alex.mullr.net/blog

At the end of 2008, I posted a map of all the teenage homicides in London by collating BBC News articles. This year, it was significantly easier; my Freedom of Information request was returned by the Metropolitan Police’s Performance Information Bureau yesterday, and here’s the map:

View 2009 Teenage Killings in London in a larger map

The total number is down on last year, from 28 to 15. However, where there was only one girl last year, there are three here. The mean age is between 17 and 18 years old, with the average age for the girls being just under two years less.

This is what both sets of points (1st January 2008 to 31st December 2009) together look like:

And both years in central London:

Thanks to the Met for taking the time to dig out this information for me. The title of the report they provided is “Names, Dates and Location of Homicide Victims aged 13-19 between 1st Jan – 31 Dec 2009”, FOI 2010 01 0002688.

(This appeared on BBC News two hours ago. I suppose I’ll have work to do next year too, then.)

From the OpenStreetMap wiki, shared on Google Reader by Frankie. This is definitely worth a read:

I am currently in Port Au Prince with the Fairfax County Urban Search & Rescue Team (USA-1) out of Fairfax, VA, USA. I wish there was a way that I can express to you properly how important your OSM files were to us. Most of our team members own their own Garmin Rino and 60CSx units on top of the units we already have in the cache. Having these detailed maps on our GPS units is a big deal. Shortly after discovering your work I quickly spread the word and transferred the street level maps onto as many Garmin units as we could before sending the American rescue teams on the streets. The team members are thrilled to have this resource you have created. I wish you could see their faces ‘light up’ when I take their GPS unit and tell them that I’m going to give them street level detail maps.

This is just fantastic news.

I’m somewhat compulsive when it comes to hoarding and keeping things. Here’s all my Starbucks receipts from 2008 (which I can safely say are now where they belong, in the bin).

Taking cues from sites like Information is Beautiful, I’m also trying to improve my ability to display data, and really just make things that look pretty. There’s definite progress being made on that front.

I’m a big fan of making pretty maps, so when I thought up an idea yesterday morning, I had to see it through. For those who weren’t aware, last Thursday was exam results day for loads of kids all over the country, the day they found out where they’d be going to university. More than a few announced this via Twitter (as you do these days, I guess); and as they were copying and pasting from “the results site”, they were fairly easy to find.

So I stitched together a Google map of the UK, and set to work putting the points on a map; it made sense to do it by hand seeing as the sample size wasn’t massive. And here’s the result (click through for a massive version if you really feel like breaking your browser and my Amazon S3 account):

For reference, the blue dots map number of undergraduates against location. Both maps should be scaled sort of properly (there’s the same amount of red as there is blue, if my Maths hasn’t failed me). It was interesting to see how the many more results came from the universities in the middle the country when compared to their size.

And as though that wasn’t enough, I went and made you a Wordle of what subjects people are studying:

Oh, and I don’t claim that any of this is 100% certified guaranteed scientifically accurate™. It was just a fun little project for the day. My messy data’s available as a .csv should you wish to inspect it.

I’m really into my Google Maps at the moment. With the amount I’m using it, it’s easily my favourite Google service, except maybe Gmail. Or Reader. Or Analytics. Screw it, they’re all brilliant.

The latest creation comes from a service called map a list, which Lifehacker played with a month ago. I couldn’t think of a decent use for it myself, but someone pointed out that it would be fantastic for mapping customers who have signed up their details with a company. A massive advantage is that a business owner can immediately see whether handing out leaflets or flyers has had the intended effect. It works really nicely: link it to your Google account, select a spreadsheet to pull data from, link columns in the spreadsheet to address fields and… boom!

Here’s the service containing a bit of post code data (and with hindsight, I could have used it for my earlier post on mapping friends). Love it.

Put this map together this afternoon, and it scares me quite a bit. It shows the 25 teenage boys and one girl who have been killed inside the M25 since the beginning of 2008 (I think I got them all).

The Google Map is embedded, so click through if you can’t see it in an RSS reader. It was updated in 2009 with two, bringing it to a total of 28 (using a BBC News article), so it’s now complete.

View Larger Map

What the hell is going on?

I’m not doing much to counter the theory that there is too much free time in the world. Spent half an hour this evening going through my address book to create a Google Map of people I know, so without saying any more:

To be honest I am a little disappointed in how concentrated the pointers are around the UK. To clarify this map, it’s populated by people who I know well enough to know where their permanent address is. Not that I’m inviting myself to stay or anything…

How data changes over time is starting to really interest me – things like, for example, how listening habits can be graphed year by year to see changes, or the fantastic TweetStats, which gives a whole bunch of numbers and pretty bar charts. I would be very interested in recreating this map in four years time, or maybe even ten years time, and seeing what has changed.

Hope I haven’t forgotten anyone this time round.