Over the last few days I've had to start putting serious thought into my summer thesis. It's crazy how its come around so soon after the start of the course. Last September it was fine, you think "Ah, months away, something will come to me soon, I'll get passionate about an area and then follow that" .... then X'mas comes... and goes.... and you're bogged down in coursework... and then BAM. Although we're constantly told it's
only a short project, and not to worry about it too much, we're also told to consider what skills we want to get out of it, and make sure that they're relevant for what we want to do afterwards. So as you can see it suddenly isn't
just a short project anymore, it's the rest of our lives. Ha. Tad dramatic I know.
And that is where I've got to stop writing unfortunately...! Reason being I'm fortunate enough to have been given access to some data of a confidential nature. People within the Department will no doubt know what I'm talking about, but other than that it's hush-hush. Suffice to say I'll be doing some spatio-temporal analysis, mostly on the movement of cars around a London Borough, and that the results might be quite interesting. Spatio-temporal being, as I'm sure you've guessed, analysis of a spatial nature combined with temporal (time) nature. So maybe firstly looking at the movement pattern of the cars, seeing which streets are visited more maybe, and then looking at how this varies over hours/days/months etc.
As a random aside, this is a map that I created for some coursework a month or so ago that I thought was pretty cool. It's a representation of how air pollution may increase around the town of Lydd from the expansion of nearby London Ashford Airport. I produced it to note firstly how the consultants (employed by the airport!) had done a terrible job of modelling the increases, and secondly to show what the figures might actually be if they had done it properly (Hmm.. this is probably the same thing, right?):
