At the risk of becoming a prolific blogger, I want to add some new thoughts on the extent to which the arrival of Barack Obama as President of the United States will have an impact on my main field of study - urban policy. This is interesting to me for a number of reasons:
1. Obama's recent background is in Chicago; a city where housing and urban policy are high on the agenda and where it has been very controversial; 2. Policy-transfer from the US to the UK is increasingly common, but not unproblematic, so any new developments there will surely impact here; 3. He promised to create a White House Office of Urban Policy; 4. He talks of 'targeting' federal dollars to urban areas and effective spending on 'high-impact' programs, but isn't this ignoring the real causes which are not in the areas that need targeting? 5. It raises the prospect of more people taking note of the work we do (e.g.)!
For the time being, however, it's just a case of wait and see and keep working on things. Right now, I'm writing a new paper which explores the extent to which spatial targeting of deprived areas for things like employment is actually a fundamentally flawed approach when there is no guarantee that jobs created in, or nearby, the poorest neighbourhoods will be of benefit to residents there.
I've recently discovered ScreenToaster (via demogirl). What on earth is it? It's a tool for making toast online. Okay, not really. It's a really smart tool that allows you to record your screen activity, then upload it to their website where other people can view it. So, if your Mum wants you to show her how to do something it's great for that, but it could also be of use to people who teach various software skills - in Universities for example. It's not a replacement for traditional screencasting software but I rate it very highly as a new tool on the scene. Quick example below...
As you can see, the quality is very good and you just copy and paste the html text into your web page, blog or whatever and then share it with whoever you like. You can increase the size of the video to fill the whole screen and it remains quite high quality. I recommend it. That's all for now but more e-learning things will appear in the future...
I've been thinking recently a lot about methods we use to rank, count and understand urban areas. This is a topic which the Globalisation and World Cities Group (GaWC) at Loughborough University in the UK have become world leaders in. I also wrote a paper about this some time ago and I'm still interested in it more generally but not so much from an academic research point of view these days. However, I was reminded about a paper which I referred to in the SGJ article mentioned above - a paper written by the aptly named Florian Urban. He looked at the representation of cities on the internet in his 2002 paper from the perspective of place marketing and representation. However, I wondered recently what outcome you would get if you simply entered city names into google (I did try others but google seems to return more results than all others). Not surprisingly, the results match those which are typically published and based on much more complex analyses...[read the caveats below too]
New York = 827m ("new york city" returns only about 102m)
London = 539m
Paris = 597m
Tokyo = 142m in English, plus 427m for 東京 for a total of 569m
Hong Kong = 246m in English, plus 290m for 香港 for a total of 536m
Los Angeles = 267m (quotes or not, doesn't seem to make much difference)
Singapore = 221m
Chicago = 337m
Seoul = 35.5m
Toronto = 157m
Caveats... New York could be the city or state, Seoul has some name issues that mean even if you use the simplified Chinese characters to seach the indexed pages result doesn't increase much, there is a massive English speaking bias here too (but then that reflects the real world to an extent). Also, the extent to which the web is US-centric comes out here. For comparison, Beijing/北京 returns (105+555 =) 660m. You'll also get different results day to day, with a general trend of increase.
Okay, so these results are not at all scientific, but they do quite closely match the kinds of rankings you see in the academic, popular and web press. What about cities in the UK? Well, we have Manchester at 139m ( swelled by football references?), Birmingham at 85m, Glasgow at 58m, Edinburgh at 53m, Leeds at 46m, Sheffield at 39m and Inverness at 14m. No doubt there's a lot of noise in these results but again it mirrors other ways of measuring.
In my work, I'm much more interested in the places far lower down the urban 'hierarchy' and not so much in rankings but it's interesting to see how this little exercise has turned out.
...call it what you like but the practice of recording what you do on your computer and making it available online is really beginning to become more widely used. I've been tracking things over the past couple of years - in addition to doing it myself and I've amassed quite a few bookmarks that mostly just sit there and get looked at by me when I need them. So, I thought it would be a good time to share some of my favourites.
First, best to start off with the software for screencasting in the first place. I use Camtasia 5.1 (now it's at 6.0) but am aware that lots of other people like Captivate (more bells and whistles?). Then we've got free apps like Wink (not bad) or Camstudio (the first one I ever used) or a new player called ScreenToaster (which I first saw on demogirl). Can't forget Jing (ahead of its time?) either of course. There's more on the wiki page but that's not exhaustive either. You get the idea; the tools are out there, take your pick.
Where did the term 'screencast' come from? If you believe the web then it's Jon Udell and in this case I've no reason do doubt it. However, maybe it should be Deeje Cooley we all thank.
What do people do with it all? Well, all sorts really. Demonstrating software for promotional purposes on YouTube (ArcGIS 9.3), creating training DVDs like KnowGIS (I've got it - very high quality), archiving tens of thousands of videos some of which are free (there's a lot here!), and the Idaho State Tax Commission also have their own take on screencasting GIS (I'm not making this up (but I am particularly proud of this find) - see). Not forgetting the web's uber-tuber demogirl herself (shameless promotion I know but it's a very useful blog).
What do I do with it and why am I into screencasting? I record software skills with voiceovers to help students learn and I'm into it because it works. It works very well, if it's done correctly. I'm now in the process of trying to widen my audience but that's for another blog. I hope with all the new capabilities that the method will be more widely available and that it won't just be techie-nerds who do it. Enough.
Much has been written in the academic literature about 'area effects', or how concentrations of poverty (or disadvantage, or deprivation, or whatever you want to call it) can act to create further disadvantage in terms of all sorts of things; from health to employment, to crime and so on.
Another issue here is the extent to which the geography of deprivation has largely remained the same in cities across the United Kingdom. So, if we look back in time and follow neighbourhoods through to the present day many of the areas that we target with policy today were seen as 'problems' decades ago. Despite lots of money being spent on them, things have not got much better.
The Department of Communities and Local Government's recently published Regeneration Framework has more to say on these issues but it also acknowledges the above two problems. But what can we do about it? Well, the Framework has three priority outcomes:
• improving economic performance in deprived areas; • improving rates of work and enterprise in deprived areas; and • creating sustainable places where people want to live and can work,and businesses want to invest.
Some good ideas but have we any reason to think it will be any more effective than previous approaches? Maybe. There is a growing realisation that, after 40+ years of area-based initiatives in England, something just isn't right in the approach we take.
The point of this post is to say that I concur with most of what's in the Framework but I don't there there is enough emphasis on the extent to which deprivation is a spatial phenomenon, as well as an attributional one. What I mean by this is that the spatial manifestation of deprivation also needs to be tackled head on. But first, it needs to be understood - and this is what my current research focus is on. I've blogged on this before, but I just wanted to re-emphasise it here since the Framework was on my mind. There's also a reference to a paper that I co-wrote (bottom of page 55) with some of the spatial context material in it.
The reason for another of these posts is that I've been contacted by various people in different parts of the world (the USA, Australia, England) about flow mapping; how to do it, what to use it for and so on. Well, I think much more development is needed. I also need to keep blogging but I've been busy recently - poor excuse though.So, more results of my experiments in flow mapping... all of which use migration data from the 2001 UK Census.
First we have flow lines for the United Kingdom, at district level and then along the side I show different link magnitudes. This map shows 'gross' flows. That is, the flow lines represent the total link between two places (so, if A to B = 100 and B to A = 50, the gross link = 150).
On the second map, I've shown the same data but at ward level (n.b. there are about 430 districts and about 10,000 wards - as you'll understand, the migration matrices are pretty big). I've had to filter it to show only flows of 12 or more otherwise it's a jumbled mess.
On the third map, I've shown this data just for South East England, in the area surrounding London. This illustrates, to varying degrees of success, the level of functional polycentricity which exists in relation to household mobility.
Finally, I've attempted something different. I've produced a smooth surface raster, based on 2.5km cells, of all ward level migration. In some ways it is a success, but we can never really overcome all the limitations of 2D display. However, it does tell a story.
In the film Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner's character hears a voice saying 'if you build it, he will come'; 'it' being a baseball field and 'he' being the great baseball player Shoeless Joe Jackson. Okay, so I haven't been hearing voices and I'm not expecting any sports legends to use my e-learning resources, but I did built it (a screencast site inside the University's VLE) and he/they (users) did come - some of them are even spending hours looking at the content, which so far is not complete but there's probably around 4 hours content on there.
Anyway, the point being I had an idea I felt pretty sure was a good one and now people are coming. The unfortunate part is that I'm moving jobs so won't be able to continue it at Manchester, but will probably do something similar at Sheffield after I arrive. All posts have to have an image:
So, any e-learning boffins out there - building a dedicated screencast site is not that much work, it is very effective within existing VLE technology and students will use it. So far I've got about 160 users but this number should rise once the semester goes on. That's it for now.
This blog featured data, maps and stories related to my research between 2008 and 2015. I've decided to move on to other things, but I'll leave all content as it is now in case anyone is interested. The focus was normally on things to do with cities, GIS and spatial data analysis. If you want to use any of the material on here just ask, as I'm generally okay with it.
