Alex Singleton

I just had notification of an article I recently wrote for a special issue of GIS Development on Neogeography. This is available online: here or to download as a PDF here.

In brief, my article provides an overview of Neogeography and then details where I think the next developments will occur.

Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) is a method of spatial statistical analysis used to explore geographical differences in the effect of one or more predictor variables upon a response variable. However, as a form of local analysis, it does not scale well to (especially) large data sets because of the repeated processes of fitting and then comparing multiple regression surfaces. A solution is to make use of developing grid infrastructures, such as that provided by the National Grid Service (NGS) in the UK, treating GWR as an “embarrassing parallel” problem and building on existing software platforms to provide a bridge between an open source implementation of GWR (in R) and the grid system. To demonstrate the approach, we apply it to a case study of participation in Higher Education, using GWR to detect spatial variation in social, cultural and demographic indicators of participation.

Grid-enabling Geographically Weighted Regression: A Case Study of Participation in Higher Education in England

Richard Harris, Alex Singleton, Daniel Grose, Chris Brunsdon, Paul Longley

I have blogged about the newly launched London Data Store elsewhere, however I thought I would post a quick (actually not so quick given our ArcGIS liscence server died today) post about a mashup I created today using the CASA software GMapcreator and website Maptube.

Anyway, you can view the map here – it shows deliberate fire incidents in London.

Since Endnote X3 has recently added Pages compatibility I have started to write more on my Macbook. However, one issue with this was that my very large Endnote library was stranded on my university workstation. An effective solution to this problem was to move my Endnote library into my Dropbox folder. For those not familiar with Dropbox, this is free online storage account that comes with an application for Windows / OS X / Linux that syncs files in a specified folder accross multiple machines. This provides a very simple way of sharing Endnote libraries for free!

An alternative, and one which I experiment with in a different context is Zotero . This is a centralized online reference manager with growing caitpabilities that is free to use, and is integrated into Firefox. I am really looking foward to seeing what happens with this application over the next few years. Specifically if they add Pages compatibility.

Happy New Year!

Yesterday I spoke at an OAC User Group event at the RSS about geographic visualisation and area classification more generally. The slides as usual are on slideshare!

Here is my talk from the 39th RSAI:BIS conference on 2-4 September 2009, Limerick, Ireland.