you’ll be able to see it soon on her blog.

Alistair Leak created a great “forest fire” CA a few weeks ago for the Cellular Automata assignment. He’s incorporated probabilistic fire-spreading models with wind and “fire breaks” – simulating how we can intervene to limit spread. (Again, it’s not there yet, but you can read about other examples of his work on his blog).

Martin Dittus created a wonderfully kaleidoscopic vis from Boris Bike data:

and his blog includes the work he’s done on cannibalistic ABMs and tile-shifting CAs.

Jack Harrison‘s Agent Based Model had more than a little of the zombie about it. His blog is a bit less bloodthirsty and more design-based. Robin Edwards‘ ABM was a bit more jolly – a celebration of The Beautiful Game.

The students’ next visualisation project is to integrate all the skills they’ve learned to create a larger exhibition for the end of next term. In the meantime, they’ll be exhibiting some of their work at the CASA Smart Cities conference on April 20th in London. If you are able to come, free tickets are available here.

And if this have whet you appetite, you can find more information about the CASA MRes here.

On swans…

BBC Radio 4 ran a well-made item in Analysis this week on Nicholas Nassim Taleb, known for his bestselling book The Black Swan, and his relationship with David Cameron. More specifically, it was about Cameron’s relationship with Taleb’s ideas – the episode played out a bit like an Adam Curtis documentary*. Imagine All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, replacing “Ayn Rand” with “Karl Popper”, “Alan Greenspan” with “Nassim Taleb”, and “Every US president since the 80s” with “David Cameron”. I think it’s worth a listen, and is a well-made programme, but irritated me inordinately.

To give a little background, The Black Swan event is one that is impossible to predict, but cause a radical shift – in the original statement of the phenomenon, “all swans are white” was disproven when the Europeans who’d coined the “law” went to Australia and saw black swans.

What Taleb has taken from the application of “Black Swan Theory” to the world of economics is that we shouldn’t assume we know everything and risk everything on that assumption. That we should behave as if the worst could happen at any time and plan for those contingencies. That concentration of great power and wealth into the hands of a few is a bad thing**. These might be big newsflashes for neocons, captains of industry and dictators, but for anyone left of Thatcher, Taleb is not being terribly original, and he certainly isn’t the only person to have spotted this, even during the boom years. To paint the financial crisis as a failure of intellect as opposed to a failure of leadership seems to me impressively revisionist. Poor financial sector – no one told them that creating bad debt and selling it on hidden in complex financial instruments was risky behaviour – HOW WERE THEY TO KNOW?

“Small C conservatism”, “anarchism”, “fiscal responsibility” – all of these things existed before 2007. Taleb seems fairly anarchistic himself. He thinks large companies and large government are dangerous, because if they fail, we all feel their effects. If we take this thesis (which I think is plausible) what are the solutions? Reduce centralisation of government and companies, presumably. It would seem to me that reducing corporate centralisation would best be done by something of comparable power (i.e. government), but I’m no policy expert. Arguably withdraw government support for large corporations. But reduce central government power and devolve it to smaller units, as Cameron seems to want? How does that reduce centralised corporate power and invulnerability? (Equally, devolving political power is not an act of piecemeal experimentation, by definition).

The invocation of Popper (along with this article a few months ago) in support of Tory policy just seems like a ridiculous fig leaf to me, although it’s not the first time they’ve worn it. Scientists love a man in uniform, runs the old joke. But philosophers love a man in a crown. Or a house with 10 on the front, or “white” in its prefix. The auspices of power give a philosopher reach and credibility, as well as material benefits; a premier loves having a man of letters to tell them why their political philosophy is deeply thought out and profoundly correct. In The Open Society and its Enemies Popper characterises the philosopher Hegel as an apologist for a brutal and deeply unequal monarchy, Hegel’s claims that the Prussian political system represented the perfection of politics nothing more than sucking up to the rich and the powerful to line his own figurative pockets. Be careful who you cite.

I’m no Popper scholar (LSE’s John Worrall is, and he didn’t seem too impressed either) – but the theories they are using seem to come from The Logic of Scientific Discovery (which I am part way through reading) and The Open Society and its Enemies (which I have at least read). The former introduces the idea of falsifiability, the latter the idea of incremental social experimentation. Falsifiability ties into the idea that statements like “all swans are white” can only ever be disproven (by the appearance of one black swan!), never proven. Popper goes on to suggest that good science is based on building theories which are falsifiable. If you test something to within an inch of its life, and still haven’t proven it to be false, it’s doing ok. What he doesn’t say is “well let’s not bother looking at swans at all – in fact I’m not even sure swans exist” which seems to be message Cameron has taken away***.

The idea of piecemeal social experimentation, meanwhile, comes as a reaction to Popper’s critiques of messianic and utopian social movements of 20th Century like fascism and communism, and Marxists theories of historical inevitability and their desire to foresee the future of all of humanity. To remotely compare this to Cameron’s reaction to New Labour seems pretty disingenuous. Popper was writing in a (what is for me at least) a moving display of postwar optimism and the belief that conservative rationality and evidence-based approaches can make our society a better place. No grand narratives. No shining utopias. Just gradually finding ways to make things better.

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*the digested arc for Adam Curtis docs seems to be “How a big idea got taken on by government and made everyone’s life a misery”. I happen to really enjoy the ones I’ve seen, but he has fairly direct MO that’s well-known enough to have been parodied

**apparently “because they might fail” rather than “because it encourages abuses of power” as every political philosopher of the last few thousand years seems to have spotted

*** swans = central government policy. This ironically seems to mirror what Adam Curtis calls “Oh Dearism”

[Location Redacted]

I took a very pleasant urban ramble on Saturday, from Greenwich, east along the river and past the Thames Flood Barrier, under the Woolwich Foot Tunnel and then back west to Wapping (with a DLR trip through some of the boringer bits of pudding mill lane/Bromley-by-Bow). I’d done a (slightly modified) version of this five years ago to the day – and because of its proximity to the Millennium Dome, City Airport and the docklands redevelopments, dubbed it the Millennium Follies. 5 years ago, passing by the Anchor and Hope pub, we found this curious conflagration of streets:

It was pretty surreal – why were these two streets in Woolwich acting as some sort of memorial for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I never found out. In fact, if you know, then please tell me.

I showed another rambler this photo recently, who asked “where is this”? Well, I can show you the location on googlemaps:

View Larger Map

Ok, so Google Maps doesn’t show “Nagasaki Way” at all – that’s ok, Google is often a bit crap for footpaths. “Hiroshima Walk” is referred to as “Riverside”. Weird. Let’s take a look at Open Street Map. Hmmm. Same thing. I couldn’t find anything about it on google. This chap had a similar photo, minus mourners, from later in 2007. I resolved to chase this down on this fifth year anniversary. This is what we found:

Slightly different angle, same location. Hiroshima Walk and Nagasaki have been redacted. No idea why, any more than why they existed in the first place. Can anyone help solve this mystery?

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While you’re sleuthing, here are some nice pics of the ramble…

Choose Paranoia – in praise of Imposter Syndrome

Athene Donald posted recently on imposter syndrome, that feeling that we’re doing something way beyond our capabilities, perhaps due to clerical error or overenthusiastic “brand management”*. As I’ve touched on before, working in an interdisciplinary team exacerbates that. I’ve heard a talented researcher say “but I haven’t studied maths since the nineties”, and mathematicians wondering out loud what the modifiable unit area problem is. Not that I really know myself…

Interdisciplinary work at its best forces people out of their silos and out of their comfort zones. For example, it’s not enough to be a great mathmo if you don’t gain some understanding of the problem you’re applying yourself to – relying on someone else to deal with the nitty-gritty is not a recipe for success. In this world, everyone should feel like an imposter to some degree.

Although expressed as an afterthought in this blogpost, I have recognised in the past a reverse-Dunning-Kruger type attitude in my behaviour. Dunning-Kruger is the tendency of people to overrate their abilities, reverse-Dunning-Kruger is the tendency for competent people to overestimate others’ abilities/underestimate their own**. I recognise the thought process:

“I’m a reasonably intelligent person, but I don’t possess a unique intellect – so anything which I’m good at can’t be too hard to get good at. That person over there – they’re really good at/knowledgable about things I find really hard, and they could probably get good at the things I do quite easily, if they had the time and inclination [note to self: perpetuate the myth that physics is REALLY TOUGH so they never develop the inclination]. Oh look, there’s another person who’s an expert in a whole different difficult field. And another. Gee whiz”.

If you find this yourself: welcome to interdisciplinary research. And if you’re not working in interdisciplinary research: welcome to academia. There are lots of smart, hardworking people here. And if you’re not working in academia: welcome to the world. There are lots of bright people doing cool things.

When you look at it that way, Imposter Syndrome doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. I liked writer Leila Johnston‘s response: “Imposter syndrome is pretty good, I think, because the alternative is a world in which everyone else is as mediocre as you are.” If the choice is between paranoia and mediocrity, let’s choose paranoia.

*(I don’t know how many academics lie on their CVs – I’m assuming very few – but that is almost certainly a problem in the world at large)

**self-identifying as suffering from reverse-Dunning-Kruger might indicate an overestimation of one’s own abilities, but let’s set that aside for the time being. I’m no expert on foward-reverse-Dunning-Kruger.

Sounds of… Tottenham Court Road

Science Sociologist/Policy Academic/Blogger Alice Bell has very kindly invited me to take part in the Sounds of Science event on February 29th at Charles Darwin House – featuring participants from the BBC, Audioboo and the BMJ. To celebrate world radio day, she wrote this blogpost in celebration, in part, of the sounds around us.

In my time as a scientist I’ve worked in labs, offices, clinics and theatres. I have a particularly vivid memory of being involved with a prostate laser treatment where the theatre staff insisted on playing 80s pop on a little CD player while they worked. Sitting between a man’s stirruped legs, waiting for the treatment to finish while listening to Never Going to Give You Up gives a new definition to the phrase “rick-rolled”. But I digress.

My current office is on Tottenham Court Road (aka “TCR”) – one of London’s busiest streets. When we record Global Lab (the CASA research podcast) you can hear the sound of TCR in the background –  we frequently have to stop and let ambulances and police cars race past. But we wanted to make a feature of this – CASA is a department that has a lot of projects about sensing the city, and it’s entirely appropriate that we’re right at the heart of one of the world’s most vibrant, most historic cities. So I went out onto the street with my iPhone and captured a bit of this. This is what TCR sounded like last July:

So far, so noisy. That weird whale song sound you can hear is the noise buses make – I think it might be their brakes, reverbed by some reflections between the parallel buildings of TCR. I started thinking about whether I could make that musical. It has a certain tonality to it, and with a bit of looping, a certain rhythm. A GarageBand file was born, complete with “dance” drums, and a guitar and a bass part recorded straight into the computer and augmented with Apple’s rather passable amp simulators. This is what it sounds like:

And, GarageBand users, this is what it looks like:

Anyway, that’s how I made background noise into the theme tune for a podcast. If you want to hear (even) more interesting stories about sound and science, come along at the end of the month to Sounds of Science.

Twitter data – visualised by our MRes students

This term we’ve been running our Visualisation module as part of the CASA MRes in Advanced Spatial Analysis and Visualisation. The flavour of this module is what you’d expect – finding interesting ways to communicate complex spatio-temporal data through static, animated and interactive tools. I teach every other week, focussing on the use of Processing to programmatically represent data; 3D design whiz and course director Andy Hudson-Smith tends to work with ArcGIS, Lumion and other 3D tools.

CASA student Fabian Neuhaus‘ twitter maps have had quite an impact in the past – showing patterns of geographical twitter usage around London. We challenged our students to take a sample of the same data (collected by Fabian with Steve Gray’s big data tools) and visualise it. The dataset included the date and time of the tweet, its location (only geotagged tweets were considered), and other information like the username, what platform they tweeted from, and language. Here are some examples of what they came up with…

This was my initial (quick and dirty) stab at visualising the data:

One criticism of my initial attempt is that it lacks geographical markers – Alistair Leak tackled that problem by introducing a map. He chose not to blend time or spatial aspects, and with the underlying map this gives perhaps the most accurate representation of the data. The counter to that is that it contains a lot of visual information for the viewer to take in.

Ian Morton took an intermediate approach; a skeletal geographical boundary provides reference points for the viewer. Each tweet persists in time, shrinking and darkening over successive frames. This is a simple and effective visual grammar to provide some “history” or continuity to the vis, whilst retaining a focus on the most recent events.

Robin Edwards and Martin Dittus took a 3D approach, binning over a geographical grid in a KDE-like approach. These elegant 3D visualisations have both considered the problem of interpolation – how to move from one data state to the next. Robin has approached that problem by the bars instantly moving to the current data point, and then (if subsequent data at that point is zero), fading down to zero gradually (like an old-school “graphic equaliser”). Martin has written a smooth transition between subsequent data points – so the bars move smoothly *towards* the latest point. These interpolations enhance the polish of a vis and provide a sense of continuity in a noisy or discontinuous dataset. Martin also added a rich functionality for filtering the tweets by metadata (language, twitter platform, etc) – giving the user of the interactive app control over their view of the data.

Jack Harrison decided to dispense with space, and treat Processing as a component in a more complex workflow. He analysed temporal patterns in R and output the result to Processing to create a “clock”. By saving this as a PDF, he was able to import it into illustrator, allowing him to add the colour scheme and text and create this wonderfully Art Decon rank-clock like vis.

This is my take on the data – I’ll blog about it in more detail, but it’s essentially a Gaussian KDE with some transparency to give smooth blending between different time points as well as spatial blending. As I didn’t give the students an opportunity to feedback on my offering (after we gave significant feedback on theirs) I’m sure they will express their opinions below the line…

Why I do not self-identify as a geek

This week Alice Roberts, newly appointed Professor of Public Engagement at Birmingham Uni, attacked the idea of “geek” being a badge of honour, even suggesting (gasp) that scientists study arts subjects during their education to make them well-rounded people. Setting aside the question of whether scientists should be diverting their time into reading (non-text) books when they could be spending it on their more economically productive STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) studies*, I would tend to agree. The tag “geek” is problematic for me, and to anyone who asks I will tell: I do not self-identify as a geek. Other people can call me what they want: sticks and stones…

This may seem surprising. I have a degree in physics and a PhD in a seemingly obscure branch thereof. I not only code, but teach programming. I perform at events with “geek” in the title. I wear tweed. Those things all mark me out as one. And I’m perfectly happy for it to be used in a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek way. But…

The label is reductive. Sure I have a physics degree. I also sing and play guitar in a band**. I like making puff pastry, and observing the landscape of Utah. I don’t care for sport, but neither do I care for Buffy. I have a GSOH (6/10). I could go on.

Even if it doesn’t marginalise me in any practical sense, the label “geek” seeks to see me in terms of a set of attitudes and behaviours that don’t necessarily represent me very well. Like any label.

The label is escapist. This cuts both ways. I suspect that self-identifying with a set of behaviours means you don’t feel the need to act beyond them. Geeks can feel happy and justified in focussing on their area of geekdom and not, say, being politically engaged, or culturally aware, or sensitive to gender issues (particularly an issue in geek and skeptical movements). I’m not saying everyone has to be engaged in all these things, but on a fundamental level I find it profoundly depressing when I think people are consciously conforming to a stereotype in order to excuse (or minimise the burden of choice regarding) their behaviour, thoughts and conduct.

Self-identification with “geek” has a certain arrogance. It implies a high level of ability in something, as well as the negative social connotations. I personally know people who are either better coders, better mathematicians, better physicists or better geographers than I am. To claim geekdom requires a particular domain of mastery, and I honestly could not pick a domain where I would claim to be that good***.

Being reasonably good at a number of things is not geekiness. There are a number of labels; “jackass of some trades” is my preferred sobriquet.

“Geek” suggests that to be smart, you also have to be dumb. To be a good mathematician, you have to be on the aspergers spectrum. To be a good coder, you have to be scared of women. To be a good physicist, you have to have poor personal hygene. To be a good geographer, you have to have a beard. To be a good academic, you have to be disorganised and absent-minded, especially in your private life. These cliches should be as laughable and trivial as “women can’t be comedians” or “men are bad at childcare”, and while they exist they will force casual interest away from “geeky” subjects – “only those really hardcore people who care more about their subject than their families and friends and social skills should apply” – and leave it in the hands of a few.

The meaning of being a geek has changed. On one hand, geeks run the world. As Harvey Pekar points out in American Splendour, the “nerds” in “Revenge of the Nerds” are middle-class white kids studying for computing and engineering degrees at good universities. When they graduate they will be well-renumerated and relatively powerful. The Gates and Zuckerbergs. In celebrating one’s geekiness, one straddles a fine line. On one hand, you’re celebrating having found a peer group with similarly geeky interests in the face of marginalization by mainstream society; on the other, you’re celebrating your membership of an intellectual and economic elite. One is sweet and life-affirming; the other, not so much.

Geek chic is still in. Any English graduate can put on a pair of window-glass NHS specs and a tanktop, having the lit chic cake and eating it. In this climate of faux geekery, the label loses meaning.

Geek might be a useful shorthand. It is, undoubtedly, still an insult in the playground. But let’s be careful about how seriously we take our own stories. Part of the “we grew up and now the shoe’s on the other foot, big bullies” myth is – we grew up. We should be sharing all this amazing stuff we love and not apologising for being passionate about it – and not hiding behind the shield of the geek clique.

EDIT: I didn’t reference this very good article on a very similar topic, which gives a number of different perspectives on the “geek” phenomenon.

[Adds "citation needed" to academic New Years' Resolutions]

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*I am being sarcastic

**the science songs came after writing gloomy folk songs for 10 years.

***this might be reverse-Dunning-Kruger in action. But it probably isn’t.

Academic New Years Resolutions

What are your academic weaknesses? What would you like to improve? And in 2012, how will you resolve (see what I did there) to improve them?

I suspect that many of my Academic New Years Resolutions are the same as everyone else’s: write more papers, get grants, teach better, engage with the publics better. To this, other academics might also add: do the work/life balance thing better, go for promotion, and, if many of them are honest, get a big grant and farm out all their teaching to graduate students and RAs – but these aren’t concerns for me at the moment. If we get into more detail, we start to see different sorts of academics at different career stages have quite diverse short-term goals; for some, it might be publishing their first paper (for PhD students); for others, time management or getting more students.

It can be quite difficult to talk about weaknesses in the competitive world of academia, especially if we view those weaknesses as being core to our work (and, let’s be honest, academics have a diverse and difficult to master range of skills which are held to be core to our work). However, I thought I would share the areas where I really want to get better in 2012 -  I’m interested in hearing from others what they think their weaknesses as an academic are, and how they go about improving…

As an academic, I think I have a fairly acute sense of what my strengths and weaknesses are. I’ve had a fair bit of teaching and public engagement experience; on the minus side I’ve led a fairly peripatetic academic existence, and so my publication record is not the jewel in my crown (especially in social sciences) and neither is my substantive grounding. This is sort of the opposite position that most new lecturers find themselves in – typically they will have a very strong research record but perhaps will have had fewer teaching and PE opportunities.

1: Read more and better
I’m still reading around my new subject (only 18 months in). Finding time to do it can be hard, but committing time to regular reading during the working week is really important. I do read (academic!) papers on the commute sometimes, but I’m not someone who will get home and start reading a treatise on subgraph centrality over their steak dinner. Contextualising knowledge, retaining it through note-taking – these all happen differently in social physics compared to medical physicis or a quantum physicis, and I am still learning how to do that in this new field.

Summary: Protect reading time and learn new study habits for organising knowledge systematically

2: Write more
I can be a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to writing, and I am completely aware that this comes from knowing how savaged things get at the review process. As a musician and writer I taught myself early on that work I share with the world will meet criticism, hatred and indifference as well as interest and praise, and taught myself not to care. That’s not a reasonable outlook for academic work, as people’s criticisms have impact on (e.g.) whether the work is published and are often (but not always) useful for improving the work. I personally think that the writing process will become easier as I have more confidence in what I’m presenting, and view criticism as “suggestions for improvement” rather than “an indictment of my poor scholarship”. All of this might seem terribly thin-skinned of me, but being an itinerant academic (I’ve changed fields twice since my PhD) means that there are plenty of times when I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Summary: Learn to be capable and confident in my scholarship and so to respond positively to criticism

3: Get grants
This seems pretty important. I have only a Co-I on a small grant to my name.

Summary: Start applying for grants (duh)

4: Improve teaching
I think I’m a decentish lecturer, so now is the time to build on what I view as a reasonably solid foundation and try to make my teaching better. As hinted above, I’m not someone who especially wants to get some jackpot grant and give all my teaching to a research associate – while I think that it’s useful and important for grad students and RAs to do some teaching, I want to teach and I want to teach well. And a good course will attract more students, so there are cynical as well as idealistic reasons for this, too.

How will I teach better? With the small group we have, class-led activities have worked really well, and I want to continue those and expand them into formative assessment exercises – giving students feedback about their progress and encouraging them to assess themselves and collaborate.

Summary: Improve course content and use group-led assessment

There are lots of ways I want to improve as an academic, but I suspect these will be the ones I focus on most over the next 12 months. If there are other academics and researchers out there who want to share their improvement plans and resolutions for 2012, please leave your comments below the line…. I would suggest the twitter hashtag #acNYR12 but it’s long and incomprehensible.

The loneliness of the long-distance cyclist

One of the big concerns in the use open and public data lies around privacy – whether the information you provide and is collected about could be used to identify you personally. While this might be an issue with respect to governmental or commercial entities, where I work we are very rarely interested! It’s the patterns that arise from groups of people that are interesting, and knowing that the datum I’m observing is Oliver O’Brien and he lives in Chadwick Road, Peckham* does little to add to my analysis. Now, knowing that that a data point lives in SE15, has above median salary and reads the telegraph* might be useful for some sort of analysis – but at no point do I need his actual name, and while useful, his address is not necessary. With all this data from overlapping, geographically-coded data, it’s been argued that it’s relatively easy to identify individuals, especially those in a minority (whether ethnic, fiscal, or other). While this isn’t meant to dismiss people’s concerns, particularly wrt to governmental and political organisations and businesses, I thought it worth stating the counter-example. To wit: at CASA, knowing someone’s name and address is useless – but we are interested in information about groups of people’s income, lifestyle etc.

As an example, this is a visualisation of the journey of one London Bikeshare bike on one day last year. As noted previously, we don’t have GPS data (and as far as I know, it doesn’t exist) so the routes we assign are reasonable guesses** – only the start and end points and timings are known. Secondly, we don’t know who was using the bike – that’s also hidden to us. And seeing the “path” of one bike is (I hope you’ll agree) rather interesting, but doesn’t tell us much about the system as a whole, which is what we actually care about.

And because it’s Christmas, this is what Xmas *last* year looked like for the bike scheme:

Some very slow cyclists there, making their way home after too much turkey and Christmas cheer. Merry Xmas, readers!

*none of this is supposed to reflect the actual @oobr. He’s much too cool to live in Peckham, for a start

** by Ollie O’Brien, Open Street Map and Routino