I’ve made a visualisation tool for digging into the English index of multiple deprivation (IMD). The 2019 IMD just came out, accompanied by a bunch of great ways to look at it, including Alasdair Rae’s full set of local authority maps and Rob Fry‘s amazing webmap that shows all IMD subdomains for any LSOA (lower layer super output area). My own visualisation aims to tell some stories with the data by comparing different local authorities in England and looking at how the IMD has changed between 2015 and 2019, as well as allowing free exploration. It’s utterly unsuitable for phone …

Video above: how house price substitutability changes between Glasgow postcodes. The blue dot (centre, below the river) moves up and down across a few postcodes. Large red dots show other postcodes where house prices have moved in tandem over time. As the dots shrink / turn green, price movement matches become weaker. Right-click on the video to get a ‘loop’ option to see the pattern better. — One of the lovely things about my work in the Sheffield Methods Institute over the past few years has been the huge diversity of projects I’ve got to work on, often collaborating on …

I was at Sheffield’s first data for good hack day on Saturday – it was bloomin’ Marvelous. Organised by Tom French and Lauren Quinn from Good Things Foundation and Sarah Miller, BI developer at Jet2, we were working with Amy Evans from youth homelessness charity Roundabout. (It’s sensitive data so we had to delete it at the end of the day and I’m afraid I can’t explain any findings.) It was the culmination of a number of data-for-good evenings looking at the issue of homelessness. Those bought together a huge range of people with different perspectives: university, charity, council, other …

On Brexit: I think there should be a supplementary vote on the three options: (1) remain. (2) leave under the terms of Theresa May’s negotiated deal. (3) leave with no deal. You’d get a first and second preference. If no option gets more than 50%, the two with the highest count go into a second round. At this stage, anyone who’s first preference is eliminated have their second preference counted. Up until this week I didn’t believe another vote was justified. People who argue for one, it seems to me, are dismissing the original leave vote as driven by idiots, …

Title stolen from this song by King Creosote and Jon Hopkins Coveredinbees 1.0 came about after I’d found out I got PhD funding, back in April 2006. That version now exists only on the wayback machine, hit and miss on what posts it kept. 2.0 ended recently, archived as a a flat website by the awesome folks at webarchitects. 3.0 has moved to WordPress – and has been sitting here quietly judging me for four months. “Why aren’t you writing?” Looking back to 2006, those early posts are so uninhibited – not necessarily coherent, but I wasn’t afraid to wildly …