The Spatial Miscellany

When you submit details to a website via a web form, increasingly you’re asked to interpret a picture of a word and type the answer in a text box, this type of puzzle is known as a ‘CAPTCHA’ – if you’re not sure what I’m talking about, check out the comments section of this post for an example.

The CAPTCHA was created by Luis von Ahn, in an attempt to fight Spam…if the CAPTCHA is completed successfully you are assumed to be human and the web form is submitted, if the CAPTCHA is failed you are assumed to be a computer and web form submission is prevented. The CAPTCHA is a classic example of a Turing Test, as proposed by the eponymous researcher in his 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ - indeed the name CAPTCHA coined by Luis von Ahn is an acronym for a “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”.

Ahn was initially proud of his highly effective solution for preventing Spam, but was subsequently frustrated with the cumulative amount of time being consumed by millions of people across the globe filling in CAPTCHA’s and producing very little in return. Personally I found the CAPTCHA mightily offensive and avoided them like the plague, until I discovered them to be the only effective way to stop computers spamming this blog. Fortunately, Ahn has recently worked with Ben Maurer to address his frustration and recently released reCAPTCHA. Here’s the deal…

The Internet Archive is attempting to automatically digitize old books using optical text recognition software, they are largely successful but the text recognition software struggles with recognizing ye olde English, meaning that roughly 8% of words are digitized incorrectly or not at all. reCAPTCHA addresses this problem by asking a user to interpret a picture of two words (instead of just one), the first word is a known word and the second word an unknown word. If you correctly interpret the first known word, it is assumed you have also correctly interpreted the second word that wasn’t recognized by the text recognition software. So when you fill in a reCAPTCHA, not only are you proving that you are human, but you are also helping to digitize old books! For me, application of technology in this way is poetry.

Obviously Luis von Ahn has applied this technique to digitizing old books, but it had me thinking of the potential to apply such an approach to digitizing maps…is there scope for a geoCAPTCHA?

The above cartoon is the copyrighted work of David Farley

Earlier in the week, the BBC reported on the latest research findings from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF). The JRF has been investigating poverty and wealth across Britain, and how its spatial distribution has changed between 1968 to 2005. Despite a heap of academic research having been undertaken looking at poverty and wealth in the UK, apparently little work has been undertaken that investigates the geography of rich and poor; with their latest research, the JRF have aimed to address this.

Buried deep inside the report are a whole host of maps that illustrate a spatial analysis of Britain’s changing poverty and affluence over the last 40 years. The report and supporting data are available for download, as a combination of pdf and xls files; with a little manipulation this data could make for some attractive Google/Yahoo/Microsoft online maps.

The JRF concludes that the most significant change in the spatial distribution of wealth over the last 40 years has been the clustering of wealth and poverty. Urban clustering of poverty has increased, while wealthy households have concentrated in the outskirts and surrounds of major cities, especially those classified as ‘exclusive wealthy’, which have been steadily concentrating around London.

Pretty much every map in the report suggests the overarching spatial distribution of wealth in the UK, the north-south divide, is as pronounced today as it was 40 years ago. As the gap between rich and poor has increased, the report concludes…and I quote…‘average households are gradually disappearing from London and the south east’!

I wonder what other spatial distributions of wealth and poverty have emerged elsewhere throughout the world, over the last 40 years?