The Spatial Miscellany

One thing that often frustrates me when working with a map is the absence of meaningful neighbourhoods. For example, try finding ‘Marchmont’ in Edinburgh, Scotland using Google Maps. You might find ‘Marchmont Road’ but that only gives an indication as to the area that the people of Edinburgh consider to be ‘Marchmont’ the neighbourhood.

A novel approach has been taken to resolve this and similar problems using Flickr’s 90 million geotagged photographs: The Shape of Alpha.

A handy demonstration of the API has been developed by Tom Talyor. A good example of the power of crowd sourced datasets.

Something had to change, that point we all came around to agree on. The Sunday Times suggests tomorrow that the Ordnance Survey along with other state owned organisations (think the MET Office and Forestry Commission) are being prepared for sale by the government.

Parliament? An MP? The Cabinet Office? The Shareholder Executive? No, read it here first…

The Sunday Times : Treasury in state-owned assets sell-off

Today America votes; drawing to a close another epic, media fuelled, billion dollar US presidential race. As always geography has played its role…

Earlier in the summer Ed Parsons noted the recruitment of a GIS analyst for the Obama campaign…

On the campaign trial John McCain struggled with the Iraq-Pakistan border…

A slip of tongue, or a clue to future foreign policy? Kevin Burke has noted similar geography hiccups from Barack Obama.

Of course long before November 4th, geography and GIS are at work carving the outcome of the election, the folks over at WhyTuesday have posted a clip to YouTube raising awareness of ReDistricting and the dark art of Gerrymandering…

Brady Forest has posted an analysis of some data released by Skyhook wireless, the company that provides the location for the Apple iPhone. Skyhook has shared some details of how iPhone application developers are making use of the device location in their applications.

It’s a small dataset, so we mustn’t place too much significance on the conclusions of any analysis, but it makes for an interesting read.

I often work on the assumption that location adds value to an application, so it was intriguing to discover that a greater percentage of location aware applications are given away for free (40%), in comparison to the larger pool of iPhone applications, of which only a quarter are given away, and the remainder are sold.

The artwork of London based illustrator Harriet Russell caught my eye today. Russell concealed the addresses of 130 letters to herself in a series of increasingly complex puzzles and ciphers, my two favourites are below (and more here):

Her book ‘Envelopes: A Puzzling Journey Through the Royal Mail‘ is on sale shortly.