1. Nathan Storey Guest Lecture

    Thu 10 October 2013
    cfarmer

    Nathan Storey will be speaking to my spatial data analysis class later today, October 10th, 2013, and you are invited to attend! Nathan is a former Hunter Urban Affairs student and current Open Data Guru working with Ontodia doing GIS/open data projects for NYC. Check out PediaCities, their platform to curate, organize, and link data about cities.

    This will be a great opportunity to see GIS data applied to real-world problem sets here in NYC. The discussion will go approx 1 hour, beginning at 5:35 in the large lab of Hunter College, CUNY, North Building, Room 1090B. Due to the location, no refreshments will be served, but its a good opportunity to feed your brain :)

    Here is what Nathan (the speaker) has to say about this talk:

    I will be speaking to Carson Farmer’s spatial data analysis class next week about open data in NYC, data discovery, and PediaCities, a data encyclopedia project I’ve been working on for the past 6 months.

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  2. Re-imagining New York Streets

    Tue 08 October 2013
    cfarmer

    Here’s a TED talk from Janette Sadik-Khan, the New York City Transportation Commissioner, on how they’ve transformed New York City streets over the past several years.

    I love the Citi Bike program (especially the data), which she helped introduce, so it is interesting to hear her talk about how and why the program was started. There is also an interesting article on Sadik-Khan on the TED blog which provides some additional insight into her and the various programs she’s helped develop.

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  3. Public transportation time warp

    Tue 01 October 2013
    cfarmer

    I recently came across two extremely cool videos while preparing lectures for my transportation geography course. It is pretty cool to see the development of the regions around the transportation network while the network itself remains pretty much unchanged. Worth a quick watch!

    The first video depicts the London to Brighton Train Journey for three time periods. In 1953, the BBC made a point-of-view film from a London to Brighton train, 30 years later (1983) they did the same trip again, and again 30 years after that (2013).

    The second video is from the Vancouver SkyTrain, with older footage (1985) from BCRTC/Translink, and newer footage (2013) by Celgen Studios. You can get the original Translink footage from here.

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  4. Maps as Art and Other Experiments

    Fri 27 September 2013
    cfarmer

    With the recent (and long anticipated) release of Quantum GIS 2.0, there has been a lot of ‘buzz’ in the open source geospatial community about all the cool new features that QGIS now boasts, and how far it has come in such a short time. I was recently inspired by such a post by Anita Graser (aka Underdark) (who is a wonderfully talented cartographer/designer) on data driven labeling in QGIS, so I thought I’d throw something together on a gray Friday afternoon to test it out. I also wanted an excuse to play around with Reveal.js slides in IPython notebook, so I produced the following slide show using the images from QGIS and some IPython magic:

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  5. Early Stage Researcher Position in GeoInformatics

    Mon 23 September 2013
    cfarmer

    This is just a quick note about a great opportunity for early career researchers interested in the field of geoinformatics. The Centre for GeoInformatics at the University of St Andrews in Scotland has two new early career researcher positions available to start right away. These are really great opportunities for someone in the first 4-years (full-time equivalent) of their research careers who has not yet have been awarded a doctoral degree. This is also especially good for foreign students, as the Marie Curie regulations require that candidates must not have resided or carried out his/her main activity in the ...

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  6. Essential Python Geospatial Libraries

    Fri 12 July 2013
    cfarmer

    Just so I don’t forget, here is a list of really awesome Python libraries that I’m using these days to do lots of fun things with spatial data [UPDATE: I’ve added a few more]:

    • pandas - For data handling and munging
    • shapely - For geometry handling
    • cartopy - For plotting spatial data
    • rtree - For efficiently querying spatial data
    • nodebox-opengl - For playing around with animations
    • statsmodels - For models and stats in Python (otherwise I’d use R)
    • numpy - For pretty much anything that involves arrays
    • geopy - For geolocating and things like that
    • ipython - For a wondering interactive environment in which to play
    • freetype-py - For converting font glyphs to polygons (odd I know…)
    • ogr/gdal - For reading, writing, and transforming geospatial data formats
    • pyqgis - For anything and everything GIS
    • fiona - For making it easy to read/write geospatial data formats
    • matplotlib - For all my plotting needs
    • networkx - For working with networks (duh!)
    • pelican - For blogging about all this stuff…
    • pysal - For all your spatial econometrics needs (and more)
    • descartes - For plotting geometries in matplotlib

    Based on Twitter and some of the comments below, I should also add:

    • geographiclib - For solving geodesic problems
    • pyshp - For reading and writing shapefiles (in pure Python)
    • pyproj - For conversions between projections

    Any others I’ve missed?

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  7. New York City Panel on Climate Change

    Wed 12 June 2013
    cfarmer

    This was recently announced on the Hunter Geography Department website:

    CISC Produced Map Spearhead of Mayor Bloomberg’s SIRR Announcement

    The New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC2) Climate Risk Information 2013 Report was released on June 11, 2013 in conjunction with the release of the NYC Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency’s (SIRR) report entitled “A Stronger, More Resilient New York.” The reports were released by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg during a press conference on Tuesday June 11 at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Work by the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities (CISC) is heavily featured in the ...

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  8. New Journal: Spatial Demography

    Thu 06 June 2013
    cfarmer

    I have recently joined the editorial team at Spatial Demography — a new journal outlet for demographers and others who use spatial data, methods, and theory.

    A bit more about the journal:

    Spatial Demography [ISSN: 2164-7070 (online)] focuses on the spatial analysis of demographic processes. This cross-disciplinary work involves modern demographic data visualization, enhanced geo-referenced data availability, and spatial statistics, facilitated through full color graphics, motion video tools, and a quick time-to-publication. The journal publishes research articles, essays, research reports, data sources, computing software, teaching notes, and book reviews on a wide range of topics of interest to the social demographer.

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