Movie by Andrew Hudson-Smith, Digital Urban/UCL CASA

To use it:

1. Install Google Earth on your computer if you don’t already have it. It’s a desktop application, not a website.
2. Go to the Boris Bikes API and click the View live in Google Earth link. This will download a file called london-cycle-hire.kml to your computer.
3. Double-click to open the KML file in Google Earth.
4. You should see the visualisation in the 3D viewer and London Cycle Hire Bike Availability in your Places sidebar.
5. Move around the view with your mouse. It’s more interesting if you tilt the angle of view and fly between the “buildings” rather than just view it from above. Do this using the four-arrow cluster in the top-right hand of the 3D view.
6. Once a minute it’ll automatically fetch fresh live data from the API showing where bikes are available. If you open up the disclosure triangles in the Places sidebar you can see the network link icon change from green to orange and start moving when it’s fetching fresh data.
7. Right-click on London Cycle Hire Bike Availability in your Places sidebar and choose Save to My Places. This moves it out of your Temporary Places so it’ll be available the next time you open Google Earth.
8. Be kind to my server by unticking the box for this visualisation in your Places sidebar so it’s not constantly loading live data when you’re not looking at it.

How it Works

The Boris Bikes API is written in the Ruby language using the Sinatra web application framework. You can get the code here on Github.

The 3D Google Earth visualisation is essentially a geographical bar chart generator that updates itself live from the web using a feature called a network link in Google Earth.

Google Earth uses a file format called KML which is its own vocabulary of XML tags. My Ruby application uses the Ruby Builder gem to generate its XML.

The “buildings” that make up the bar chart are Polygons in KML that are placed at an altitude above the surface of the Earth according to the number of bikes currently available at that docking station. I generate a rectangular Polygon starting at the coordinates of the docking station and work clockwise using pre-set offsets of latitudes and longitudes to create the four vertices (corners) of the rectangle, like this:

The last vertex must be the same as the first to close the loop.

Each vertex is also given an altitude which is the number of bikes currently available multiplied by a constant. This gives us a rectangle floating above the ground which we then specify must be extruded down to the ground to give a solid column.

Google Earth/KML doesn’t let us label Polygons so we also add a Point feature at the same location with the description of the docking station and the number of bikes available written as text. We place this on the top of the extruded Polygon but use a style to effectively remove the Point’s icon so it’s invisible. This gives us a labelled column.

Network links work by downloading a KML file into Google Earth (the “source file”) which then pulls another KML file containing the actual place data according to certain conditions. It can do this periodically (as we do here), when the user changes their view, or when the user moves to a certain region on the Earth.

If you look at the source code for app.rb, the KML source file is generated by this section:

get '/london-cycle-hire.kml' do
  headers "Content-Disposition" => "inline",
    "Content-Type" => "application/vnd.google-earth.kml+xml"

  xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new( :indent => 2 )
  xml.instruct!
  xml.kml :xmlns => "http://earth.google.com/kml/2.0" do
    xml.Document do
      xml.name "London Cycle Hire Bike Availability"
      xml.NetworkLink do
        xml.description "London Cycle Hire Bike Availability"
        xml.Link do
          xml.href "http://" + hostname + "/stations.kml"
          xml.refreshMode "onInterval"
          xml.refreshInterval "60"
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

This tells Google Earth to pull the http://borisapi.heroku.com/stations.kml file every 60 seconds.

Currently this visualisation only shows available bikes not available docks. It could easily be modified to generate the docks instead or perhaps they could be displayed as a second “building” alongside the first in a different colour.

This geographical bar chart visualisation could be applied in countless situations, e.g. showing world cities and their populations.

At present the site has the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead’s spending data so it was of particular interest to this local radio station.

Adrian Short interviewed by Henry Kelly

You may have seen the website at http://twifakes.heroku.com/ which promises to tell you how many “fake” Twitter followers you have.

Do not authorise this website. It tweets without your permission and there’s no telling whether it may do other damage to your account.

If you’ve authorised it, here’s what to do:

1. Go to your Settings/Connections page on the Twitter website and Revoke Access for the Twifakes app.
2. Delete the tweet that Twifakes sent from your account. This will slow the spread of the site.
3. Notify Heroku that they are hosting a malicious website.
4. Notify @spam and/or @safety about the site. #Twifakes doesn’t have its own Twitter account.

In case you’re wondering, your number of “fake” followers is the number of followers you have divided by twelve. Hardcore algorithm.

Twitter is currently in the process of closing down the old Basic Authentication system which meant you had to give apps your password before they could read or write your account. Obviously this system was open to abuse, but the upside was that people were generally pretty careful about where they disclosed their password. Ironically, the new OAuth authentication system that doesn’t require you to give your password to an app is also open to abuse because people are more likely to trust it.

Twitter needs to be much clearer about what a requesting app is being authorised to do with your account (if legitimate, #Twifakes would only need read access, not write access) and be much quicker about closing malicious apps such as this.

Here’s a map I’ve made of the five crossings in the London Borough of Sutton that are under review.

Download the map data as KML for Google Earth etc.

Councillor Lester Holloway is campaigning to retain the crossing at Collingwood Road / Bushey Road as has been reported in the Sutton Guardian and on his blog.

In the BBC radio car

Today, Eric Pickles and the Department for Communities and Local Government (CLG) released their spending data for April 2009-March 2010. (My easy-to-download zip file is here.) I was interviewed by Eddie Mair on Radio 4′s PM programme about my Armchair Auditor website and software which helps people to understand how their councils and the government spends their money. Scrub forward to 17:30 for the start of the story. Thankfully I didn’t get the Paxman vs. Howard treatment.

To his credit, Mr Pickles never misses an opportunity to assert that there is an army of armchair auditors poised to descend on government spending data, pull it apart and send it back with a smile and a thoughtfully-reduced budget. Right now the truth is that we’re probably closer to being a little platoon of armchair auditors than an army, but great things come from small beginnings. There’s no point trying to change society unless you’re an optimist.

Excepting the hardcore of open data activists, most people think that 10,000-row spreadsheets of government spending data are dull and inaccessible. They’re right, of course. But you don’t have to go very far to find someone that cares passionately about government spending — whether they think it’s too much, not enough or just in the wrong places. Give those people great tools to surf their way through the froth of data, make sense of it and get into informed conversations with their neighbours and the people spending the money and you’re creating a genuine power shift from the government to the governed. By this time next year we can know more about public spending than most people in government knew about it this time last year. That’s a big deal.

All the local councils should be publishing their spending data by January. The central government departments and quangos will be doing it too. Armchair Auditor is free software. Find a Ruby developer in your area and set it up for yourself. Hack it to meet your local needs. Join the army.

If you’ve ever wanted to whistle up a pair of wheels while walking around London, now you can. Friday’s launch of the Barclays Cycle Hire scheme puts 6000 short-hire bikes at 300 docking stations within a few hundred metres of any point in the centre of the city. No matter where you are, you shouldn’t be more than a few minutes’ walk from a hire bike.

The project wisely keeps the bikes on a very short leash, charging a small flat access or membership fee and a progressively more expensive price for the time you’ve got a bike. The first half hour is free, so if you’re just hopping from A to B you can often ride without paying usage charges at all. Access costs £1 a day if you pay daily down to as little as 12p a day if you buy yearly membership. The aim is to keep the bikes coming back to the docking stations to maximise availability for riders and minimise the chances of vandalism and theft.

The bikes don’t come with locks. While some riders see this as an inconvenience — you could always carry your own — the message is don’t lock it, dock it. Given the rate of theft of bikes in central London it’s far safer in the docking station than bolted to a lamppost, no matter how good you think your lock is. If a bike gets stolen while in your charge, you’ll pick up the bill.

Along with the bikes, TfL has released some of the data behind the project, giving independent software developers the chance to build their own smartphone apps and maps. You can use these to locate the nearest docking stations and there’s even realtime data via my own Boris Bikes API so you can see whether a station has bikes available or spaces left for you to dock. It’s great that developers have risen to the challenge and Londoners have a range of great apps across various platforms to choose from. If you want to talk about the scheme there’s also an independent web forum for cycle hire users.

It isn’t all happiness and joy. Barclays’ branding of the scheme is crass and overbearing, not least given that banks and bankers don’t ride high in many Londoners’ affections. But given their £25 million contribution towards the project Barclays were always going to want a prominent role in return their money. If it weren’t for the money talking we might still be walking.

The first day saw a few glitches with overtightened brakes leading to stiff wheels, crashes on the supporting website and problems docking the bikes for a few. TfL responded sensibly by waiving everyone’s usage charges for the day — if your bike’s not docked you’re still being billed, so watch for the green light before you leave it. But overall the experience has been positive, with thousands of journeys being taken without incident and even a healthy contingent of cycle hire bikes on Friday evening’s Critical Mass ride.

Even for non-cyclists, the cycle hire scheme has brought a spinoff benefit for everyone by putting the excellent clear Legible London maps on the monolith at every docking station, allowing walkers to find their way around far more easily than before.

Hopefully the future will bring an expansion of the scheme further out of the centre with more docking stations and bikes over a wider area, but for now the ability to pick up a bike and whizz around a park or from the West End to the City without braving the buses or the Tube is a delightful and joyous privilege.

While many tip Boris Johnson as a future Tory leader and prime minister, whether he keels over tomorrow or makes it to the very top, I suspect his finest legacy will always be that London’s bikes are Boris Bikes – a spontaneous and popular rebranding that no amount of sponsorship money is going to reverse.

What a wonderful mid-summer gift to the city.

—

All photos are by Charlotte Gilhooly on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution licence.

Full Fact is an independent fact-checking organisation. We remove the spin from political statements and make it easier to see the facts and context behind the claims made by the key players in British political debate.

Our main work is to:

• Analyse, challenge and expose misleading claims
• Enable people to verify or rebut claims and campaign for improved standards

So I was interested to see how they’d tackle the controversy over Chris Taggart’s criticism of the way in which Spikes Cavell are publishing council spending data on their SpotlightOnSpend website.

Full Fact’s rigorous fact checking technique in this case involved asking a company that had come in for public criticism whether their critics were right. Spikes Cavell’s CEO Luke Spikes duly reported that their critics were misguided, leading Full Fact to come to the only obvious conclusion that his word should be plenty good enough for anyone.

Full Fact concludes:

Whilst Full Fact supports calls for greater access to local government data, bloggers and commentators do need to ensure that the clamour for transparency doesn’t obscure the facts. In this instance, it seems that the ire that has been directed at the SpotlightOnSpend website has been misplaced.

As FullFact hasn’t yet published the comment I submitted to their story outlining some fuller facts, I’ll put it here instead:

Here are some more facts for you to check:

1. The CountCulture blog which originally raised these concerns is written by Chris Taggart. Chris is a long-standing and well-respected open data developer and activist who runs one of the country’s leading open data websites, OpenlyLocal, and formally advises the government on open data policy as a member of the Local Public Data Panel.

2. As if to make the latter point any clearer, Chris is one of the people who actually defines what the government means by “transparency” and “open data”.

3. To my knowledge, no-one on the Local Public Data Panel or in the wider open data community disagrees with Chris on this matter.

4. The government’s Public Sector Transparency board has released a statement saying, “We understand that urgent measures are already taking place to rectify the problems identified by Chris [Taggart]“. The Public Sector Transparency Board is chaired by Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude and includes world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

5. Spikes Cavell is a company that has never published a single item of open data according to the government’s accepted principles and definitions.

6. To my knowledge, Spikes Cavell has never advocated any policy to increase the amount of open data released by government in the sense that the government is advocating.

7. In the case of Windsor and Maidenhead’s data, Spikes Cavell turned open data into closed data by republishing data that was free in an
unfree way.

8. The other councils for whom Spikes Cavell has published spending data are under the false impression that they have complied with the
government’s request to release their data in an open way. They have not.

9. A full list of the councils that have published their spending data is available on my Armchair Auditor website.

10. Today, this list shows only two councils that are publishing their data in a truly open and transparent way as defined by the government: The Greater London Authority and Windsor and Maidenhead. These are the councils that have both an open licence and machine-readable data.

11. Neither of those two councils are using Spikes Cavell’s Spotlight on Spend to publish their data openly, though as already mentioned above, Spikes Cavell are publishing Windsor and Maidenhead’s data separately in a closed way.

12. Windsor and Maidenhead’s data is available as open data through Armchair Auditor and OpenlyLocal. OpenlyLocal also has open data for
other councils’ spending.

Spikes Cavell has rightly been called on its practice of substituting its own definition of transparency for the one used by the government
and the open data community, thereby muddying the waters about what is expected of councils to bring about a situation in which their
finances can be best scrutinised by the public.

Please get in touch if you have any further facts about this matter to be clarified.

Keep up the good work, Full Fact. Transparency and accountability needs your unique voice.

This conversation would be funny if it weren’t so depressing.

So here we have what is supposedly one of the world’s leading technology companies launching what it calls a “magical and revolutionary” product. And what does it do? It goes and encourages developers to build twee simulacra of physical objects. How unmagical. How unrevolutionary. How dull. Apple have seriously employed top-flight designers and developers to build digital representations of address books and books and goodness knows what else that computers are designed to get rid of. And by “get rid of” I mean “eliminate as a concept” not “replace with a digital lookalike”. Now they want everyone else to do the same. No thanks. This is 2010 not 1910.

This approach is an enormous dead end that’s wrong on so many levels and plays itself out in various ways, some quite obvious, others more subtle and insidious. In a pragmatic sense, it just doesn’t work on its own terms. Digital metaphors of physical objects are full of leaky abstractions, being both capable of things that their physical counterparts are not and (surprise!) not capable of things their physical counterparts are. No-one seriously designs these metaphors to be perfect — it’s impossible. With computers being mainstream for at least twenty years I’m wondering why anyone’s still bothering at all. The desktop metaphor for graphical user interfaces was a smart-ish idea compared with the alternatives in 1984. With every year that passes it gets shot through with more and more holes. And the iPad is supposedly the device that moves on from all that. It certainly has the potential as a piece of hardware, as an OS, as a platform. So why try to limit designers’ approaches to something so decidedly retrospective?

But the real problem is much worse than some of the cheesy UI elements like page curls, as excruciating as they may be. What’s wrong with this scenario?

I go to the (virtual) bookshop and browse through the (virtual) books. I find one I like and I pay real money for it. The (virtual) book gets transferred to me and placed on my (virtual) bookshelf alongside the other (virtual) books I’ve bought and that I now have to store and organise.

Hey! It’s just like the real world!

Quite. With most of its limitations, inefficiencies and exclusions comfortingly intact. Business as usual.

Page curl and page turning is a cartoon of something that’s an artifact of pagination which is a consequence of the former necessity for long-form texts to be printed and bound and distributed as such in the physical world. So are bookshops. So is the concept of owning a book. So are bookshelves and private collections of books. And yes, I notice that the age-old tradition of handing over real money for the non-exclusive opportunity to access a particular small and pre-defined chunk of content is still going strong.

Designers: You can think of better ways of doing it than this. Numerous better ways. You could get the genius lovechild of Edward Tufte and John Pawson to redesign iBook’s UI and it’d still be a bad idea. We don’t need iBook any more than we need books. We still need ideas. We still need texts. But where they start and where they end and how we represent them and how we can explore them — that’s all up for grabs. Can we do this on the iPad? Probably. Should we try? Definitely. Does Apple want us to? Frankly, probably not.

Someone mentioned beauty. Supposedly there are 80% of people that like “functional” stuff and 20% that like “beautiful” stuff. That 20% are supposedly Apple’s customers. and the rest still use slide rules, telephone directories and Windows Mobile. I’m not going to pick apart how right or wrong that may be right now. But I’ll say this:

If beauty is making digital simulacra then we need a new aesthetic. If beauty is perpetuating not just the appearances but the cruel limitations of things past, it’s time to move on. We need a digital aesthetic that’s more than skin deep. One based on possibilities and power that continue to delight us as we use our new digital tools rather than briefly amusing us when we first encounter them. And yes, given that these are new things they should look like new things too. Get the message? If you’re not experiencing Google Search on an aesthetic level you’re not paying enough attention. I’m not talking about how it looks. I’m talking about what it can do for you. We need more of that. A whole lot more. In the short term, it’s about companies paying their bills, thriving, profiting. In the long run it’s about the entire field of computing progressing or stagnating, not the fortunes of any particular company. It’s about having an information society rather than an information technology society. You want to have something worthy of an upgrade in 2020? Step away from those horseless carriages. Don’t look back.

In short, if you love notebooks, buy a Moleskine. If you want to be a cartoonist, go and work for Pixar. If you’re confused about which way time’s running, go cyberpunk or trawl eBay for a Newton. And if you want to make a genuinely “magical and revolutionary” break with the past on the iPad platform — and I think you should — then forget about physicality and virtuality and retro computing and go and make something that not only doesn’t exist in the physical world but doesn’t exist in the digital one either. After two decades of mainstream computing we’re more than ready for something genuinely digitally native. We can stand the shock of the new. I hope that someone at Apple still understands that sometimes you’ve just got to break the rules — including your own.

“I make no apology for being a committed Christian. However, it is categorically untrue that I believe homosexuality to be an illness and I am deeply offended that The Observer has suggested otherwise. I have spent 20 years working with disturbed people who society have turned their back on and are not often supported by state agencies; drug addicts, alcoholics, the mentally ill and the homeless that I and my charitable friends in the public sector have tried to help over the years. The idea that I am prejudiced against gay people is both false and insulting.”

I do not speak for Mrs Stroud or the Conservative Party and I have no other information on this matter than what I have posted here.

Hat tip to Cardiff Blogger (@cardiff_blogger) for posting this first.

“With Labour and Plaid out of the race locally, only John Dixon and the Lib Dems can be trusted to stand up for people in our area!”

“With Labour now a spent force both locally and nationally, I believe I am the clear alternative here to Cameron’s Conservatives.”

“Remember, with Labour and Plaid out of the race here, only the Lib Dems can keep the Tories out!”

“Don’t forget. In our area, only the Liberal Democrats can stop Cameron’s Conservatives. Labour are a spent force — they don’t even have any councillors in Cardiff North!”

“The race to be Cardiff North’s next MP is set to be a close-run contest. Local Lib Dem campaigner, John Dixon, is providing a strong challenge to the Tories.”

And to top all that we get one of the Lib Dems’ customary bar charts:

Get the message? That’s just from one leaflet.

If you didn’t know better, you might be forgiven for thinking that Cardiff North is a Tory marginal seat where the Lib Dems are the main challengers and Labour are “out of the race” with no realistic prospect of winning.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Cardiff North is a Labour marginal under serious threat from the Tories. Labour have held the seat since 1997 when they took it from the Tories. John Dixon and the Lib Dems are lying to suggest otherwise.

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s look at the facts.

We all know that the Lib Dems are very fond of bar charts. I’m keen on them too. Unlike the Lib Dems, I like ones that are drawn to scale, accurately labelled and that show data relevant to the point I’m attempting to make.

First, let’s see the most recent general election result in Cardiff North:

We can see that Labour hold Cardiff North with a majority of 1,146 votes. It would take a 1.27% swing to the Tories to unseat Labour here. This seat is very marginal based on the 2005 general election results. The Lib Dems are in a distant third place with less than half the votes of Labour. Based on these results, the other parties could quite genuinely be described as “out of the race”. Catherine Taylor-Dawson standing for the Rainbow Dream Ticket polled just a single vote in 2005. Never was a deposit lost with such panache.

This bar chart looks very different from the Lib Dems’ one which, using a statistical airbrushing technique that would shame Stalin, eliminates the bar for Labour entirely and fails to show the very slender gap between Labour and the Tories. How did that happen? They cherry-picked their data not just from a convenient election but displayed it in a way that’s entirely irrelevant to how voting works in the general election.

In other words, John Dixon and the Lib Dems in Cardiff North have lied with statistics.

Here’s how they did it.

Based on recent elections, all the results show that the Tories and Labour are the two most popular parties in Cardiff North. We’ve seen the 2005 general election results above. Labour won with the Tories very close behind.

In 2007 there was an election for the Welsh Assembly. Usefully, the Welsh Assembly constituencies are the same areas as the constituencies for the UK Parliament at Westminster. Here’s how that election turned out in Cardiff North:

Once again we see the Tories and Labour as the two biggest parties by far. The Tories won this seat in the Welsh Assembly with a comfortable margin over Labour. The Lib Dems were in a distant third place. Obviously, these election results don’t help the Lib Dems’ case that they, and not Labour, are the main challengers to the Tories in Cardiff North. Which, of course, is why the Lib Dems don’t mention them.

In desperation, the Lib Dems turned to the local council elections in 2008. While Cardiff Council is a different body to the Westminster Parliament, the Lib Dems have chosen to use the council election voting patterns as a guide to the relative strength of the parties in the area. You can draw your own conclusions on the extent to which this is a valid exercise.

There are eight Cardiff Council wards in the same area as the Cardiff North Westminster constituency. They are:

• Gabalfa
• Heath
• Lisvane
• Llandaff North
• Llanishen
• Portprennau/Old St. Mellons
• Rhiwbina
• Whitchurch and Tongwynlais

Let’s have another look at their bar chart:

I’m going to label this Lib Dem effort as Chart A.

Given that I’m the kind of pedantic, dull chap that prefers their bar charts drawn to scale and with a bar for every party, I’ll redraw it properly. I’ll call this Chart B:

While my Chart B is based on exactly the same data as the Lib Dems’ Chart A, drawing it properly shows something very unusual that isn’t apparent in the Lib Dems’ own chart: Labour and Plaid Cymru don’t have any councillors in Cardiff North.

We can also see more clearly that when the correct scale is applied, the Lib Dems have fewer councillors relative to the Tories than their own bar chart would suggest. The Lib Dems’ bar chart shows them as having at least half as many councillors as the Tories. In fact, the Lib Dems have five councillors and the Tories have 13. Scale matters.

It’s also notable that there are three independent councillors. Should we infer from this that independents are more popular in Cardiff North than Labour? Hardly.

Now the Lib Dems aren’t actually trying to hide the fact that Labour don’t have any councillors here. In fact, they mention that point specifically in their leaflet to bolster their case that “Labour are a spent force locally”.

But how do we explain the anomaly between Labour having no councillors in Cardiff North, yet they hold the seat at Westminster and put in a strong second place in the Welsh Assembly elections?

That’s down to the first-past-the-post system used for the council elections. In the 2008 council elections, Labour were the second biggest party in the eight “Cardiff North” wards in terms of votes but got no councillors at all. They came in second place in six of the eight wards but won none of them. In the “winner takes all” first-past-the-post system, Labour’s strong showing across all eight wards counts for nothing as it’s not sufficiently concentrated in any ward to win them councillors.

Here is Chart C, the number of votes each party got in the eight Cardiff North wards in the 2008 council elections:

And now we’re back to the familiar story of Cardiff North: The Tories and Labour are the two biggest parties with the Lib Dems a distant third.

Chart C is the bar chart that the Lib Dems should have used but that they don’t want you to see. Unlike Charts A and B, it shows the relative strength of the vote for the parties in the Cardiff North area in a recent election. And unlike the Lib Dems’ chart, it correctly reflects the fact that the council ward boundaries within the Cardiff North area mean nothing whatsoever in a Westminster election. The number of councillors the parties have locally is an entirely inaccurate reflection of local voters’ preferences across the whole area. It is utterly disproportionate representation.

In Cardiff North, all the votes for each party across the whole constituency are added together to elect the MP. It makes no difference at all what the relative strength of the parties in each ward is. But that’s what the Lib Dems chose to show, because it’s the only set of figures that supports their entirely bogus case that Labour are weaker than the Lib Dems in Cardiff North.

Out of all the data on recent elections and all the ways of presenting that data, John Dixon and the Lib Dems in Cardiff North have chosen the one anomalous case that least represents local opinion as expressed at the ballot box and best represents something entirely untrue that they want you to believe.

That’s how to lie with statistics, Liberal Democrat style.

The Lib Dems were advocating voting tactically against both Labour and the Green Party on the entirely false claim that they “couldn’t win”. As it turned out, Labour polled much higher than the Lib Dems in London and the Greens got a single MEP, albeit on a lower vote, just like the Lib Dems. For a party that supports proportional representation and campaigns strongly against what it sees as the shortcomings of first-past-the-post, this was the most unbelievable hypocrisy.

Remember these bar charts whenever you hear the Lib Dems talk about how we need a new kind of politics. Well we certainly do — and one where the voters can at least expect the parties to be truthful about straightforward things like previous election results and how the electoral system works.

• The Straight Choice where I downloaded John Dixon’s election leaflet. You can add any leaflets you receive to this website so that all parties’ claims can be better scrutinised.
• Matthew Somerville (in a personal capacity) advised on administrative areas and boundary changes
• Cardiff Council who advised on wards and from whose website I downloaded election results

If you like this kind of thing, I recommend Darrell Huff’s classic book How to Lie with Statistics and the complementary volume by Mark Monmonier, How to Lie with Maps.