Ollie Ballinger Profile Banner
Ollie Ballinger Profile
Ollie Ballinger

@oballinger

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Lecturer in geocomputation @CASAUCL . PhD from @ODID_QEH . @Bellingcat tech fellow. Big fan of satellites.

London, UK
Joined June 2011
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
1 year
New investigation i've been working on for a while for @bellingcat , identifying almost 180 ghost ships loading grain at a sanctioned port in occupied Ukraine. This potentially ammounts to millions of tons of illicitly exported grain.
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@bellingcat
Bellingcat
1 year
New: Bellingcat has been given access to over 140 satellite images showing activity at a Crimean shipping terminal that some reports have claimed has been enabling the transportation of stolen Ukrainian grain by Russia.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Turns out lots of missile defense radars interfere with open source satellite imagery when they're turned on. I built a tool that lets anyone monitor when and where these radars are deployed.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
11 months
Absolutely apocalyptic scenes of bombardment in #Gaza visible from space yesterday.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
@washingtonpost cars so vast they're visible from space
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Started at @CASAUCL this week as a lecturer in geocomputation! Excited to officially be a Map Guy
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
1 year
Ships are required by law to broadcast their poisition and identity via the Automatic Identification System. In the image above, only four ships had their AIS turned on. To get around this, i built a tool that uses radar satellite imagery to identify ships
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
I built a tool to conduct damage assessment in Turkey: Worked with an amazing team the Economist to provide analysis for the story below. It uses an algorithm i've been developing to detect persistent changes in Sentinel-1 imagery.
@TheEconomist
The Economist
2 years
In Kahramanmaras, a Turkish city caught between the two epicentres of the quakes, districts with many tall buildings were particularly vulnerable
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
1 year
Just draw a box over an area of interest, and it will show you the dates a ship was present (and even estimate the length). Here's a fun one where you can spot the sinking of the Russian cruiser Moskva, which used to be docked in Sevastopol
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
1 year
As always, massive thank you to @EoghanMacguire who basically wrote both articles and @obtusatum who made sure the code works!
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Did some more analysis for @TheEconomist , this time doing damage detection across Ukraine on the anniversary of the war. Again, here is an interactive tool allowing users to explore destroyed buildings across the entire country:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
10 months
I’ll be presenting at this! Come along
@bellingcat
Bellingcat
10 months
Want to learn how to carry out Bellingcat-style research? We're hosting an in-person workshop in London on November 20th-24th. Find the details and how to sign up here:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
shout out to the OG @HarelDan for making the discovery this tool is based on!
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Now have access to 3 sq meters of screen space. Look upon my chrome tabs ye mighty and despair
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
How has #Lockdown in #London impacted mobility? I made some timelapses using anonymized mobile phone data from @Mapbox showing the massive drop in movement as the first lockdown was put in place:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
1 year
For those interested in the #Turkeyelections2023 , i've got 10 years' worth of ballot-box level election results i scraped from YSK, geocoded, and visualized here: @canokar @DAcemogluMIT @ragipsoylu
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
just finished my second week of teaching online not realizing that i have a bookmark called "chicks" with a webcam icon next to it. How do i subtly explain next class that this is a live stream of my chickens?
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
1 year
Had a blast presenting on open source climate data for environmental investigations with @wammezz at #ijf2023 ! You can watch the full workshop here:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
A project I’ve been working on for a while is out now as a CSAE working paper! It explores the relationship between droughts, irrigation, and insurgency in Southeastern Turkey. 1/11
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Also as always massive thanks to @EoghanMacguire for making this intelligible
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Been working on this one with @wammezz for a while now, finally out in @bellingcat ! We use open source data and tools to identify major sources of pollution in Iraq. Spoiler: there are a lot of them.
@bellingcat
Bellingcat
3 years
Iraq has huge oil reserves, but it has also been blighted by rapidly declining air quality & oil pollution in recent years How can open source tools help us monitor these issues & pinpoint who is responsible for pollution? New from @wammezz & @oballinger
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Just got back from @glastonbury , completely awestruck by the fact that they just build a city of 210,000 people in a field over the course of a month. Slept, showered, and headed over to @planet to make a timelapse.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Recently got 209 old @NatGeo magazines spanning 1972-2000 (62% complete). Spent last weekend sorting/cleaning/taking out the beautiful old maps
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Neat!
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
If anyone's bored and wants to spot Russian military hardware on the Ukrainian border there are a bunch of interesting signals in 2021 (red dotted lines):
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Very good to hear BP is looking into carbon offsetting at #COP26 ! Let's have a look at what they're already doing for the planet in one of their largest production countries, Iraq
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
With #Election2020 tomorrow, we're about to be bombarded with very bad maps. Here's a thread on why most election maps are misleading, and how satellite images of the earth taken at night can help fix them.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
11 months
New paper out with @wammezz in the International Review of the Red Cross! We look at how the growth in computational power and open-access data can be leveraged to protect the enviornment in conflict zones.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
this is a reAL FIGURE PUBLISHED IN NATURE. The article is actually very good but my god i didnt know we were allowed to use the chad/virgin meme template for research purposes
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Live leaderboard in full effect. it's a dead heat #casatreasurehunt2022 @CASAUCL
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Had a shift until 8pm yesterday administering the Oxford #AstraZeneca vaccine. It is perfectly effective and safe! How safe?
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
What the heck is this beam on May 3rd right next to the Azovstal plant in Mariupol? (47.114804, 37.59192) visible in @planet imagery taken at 08:20 (but not at 08:13).
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
40 cases of blood clots in 17 million people who received the vaccine corresponds to odds of 1 in 425,000. The image below has 424,999 blue pixels and one red pixel. Before worrying about the odds of randomly picking the red pixel, can you even find it?
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
11 months
The epicenter of the explosion appears to be almost directly on top of the Salah Al-Din road, the main evacuation route.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
A reminder that ALL @googleearth engine app source code is publicly accessible, whether or not you publish the code itself. Good to keep in mind as people build OSINT tools/projects on Ukraine.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Great combination of our remote sensing work with the voices of communities affected by flaring in Basra
@Independent
The Independent
3 years
How oil fields are poisoning Iraq | @Beltrew
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
@DLeonhardt virtually every house candidate that supported M4A won, and vice versa. This is incredibly disingenuous reporting.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
@JackDetsch @EliotHiggins will be fun to spot it when it arrives. Looks like Poland has turned on a patriot battery near the border with Ukraine, my best guess is that it's at the Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport ;
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
5 years
I urge everyone to go through the state department’s bizarre Instagram feed, which has been posting extremely combative content about Iran non-stop for the past three years
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Made a sick gif for the course i'm teaching this fall to illustrate the The Central Limit Theorem. I use individual-level U.S. income data as the "population" (i know. shh).
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
@airwars @EliotHiggins @CJTFOIR here's what 259 OIR strikes in Raqqa looks like
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
Everyone knows that regular #election maps are full of huge empty precincts that visually overstate rural vote shares. Here's how the 2016 map would change if we only displayed the vote shares of populated areas:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
11 months
Planes appear as red, green, and blue dots in satellite imagery because of slight differences in the timing of the imaging of each band. The plane is heading around 70 degrees north.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
One thing to watch for tomorrow is how #BidenHarris2020 fare relative to Hillary in these suburban areas early on. I wrote full sentences about this here: You can play around with the maps yourself here:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Interesting find of the day: the Kanarya neighbourhood of #Istanbul is conspicuously missing from google street view at exactly the polygon boundary for the neighbourhood. Wonder why?
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
Journalists saw the precinct maps (blue coasts, red heartland) and assumed that Trump won thanks to rural voters. It took years for this to be debunked and for people to realize that his main base of support is suburban voters. This is clear in Populated Area Voteshare maps:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Methodology paper is currently under blind peer review for a conference but will share ASAP! Also caveats: accuracy will improve as more imagery becomes available; accuracy for areas with less coverage (northern syria) probably lower than e.g. kahramanmaras
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
Lets take a closer look at what's going on using Dallas as an example. The precinct map makes it look like #Trump won on the basis of rural votes. When we filter voteshare using nighttime lights, we see that Trump's "rural base" is actually suburban.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
Hey @OxfordUnion remember when you had 200 cops beat up students because you wanted to wear tuxedos and Challenge him in the Marketplace of Ideas?
@DrEricDing
Eric Feigl-Ding
4 years
WHAT THE HOLY F*CK?! Steve Bannon calls for the ***beheading*** of Dr Fauci and FBI Director Wray as a warning to federal workers. This video is real. Captured by @peltzmadeline .
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
1995 issue on the “Information Revolution” foretells the horrors of the zoom meeting and google doc
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Some gems: the last map of the Soviet Union (March 1990), and the first map of “Russia and the Newly Independent Nations of the Former Soviet Union” (March 1993). Gorgeous use of transverse polyconic projection
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
Built a rough tool to assess damage in #Beirut : source code below; commits/comments welcome
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Air quality in Iraq is generally abysmal-- major cities constantly blanketed by pollution from flares operated by multinational oil companies:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
5 years
In case you think your vote doesn’t matter today consider that Kensington flipped by 20 VOTES LAST TIME
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Geopolitical analysis from my Turkish mom (her side of the family lives on the Bosporus). We used to wait for Russian navy ships/subs to pass by before jumping in to swim, they made the biggest waves!
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
11 months
Another interesting detail is these three dots which are probably an IAF fighter jet in the air over the location:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
thanks to @AinslieJstone @Sondreus etc. for their amazing work on this article!
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
@sdbernard You can do really cool stuff using the blender-OSM plugin! I used it about this time last year to model the Beirut explosion:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
Similar trend in Nevada, where the precinct map makes it look like a Trump landslide even though Hillary actually won the state. Populated Area Voteshare shows that the whole state is mostly empty, and the real battlegrounds were Reno and Vegas
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Spooky find of the day-- the defacto standard benchmark dataset for facial recognition studies is full of junk. Working on a paper involving clustering faces across images and was getting weird accuracy statistics...
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
11 months
Want to monitor air pollution from gas flaring in iraq? Detect rare earth mining in Myanmar using AI? Identify oil spills in Northern Syria from space? We run through the data sources and methods you'll need. All open-source.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
To answer this question, I collect data on topographical and climatic factors, nighttime lights, infrastructure, tribal control, >3m ballot-box level election results, conflict incidence and insurgent recruitment, and measure irrigation using satellite imagery: 4/11
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Likely geolocation of last week's #Russia - #Belarus training exercises: RIT picked up two radar signatures in the West of Belarus, both on Feb 14. Offensive military radar systems were a key component of the 2014 war in #Ukraine . May be worth keeping an eye on Belarus. 1/8
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Massive thank you to my supervisor @AdeelMalikOx for his help on this over the years!
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
For each histogram, I take 10,000 samples of size n from the "population" and plot the distribution of sample means. Even though the underlying population distribution is very skewed, as sample sizes increase the distribution of sample means tends towards the normal distribution!
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
Broke: aliens built the pyramids Woke: aliens invented WGS84
@davenewworld_2
Fifty Shades of Whey
4 years
The exact coordinate for the Pyramid of Giza is 29.9792458°N and the speed of light is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. Aliens or time travelers or coincidence?
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
plt.imshow(KingsCross, cmap=“magma”)
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
Whats going on here? Using the fact that populated areas are lit up at night, I isolated these areas using nighttime satellite imagery of the earth. More people=more light. This is similar to @kennethfield 's dasymetric map in @NYMag , but retains important spatial info
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
@ArunFrey @pengzell @MarkDVerhagen When’s the album dropping??
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
If #Beirut explosion was caused by 2750 tons of ammonium nitrate, it was probably equivalent to between 1.2 and 2.2 kilotons of TNT. ~7-14% the size of Hiroshima
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
Oxford, "world leader in the fight against climate change", boldly divests from fossil fuels, putting people and planet before profi-- wait a minute
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Took a panorama of the March yesterday. @UCU as far as the eye can see ❤️ #UCUrising
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
Stunning picture from the August 1992 issue on Kurds in which Christopher Hitchens spends three months in the mountains interviewing Öcalan, Barzani, and Talabani.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
5 years
400,000 railway union workers (and black bloc) in the streets of Paris today protesting Macron’s pension cuts #manifestation9janvier #reformedesretraites
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
With another round of @ucu strikes coming up next week, a reminder from the ghost of Christmas future about what happens when academic labor isn’t organised and casualisation is allowed to go unchecked
@EricDirnbach
Eric Dirnbach ⁉️
2 years
How is this real? "The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA seeks applications for an Assistant Adjunct Professor on a without salary basis. Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position."
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
@jstnbraaten @ImageMagick @GoogleColab @gena_d actually wrote an amazing package that adds timestamps directly in ee! (‘Users/gena/packages:text’) highly recommend
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
An important caveat: this effect is wiped out in areas with highly unequal land tenure. Areas such as Batman actually see *increased* conflict following irrigation, as rival Kurdish clans compete over a new source of rents 10/11
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
big shoutouts to @EoghanMacguire for somehow turning this into a coherent article, @gena_d for the awesome date counter module in @googleearth engine, and @sdbernard for documenting his @FT wildfire smoke map which inspired the SO2 figure!
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
10 months
Come work with us!!
@NeaveOClery
Neave O'Clery
10 months
Are you an experienced researcher in spatial data science (broadly defined) with exceptional organisational skills? We have a grade 8 fixed term lecturer opening @CASAUCL to run the dissertation module with guidance from me. Apply by 26 Nov/start ASAP:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
lmfao i used the twitter API to download tweets containing the N-word in the past 10 days and surprise surprise!! Number of N-word containing tweets per hour increased >10x since elon tweeted "the bird is freed"
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@elonmusk
Elon Musk
2 years
the bird is freed
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
10 months
@trbrtc In case any are interested in more advanced satellite imagery analysis!
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
5 years
@CDCgov i believe i have made an important discovery
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
If LaTex error messages were more informative we would have cured cancer by now.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
5 years
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
Here's an optical timelapse of flares west of the city
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
More caveats: Is industrial monoculture farming sustainable? Is flooding villages and heritage sites good? Can the PKK simply be irrigated away? No. Is shielding Kurdish farmers from drought a better strategy to win hearts and minds than setting villages on fire? Probably. 11/11
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
5 years
Buttigieg won more counties in Texas than @ewarren .
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
1 year
@auonsson @ElsevierConnect Zotero is open source and imo wayyy Better than mendeley ever was!
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
@wammezz I made a GEE app a while back that puts VIIRS/S2 IR/S2 NC together to spot/verify burning wells: . may be of interest! Here's the full blog post about IS attacks on oil infrastructure:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
I estimate the impact of irrigation on conflict using two sets of models; a cross-sectional instrumental variables approach exploiting exogenous topographic variation in the placement of irrigation schemes, and spatial panel models that rely on the timing of irrigation. 5/11
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
3 years
@MapMakinMeyers been looking through your open data catalogue, amazing work! I've got some village-level shapefiles for Pakistan kicking about if you want em:
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
@CarmenCabArn The key is to run at least 15 minutes over time. Hold them hostage.
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
2 years
is halal
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@oballinger
Ollie Ballinger
4 years
@a_vallay Bad vobs
@peterdaou
Peter Daou
4 years
OBAMA DEFEATS TRUMP On deportation numbers. (via @jacobsoboroff @kishineff )
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