Category: Teaching

Seaborn Plots with 2 Legends

Posted here because I will inevitably forget this painfully worked-out answer for having legends for two different types of plots in Seaborn… import numpy as np import pandas as pd import seaborn as sns import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # We will need to access some of these matplotlib classes directly from matplotlib.lines import Line2D #… Continue reading Seaborn Plots with 2 Legends

The Full Stack: Tools & Processes for Urban Data Scientists

Recently, I was asked to give talks at both UCL’s CASA and the ETH Future Cities Lab in Singapore for students and staff new to ‘urban data science’ and the sorts of workflows involved in collecting, processing, analysing, and reporting on urban geo-data. Developing the talk proved to be a rather enjoyable opportunity to reflect on more… Continue reading The Full Stack: Tools & Processes for Urban Data Scientists

Bridging the Qual/Quant Divide

I’ve been in my new post in the Geography department at King’s College London for nearly nine months now and — together with another new-ish colleague — have been asked to design a programme to teach quantitative research methods to students who often seem to think that their interests are solely qualitative.

Fear of Failure

An ongoing preoccupation of many governments, but perhaps most especially this one, has been the fostering of innovation and the training of the next generation of entrepreneurs. The positioning of tertiary education under Business, Innovation & Skills is one obvious sign of this focus and so, as I noted before, is the Government’s investment in… Continue reading Fear of Failure

Multiple MySQL Servers on a Single Machine

Note: this was previously posted at simulacra.info, but I am in the process of (re)organising my technical notes and tutorials. A bit of a dry post here, but I thought I’d share my experience of trying to get two instances of MySQL (and two different versions, to boot) running simultaneously on a single piece of hardware… Continue reading Multiple MySQL Servers on a Single Machine

The MapThing Processing Library

MapThing allows you to perform a range of useful mapping (in the geographical sense) functions within Processing and offers a collection of classes for reading ESRI-compliant Shape files (a.k.a. shapefiles), CSV point data, and GPX files, and then displaying them as part of a sketch.

Plotting & iGraph on Lion and Mountain Lion

Note: this was previously posted at simulacra.info, but I am in the process of (re)organising my technical notes and tutorials. After giving up on Gephi (again, I really should learn), I decided it was time to get to grips with Python and iGraph since I really need to produce multiple iterations of a graph. The… Continue reading Plotting & iGraph on Lion and Mountain Lion

Extracting files from Moodle MBZ Archives with Python

These days it seems that just about every university is using Moodle, the “open-source community-based tools for learning”, to manage the delivery of course material and handling of deadlines, assignments, etc. Now I’m a fan of the OS community, but Moodle has… quirks.