WeAreData - London | Hacker News Reader

WeAreData - London

wearedata.watchdogs.com

157 pointsfmavituna32 comments

Amazing visualization. I just checked my area near Shoreditch High Street and I learned things I never knew. The CCTV is especially interesting.

It would be great to mix in average rental prices, hashtag clouds, or crimes from the police site as they are happening.

Here's an API of UK property rental (and sales) prices as well as actual properties

http://www.nestoria.co.uk/help/api

enjoy

Here's an API for police data http://data.police.uk/docs/

What a brilliant marketing method for this game. I don't think it could have been more perfectly timed (in history).

If only Ubisoft didn't have a major password theft scandal on their hands losing unencrypted passwords.

Uh, what? They were hashed and salted, from everywhere I've read.

Password theft are harmless if you use randomly generated passwords ;)

Would love to see them do Chicago as it's the "setting"[1] for the game and the city has great data sharing[2].

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPYgXvgS6Ww 2. https://data.cityofchicago.org/

Fascinating. I find it especially interesting to see the results of gentrification. As someone who watched a million Nathan Barleys take over Shoreditch in the mid to late 00's until the artists left, it is absolutely amazing to see the average salary of Tower Hamlets is now £3400.

Where did all those poor people go?

It's the average salary, which can skewed by a handful of extreme outliers.

Yes I understand that. What I was suggesting is that the poor people in Tower Hamlets haven't all been displaced, just the people in the Shoreditch triangle, which is tiny in population when you compare to say, Bow, just next door.

So the amount of money brought in from the Shoreditch gentrification and subsequent business tax breaks leading up to the Olympics was so great in that one concentrated area that the ENTIRE Tower Hamlets looks decent statistically but the reality is very different.

Shoreditch Triangle is in Hackney, not Tower Hamlets. The divide is midway down Redchurch Street, I know as I used to live there and Tower Hamlets would manage to send us our council tax bill but then provide no services. Fun times.

I left when they turned up as well and I'm no artist. There was a reasonable tech community around there before it went all trendy as most of us found it pretty cheap and convenient whilst raping the corporations around E1/Docklands as hard as we could on contract work (TBH they deserved it :)

Poor people are still there, stacked up on top of each other in the estates around the top of City Road and around the focal point of Shoreditch.

It's still like Islington (where I was born into abject poverty without even the prospect of an orange lined fluffy anorak or dunlops) in the 1970's around the back of Shoreditch. Total deprivation, but people are getting by somehow, without an iPhone or a power-job. Good luck to them but fuck the hipsters to hell.

...the hipsters to hell.

Back in ~2009, living on the southern periphery in Whitechapel, we came up with the idea to call 'em ditchies.

There's a decent old-school pub left with some serious artists (aged and incoming) directly opposite the East London Mosque. It's run by an alcoholic former schoolteacher who reckoned it was better public service running a bar (apparently, for artists). Good place.

I live in Tower Hamlets and I have a hard time believing that figure. I guess there are plenty of super-rich in West India Quay, Canary Wharf and Pan Peninsula.

The median salary is probably around 1/3 of that.

I can imagine a similar thing with a lot more data sources and reliable data to be very impressive and scary at the same time.

If you had access also to phone data, with position etc. it would be the ultimate stalking tool...

Hmm, I just get a black screen (Chrome, Ubuntu). Any idea what might be missing?

Its running on Flash.

Ah ok, I don't have flash on this machine; usually you get a missing plugin error, but no, nothing.

It is? Does the flash based experience differ from the version I'm seeing on my iPad?

You have 2 seconds to load 3MB flash...

Requires Local Storage enabled in your Flash preferences (aka flash cookies/LSO).

This is quite nifty. I'm not usually into games or gorilla marketing but I'm going to keep an eye out for this.

Guerilla marketing ;).

"Gorilla marketing" certainly conjures up a nice image though.

I personally like it more than normal marketing simply for variety: it forces marketers to be more creative and to try new things, which is never a bad thing. Certainly better than their standard approach of shoving their logo into my face enough times to imprint it into my brain.

Haha - whoops!

Kind of prefer Gorilla to Guerrilla :)

What a great way to visualize data from many sources at once. (Is it only me or does the number of public toilets seem way too low for the population?)

It's missing a lot of public toilets and, in any event, McDonalds toilets are free and all over the place :-)

Good point ... perhaps the marked public toilets are those maintained by the government?

McDonald's toilets aren't "public", you're supposed to cough up for a cheeseburger. It's just that nobody checks.

I did once visit a McDonalds in Romania where they required a pin number to enter the toilets, that was given out with purchases. However, standing by the door and waiting for someone to walk out worked quite well too.

Shame about the dark and dingy colour scheme...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com