Author: admin

Property Price register in Ireland…

I’ve started looking at the possibility of doing something with the data released by the Irish government on the subject of property prices in Ireland.

This is something which really only started happening in the last few years, and in fact, it started happening well after the property market in Ireland had started to collapse. The first year for which we have data is 2010.

In general terms, I think it is a good thing that we have this data available but there are ways in which it could be enhanced, I think, which would make it more useful.

As far as I am aware, data for the Irish Property Price register comes from stamp duty returns

Currently, the data headers are as follows:

  • date of sale
  • Address of property
  • postal code
  • County
  • Price in euros
  • Not Full Market value (yes or no – in this case YES means it was not full market value)
  • VAT Exclusive (yes or no)
  • Description (New Dwelling House/Appartment or Secondhand dwelling house/appartment)
  • Property size description (greater than 125 sqm, greater than or equal 38 sqm and less than 125 sqm, less than 38 sqm)

As things stand, there is very little useful information about the properties in the register that allow us to do anything particularly interesting.

  • Data can be downloaded a county level. The county column is otherwise not useful to an end user
  • The postal code field is currently inapplicable for most of the country and for Dublin, it is not always filled in because the postal code has been integrated with the address
  • date of sale is useful
  • price of property is useful
  • full market value or not is useful
  • VAT exclusive is useful
  • property description only informs us whether the property is new or second hand. It does not tell us the type of property
  • property size would be more useful if the bin ranges were more granulated.

Nevertheless I have plans for this data but only within the confines of the possible.

However, one of the things I would consider is how could we make this better for the future?

  • postcodes are coming for the entire country. I have yet to look at the implementation (soon) but this could be very useful in terms of segmenting the market, provided they are entered in the correct field.
  • No estate agent describes a property as a new or second hand dwelling house/apartment. DAFT, for example, drills down house, apartment, duplex, bungalow. Arguably to that we could add detached, semi detached, terrace (or town house or whatever you’re having yourself for houses bounded on both sides). Put simply, for type of property, there isn’t enough information.
  • Additional column for new or secondhand dwelling
  • Accurate surface area measurements. At this point I need to note that from experience, in other countries, surface area is more important in ads and classifiers to the numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms. I would like it if a) it was mandatory to provide surface area measurements in property sale/rent ads and that this information gets included in the property price registry.

There are a few benefits here. Price per square meter is a useful indicator of value across different areas (which might be more definable with valid postcodes). We can also get a picture of which are are bigger houses (I have plans to look into what I can find on the subject of surface area measurements against time at some stage too).

Our property market now is very different to what it was in 2007, but also compared to what it was in 2000, and in 1993. We built a lot of apartments in later years which makes comparing averages very difficult and fraught with danger.

According to the data I have available to me right now, up to 7 October or so, there have been 5943 sales in the Dublin area. In comparison, for the whole of 2012, there were 8808 sales based on a superficial glance at the data.

I will be having a look at this in more detail and will post the outcome in the future and I will also put the code up on github.

In the meantime, it would be nice if we could consider getting past “we have a register” and on to the question “how can we make it even more useful”.

 

Dublin Bus data – can I have some please?

If you use the RTPI signs, or have either the Dublin or Ireland transport info applications on your phone, here are the questions that gets answered:

  • When is the next bus due?
  • What is the next bus?
  • When is the next train going to leave from here?
  • Where is that train going?

I use Dublin Bus’s RTPI applicaton all the time. I use it more than the all Ireland one because I have my favourite bus stops set up and somehow I haven’t the time to set them up in a second app. I will probably use the all-Ireland one for Irish Rail.

These are useful questions to answer. They take the guess work out of the time table, traffic and delays. Only on one day have the really let me down and to be fair, Dublin Bus had extenuating circumstances as O’Connell Bridge was closed.

But there is another question I’d prefer an answer to and it is this.

  • How packed is my onwards bus connection.

Every morning, I get two buses, one from where I live on Dublin’s northside to the city centre, and one from the city centre to UCD’s Belfield campus. In total, the journey normally takes me about an hour, end to end. It’s not bad, but on occasion, things go wrong and I wind up delayed, and occasionally a bit soaked.

Normally I change buses on D’Olier Street. Most of the cross city buses wind up there when they are running southbound, and both buses I can get into the city centre drop at stops there, and a lot of the buses to UCD pick up there. Sometimes, however, those buses are full, full enough for drivers to decide they are not taking on any more passengers. So I get left behind.

So, some mornings, instead of getting off in D’Olier Street, I stay on my first bus until I get to Kildare Street, and do the change there. This is because I gamble that the UCD bound buses will lose a significant number of passengers on Nassau Street, outside Trinity College.

Because of the way Dublin City Centre is laid out, and how the bus routes cross each other, there are often, multiple common stops between bus routes. So the question that I’d like an answer to some mornings, at 8am is this – can I get out at D’Olier Street (there’s a Spar there, and a little more shelter if it’s raining) or should I wait until Kildare Street before doing my bus route change.

Dublin Bus collects a lot of data that I know about, and probably a whole lot more that I know nothing about. Typically, they will know how many people are getting on buses because they have two ticket readers and a driver. And because of the stage system, for a lot of those passengers, they can make an educated guess where people will be alighting.

It would be nice if the RTPI could indicate the likely busyness of a given bus. If, when you looked at the 41 due to go into town it was highlighted whether it was likely to be full or only half full at a given point on its route. So that when I look at RTPI for the 46A to go to Belfield, I can check how full the bus is as well.

Incidentally, this is worth a read – via ITS International..

 

Communications skills and IT

Sunday morning is when I get to read most of the stuff I bookmarked during the week. Which means occasionally I notice stuff which I might not if I had been reading all along.

This morning, I have read yet another treatise on “don’t comment, just write better code” where Hungarian notation was the panacea for related problems (again) (argh). It’s one of a theme – I’ve already written about this another time so I won’t go too far into the details of that this time. But I program,. and I work with programmers and yes, there are programmers who don’t like commenting their code, and who don’t like writing documentation.

Hold that thought.

This week I also read something – probably a tweet now that I think of it – suggesting that people should learn how to set up a server in school. We also get that people should learn how to program in school. You know it’s tech specialists coming up with these ideas because non-tech specialists say generic things like “learn computers”.

Hold that thought.

I’ve also gotten stuck in arguments with people about how using computers should be hard to use because they were complicated .I wrote about that at the time as well by the way. And arguments about punishing users. I wrote about that too.

What occurred to me here was this. All of these are gaps in communication and the suggestion on the parts of those who do not have the communication skills expect others to fill different gaps so that they don’t have to fill their communications skills gap.

Other people should learn to read my code so that I don’t have to document it effectively.

Other people should learn to program so that they * understand * and I don’t have to document my code properly.

Other people should learn more about technology so that I don’t have to communicate gaps – which I designed – effectively to them.

Computers should be hard to use because they’re complicated so that I don’t have to make it easy for users.

I’m seeing a theme here. Tech workers don’t value communication skills enough and blame other people for their gaps in that area.

I’m helped in seeing this theme by another piece I read this morning – this time via Forbes on the provision of data science courses in the Illinois Institute of Technology. From that:

Data scientists also need the communication skills to give talks with clients to help them understand the needs at the beginning of a project and present results at the end (Professor Shlomo Argamon, professor of computer science and director of the masters program in data science)

and

He admits to some pushback from students over required communication courses.

and

But they may still not understand it involves learning to talk with people who are not technical. I hope they will learn how important these skills can be.”

In my view, this issue isn’t limited to potential data science students at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Not everyone is technical. The impression I get from some technical people is that other people should develop technical skills so that they don’t have to develop communications skills.

It’s just I think the world might be better if everyone developed better communication skills across the board first and didn’t argue the “well learn more about my specialisation before you annoy me with inane questions”.

Women in Tech – a response to Pat Phelan

Dear Pat,

I’d just like to respond to this.

Do we have a lack of female engineers? of course we do, do we have a lack of female mechanics? of course we do.

The point of this was not to point out inequalities it was to point out that we are already equal and I just don’t get it

(emphasis mine)

There just seems, to me, to be something contradictory here.

How equal women really are to men in tech is less than clear. Marissa Mayer has a nursery right next to her office. How many male tech CEOs have? Why was it news that she has?

Whether “women in tech” movements are the right way to respond to this is debatable. Changing attitudes takes – very often – a generation. Arguably it’s getting better but…the position of women in most industries is culturally driven rather than anything else. So is the position of men. And they don’t have nurseries next to their offices when they are CXs. Is this right? I’m not sure that it is, to be honest.

I have absolutely had it up to here with the term “women in tech”

You seem to be overwhelmed with Women in Tech.

How is this happening to you?

It’s not happening to me. I’m not overwhelmed with anything other than Big Data which I have had doubts about for a while anyway and I am a woman in tech, I’m on the Ireland Girl Geek dinner mailing list and that’s about it. What mailing lists are you on? What is turning up in your RSS feeds? Who are you following on twitter that you are so overwhelmed?

These are serious questions, by the way. I’m not getting the same onslaught in my media as you appear to be. I’m not even getting anything at all on the subject apart from an email every couple of months to invite me to a couple of tech talks which are about specific tech rather than a Pinky & the Brain-esque how can we take over the world tonight exercise.

I’ve had a few too many people assume I was male because I was online and technically competent in one or other field or arena over the years – and Neo could get away with assuming Trinity was a guy in the first Matrix movie because culturally, she was less than likely to be a female. Why is that? How do we change that?

And there’s this:

how it works in xkcdIndividual women get to represent all women in general terms in a way that men don’t get to represent all men. “Wow, boys suck at math”. The closest a boy will come to being in the position of the girl in the righthand panel above is in a generalisation like “Wow, Americans suck at maths”. I mean, that attitude sucks as well. Some Americans are very good at maths. A lot of them are at Princeton.

It’s the same with drivers of course. You see one woman take a roundabout with a phone stuck to her ear and it’s “bloody women drivers”. Some of those drivers have beards though, and they look kinda like men.Far be it from me to make assumptions but… But we don’t tend to complain about bloody men drivers.

I’m really glad that you don’t look at people’s sex when you’re hiring. But you’re a single data point and your location on the curve is undetermined and you can’t generalize your experience on to everyone else.

You shouldn’t.

That being said, we need more people like you arranging their recruitment, looking at talent. This doesn’t just benefit women of course – there are quite a few cohorts who come a cropper in the face of prejudice.

Some places are fine. Some places are not fine. A lot of places are on a continuum somewhere in the middle. And people’s experiences vary. We may design perfect data structures but humanity and human behaviour typically don’t fit in to one. If they did, economic forecasting would be a lot easier and there would be any product launch failures because we could model their behaviour far more effectively.

In my view, as more and more kids get involved in things like the Coderdojo movement, and as more kids see what you can do with things like scratch and writing iOS games, and more STEM related summer camps (DCU – take a bow here) and things like the DIAS doing special maths support courses, and things like the Gallery of Science in Dublin and Blackrock Castle Observatory, we’ll see more girls getting involved. It’s a question of things becoming normalized. We’re used to women driving their own cars here but there are some countries I would not do it in. We will get used to women, girls doing tech related stuff. Fantastically, the internet opens doors to girls to get access to stuff they might not have necessarily had access to in their school libraries 10-15 years ago.

In the meantime, Etsy have done some super  work on identifying female candidates which is worth a look – yes – they specifically targeted female candidates but it had other beneficial impacts for their business.

What is needed – to some extent – is mentoring and that’s where I see the value of women support networks where they work effectively.

I’m willing to go through whatever is necessary to go and give talks about working in technology and incidentally, if you decide at 25 that what you wanted to do at the age of 17 is not what you want to do now, that’s perfectly alright… all the different branches of tech, and how it’s not all bunker driven sysadmin (but if that’s what you’re into, far be it from me…) if there are schools which would be interested in that. I’ll need to know what is necessary but still…

I came across an interesting piece of information the other day (link is in French but is interesting if you’re into data visualisation). Women in France got the right to open a bank account and choose their own job without asking permission from their husbands on 13 July 1965. That’s less than 50 years ago. We take this sort of thing for granted now. Times change, times move on.

In the meantime, if I read your blog correctly you think things are equal but not equal. I can tell you they are probably 20 billion times better than they were 30 years ago when I wrote my first BASIC on an Atari 1200XL. Women are doing better now in a lot of places than they were in the 1980s – a lot better to be frank.

You’ve given birth, I think, to an interesting debate. I can see that by and large, you’ve caused some consternation. I think your delivery may have left a huge amount to be desired. That wins you, as you say, no brownie points. But the discussion is valuable.

 

Incidentally I love this idea. I wonder if we could do it in general in Ireland.

regards, 

tl

 

 

Dublin Bus routing information – the number 16 (northside) as a proof of concept

16 Bus Route in Dublin
Draft Routing information for Number 16 route (northside section)

There is a larger version of this graphic here. Please click through as it’s probably easier to read.

I’ve been back in Dublin for 14 years now and one of the things (many things) which I have still not really gotten used to is the bus system. Dublin is a sprawling city and most of its public transport is by bus with some local rail and tram handled by DART and Luas respectively and some local suburban rail which used to be called Arrow although I think some of it may now be DART

Both Colin Broderick and Aris Venetikidis have built network maps but they haven’t, as far as I can see, caught on all that widely although both have had varying amounts of coverage. I would like to have a go at that at some stage but I want to solve a different problem.

Dublin has a lot of bus stops. Dublin Bus has numbered of all of them to support a decent real time bus information system which I find pretty handy now that I have a smartphone – but it is that number of buses which makes it difficult to map the system effectively. Additionally, a lot of those stops are very close together. I lived in Brussels where there was typically a 10 minute walk between bus stops. In Dublin, it can be less than five, even for the same route.

So setting out a route map for a typical cross city bus route in Dublin is onerous if you want to list all the stops. If, however, you take a step back and consider the primary places people might want to know about, you can cut out the number of stops you display on a route substantially. The intermediate ones still exist, but for each bus route, you can create a fairly simple linear route map. What I’ve posted above is a proof of concept of such a route map, covering the northern section of the number 16 bus route. I chose that one for fairly simple reasons – I know it very well and it’s got a number of useful landmarks along the route.

The graphic above only shows a subsection of the route – namely Dublin Airport to Ballinteer. I have a number of design considerations in place:

  • I haven’t decided for sure that the 45 degree slope for the landmarks is the final version – I may bring it up to ca 60 degrees. 
  • I wanted each terminus and each major city centre stop to stand out. Obviously DIT is not the terminus for this particular route but as it’s the last one on the proof of concept graphic, it’s getting the treatment (for now at least).
  • For stops with particular features, such as transfers onto rail or Luas, I wanted to include a graphical representation of that access using the relevant logo. I discovered in doing this that Irish Rail has a new logo which I didn’t recognise. This reduces its informational value but I am (naively, perhaps) assuming that as people become more familiar, they won’t be wondering what the funny little flag thingie is.
  • I wanted the graphic to also give some information regarding which areas the bus passed through which may be of use as well as knowing that this bus goes past Saint Patrick’s College, for example.
  • Theoretically, each route should get its own colour but Dublin Bus has a lot of routes and this may not actually provide that much useful information if there are 30-40 different routes. Mostly we use colour to identify a particular route in some of the better known transit maps (I will always know that I lived on the light blue Metro Line 13 in Paris, for example). That colour association, even as it gets complicated, is something that is easy to learn if you are starting from a small number of lines and then just adding to them. A big blast of lines together is somewhat like too much information.
  • There’s a comment about frequency. The 16 has a complex time table first thing in the morning – in fact, no bus leaves Dublin Airport before 8am based on the time table although a substantial number of them are under way from Larkhill and parts of Beaumont and Santry from about 6.20 in the morning. I’ve mixed feelings about including this sort of information for the simple reason that it’s incomplete, and yet more complete information makes the graphic less informative as it’s harder to read quickly.
  • There are a couple of things I am reconsidering visiting (this is draft one, basically) regarding the layout but before I do so, I probably need to complete the entire route out to Ballinteer. The list of suburbs may need to be reconfigured a little and the bus route number brought over to the left, for example. The GAA logo is a little too big for my liking.
  • I’ve noticed the typo. I will fix it in the next draft.
  • I should probably include the Rotunda for the Parnell Square stop and also note that the bus stops are on different sides on Parnell Square depending on whether you are travelling northbound or southbound. This affects a lot of north/south services.

The mere act of producing this has been interesting however; it’s given me more ideas for things I want to do around the bus routes in Dublin, something, which like the neutrality markings might wind up being an all consuming project for a while. There will be a second iteration of this when I have more information regarding the southern section of the route, and when I’ve made more final decisions around things like route colour and font formatting.

Feedback is welcome.

Additional Note: See work done here on Cork’s bus service: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Map-of-Cork-City-Bus-Services/137667036266836

Information sources:

Dublin Bus – No 16 Timetable and routing information. 

Analytics Club – data analytics in Dublin on a Tuesday night

I found out quite by accident a week or two ago that there were occasional data analytics meet ups in Dublin city centre so I resolved to go along to the next one and found myself downstairs in a city center bar I’d never noticed before. The evening is run under the auspices of CeADAR and the DIT data analytics course with a few blowins like myself. It was quite an interesting event. There were three talks – one on PowerPivot which may or may not be interesting to you; one on datamining Dail questions since independence and specifically a comparison between local questions and national policy questions which raised a few comments, and then one final piece on the question of public policy and big data. It was followed up briefly by a panel discussion.

What surprised me about the event is that it was quite well attended for something which I figure can be quite esoteric, until I realised it was supported by a specific data analytics course in Dublin Institute of Technology. Input from CeADAR guaranteed some presence from UCD as well.

CeADAR is quite new in Ireland – it was launched on 15 March and it’s driven pretty much by UCD with some partnership from UCC and DIT. Looking at their education page is quite interesting…I would be hoping to see more datascience courses coming on stream. I know, for example that DCU has an analytics major coming with one of their Masters courses next year.

Back with the bash on Tuesday night, they are listed on Meetup and the next one will probably be in September. If you’re interested in data analytics or data science in Dublin, it may be worth a look.

Great scientists don’t need maths, apparently.

Seriously. This from a professor emeritus in Harvard.

I speak as an authority on this subject because I myself am an extreme case.

An outlier, in other words.

I have problems with this piece, not least because in discussions about mathematical ability most people are not so worried about the lack of access to seriously high level mathematics, but the basic stuff that a) makes it easier to survive modern life without being ripped off and b) makes it easier to find higher paying jobs. But this guy is talking about the higher level stuff required to support leaps forward in science, not the every day sort of stuff.

Extreme cases are not generally applicable and if he is such a great scientist, regardless of what his field of study, he should be aware of this.

 

What Twitter should know….and better exploit

Currently I follow around 2000 people on Twitter. It varies down slightly as I do the occasional clear out to make space for new people. But Twitter has applied a top limit of around 2000 so once I hit that I run into trouble.

Which is fine – to some extent (as in it’s not, really) – it’s their site, they have to sort out the scalability and all that. But some time ago, after a raft of unsolicited promoted tweets from just one company, I blocked the relevant account. I recognise that Twitter has to find a way of monetising the service and I’m not, in principle, against the whole sponsored tweets thing provided it doesn’t become a onerous load on my feed. If one in 10 tweets was a sponsored tweet, I’d get annoyed. But I got annoyed with this one company because they are selling a service I just do not want, am not interested in and don’t care for.

They appeared in my timeline again during the week. I was not happy.

You can, to some extent, tune the advertising which Google serves you on certain products – ads can be muted and you won’t see them again. And Google’s context sensitive advertising in Gmail is generally actually very context sensitive. It’s typically appropriate. I just can’t tune the sponsored tweets that come my way, not overtly anyway.

Twitter could because twitter knows an awful lot about my interests. I have 32000+ tweets on twitter and I follow almost 2000 people. And I have a bio. And based on this, twitter could offer advertisers/users of sponsored tweets a lot more granularity in targetting their sponsored tweets.

If you read my bio, here are two key things you get that I am interested in 1) photography 2) crochet.

If you then perform an analysis of the people I follow, you will find a couple of more interesting things 1) surfing 2) kitesurfing 3) science 4) computers 5) data analysis and statistics 6) mathematics 7) certain newsmedia sites.

If you then perform an analysis of the things I tweet and things I retweet you can get a feel for even more of the things I have a slightly more than passing interest in but which haven’t turned up under my bio or my followee accounts.

With that information, you can target advertising to me a lot more effectively. In that, the right accounts get to me and I get something of value back. We both, to a certain extent, win and Twitter gets to offer an enhanced service to their sponsoring accounts. And I don’t get annoyed by tweets turning up in my time line from accounts I don’t follow (in this case absolutely don’t want to follow) while simultaneously not being allowed by Twitter to add to the accounts I do want to follow because of the limit I regularly brush up against, the 2000 follower limit.

I can’t believe that Twitter don’t know this – it’s online advertising 101 – but if they are applying it, I don’t see it yet. I imagine it is being worked on.