We’re really pleased to announce that on Wednesday, 22 February Professor Sergio Rey, of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University will be discussing the Python Spatial Analysis Library (PySAL). […]
Author: jreades
Lecturer in Quantitative Human Geography at King's College London, coder, data head.
GeoCUP: supporting a flexible student computing environment
Over the past year, we’ve been supporting our first cohort of Geocomputation & Spatial Analysis (GSA) students as they learn to code and work with geo-data in an open computing context (predominantly FOSS). This post reflects on some of the problems – and solutions – that emerged as a result.
Talk: Urban hierarchies and scaling laws
This afternoon’s seminar by CASA’s Dr. Elsa Arcaute will be of interest to a wide range of students and staff at King’s – with a background in theoretical physics and complexity, Elsa now studies how urban and regional systems scale and divide, and how these aspects are expressed in infrastructure and the built environment. To put it another way: where does London end? 4:30pm today in the Pyramid Room (K4U.04) and followed by wine and soft drinks.
Aspect-Slope Maps in QGIS
While working with Naru to design our new 2nd year GIS methods training course (with parallel QGIS and ArcGIS streams!), I came across a rather striking map on the ESRI blog that managed to combine both slope (steepness) and aspect (direction) in a single representation. This post explains both a problem with the way that the colour scheme was specified and how to replicate this type of map in QGIS (with style sheet).
The Future of Geocomputation
On Friday 18 December, we hosted a workshop on ‘the future of geocomputation’ involving over 30 researchers from across the UK and Ireland. We’re still working to synthesise and write up the discussions that made up the second half of the workshop, but below are the presentations that kicked off the day. Some of the tweets from the day are embedded below but from more see our storify for the day or search #fogeocomp.
Avoiding Email for Academics
How many times do you return from field work or a holiday to find that most of your first day is spent deleting emails that are no longer applicable or were never relevant to begin with? Or, worse, you are asked to address issue ‘x’ but have no history or documentation to explain how ‘x’ became a problem, what solutions have been considered, or even why you are the one to solve it! Asana and Slack can help with that.
Peer Programming for Academics
As we prepare to teach the first year of the GSA pathway, we’ve been experimenting with techniques more commonly used in software development to see if they can help us to deliver quality and integration in our new modules right from the start. This post will explore the logic of Pair Programming.
