Twitter City Classification: The Mexican Bean Effect

Over the past few years one of the PhD students I supervise here in CASA has been working on the way cities ‘tick’. Fabian Neuhaus is examining the temporal aspects of global cities and the results are interesting.

One recent piece of work that caught our eye was Fabians classification sample of nine cities ordered from evening to morning based on twitter activity. Some cities seem to be more active in the morning and other in the evening. Dubai and Istanbul for example are clearly more active in the late hours, where on the other end Cairo and Bogota are early birds and tweet a lot more in the morning. The US cities Boston and Atlanta have both a peak in the morning and in the evening.

We liked the way Mexico’s twitter activity is bean shaped:



Image by urbanTick for NCL / timeRose diagram of 24 hours – showing twitter activity in percentage of total tweets by hour of the day. Covers the cities Cairo, Bogota, Mexico City, Manila, Atlanta ,Boston Los Angeles, Istanbul, Dubai.

Similarly there are preferences regarding the weekdays, not all areas tweet the same day. The early week days, Monday and Tuesday are generally less active than the rest of the week. Manila clearly prefers the weekend, where Cairo, Istanbul and Mexico City prefer the end of the week, Thursday and Friday. Dubai and especially Bogota have the least differences between the weekdays with very similar numbers of tweets through out the week.

3ds Max 2011 One Project from Start to Finish

3ds Max is a uniquely powerful modelling program, yet one that can catch out both new comers and even advanced users out with its intricacies and workflows. Many tutorial style books are fundamentally flawed by assuming the reader is already familiar with various aspects of the software. Indeed, we remember well a book that stated ‘now complete this easy step’ only to leave us both frustrated and annoyed as we failed to grasp the instructions.

What therefore is needed is a book that illustrates the process of creating a 3D visualization project step by step – and we are pleased to say there finally is a book worthy of its title ‘3ds Max 2011, One Project from Start to Finish’.

The movie below details the model produced over 9 chapters and the good news is we have three copies to give away, full details at the end of the post:

The book has been designed to be useful for readers at all skill levels. The material is presented in a way that will engage advanced users while still being explicatory enough for beginners – which is great to see.

Covering 2D-3D Modelling, Terrain Creation, Tree Creation, Water Elements, Animation, Lighting, Rending, Particles Systems and more the book provides a fully structured guide.

If your only going to buy one 3D modelling book this year then 3ds Max 2011 – One Project from Start to Finish is simply the best option.

The publishers 3DATS have kindly provided us with 3 copies to give away to readers – simply retweet this post and we will pick 3 winners at random from the Twitter feed. Competition ends 28th February, so you have a week to enter.

The retweet button is at the top of the post, good luck, books will be shipped Tuesday 29th, each valued at $99.95.

Street Slide: Coming Soon to Bing?

Systems such as Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside enable users to virtually visit cities by navigating between immersive 360° panoramas, or bubbles. The discrete moves from bubble to bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good visual sense of a larger aggregate such as a whole city block. Multi-perspective “strip” panoramas can provide a visual summary of a city street but lack the full realism of immersive panoramas.

The movie below provides an overview of the system:


In a paper at SIGGRAPH Microsoft presented Street Slide, which combines the best aspects of the immersive nature of bubbles with the overview provided by multiperspective strip panoramas. They demonstrated a seamless transition between bubbles and multi-perspective panoramas presenting a dynamic construction of the panoramas which overcomes many of the limitations of previous systems.

As the user slides sideways, the multi-perspective panorama is constructed and rendered dynamically to simulate either a perspective or hyper-perspective view. This provides a strong sense of parallax, which adds to the immersion.

You can view the paper here (13Mb, .pdf), with Microsofts Patent recently approved, it looks like this should be coming to Bing soon.