2nd Post: Population Density in Bangkok

I want to continue the series of my post about the population of people in Bangkok, Thailand. Last time, I looked at the total number of people within different Khwangs (which is a finer division than districts). It was also the last post that we mentioned a possible misunderstanding from the previous plot because of the different in areas for each region which are vastly different. Therefore, we should look into the population density instead of the total number of population for each Khwang. I used the 'shape_area' that is calculated within the data file for the information about the area, but there is no obvious information about the unit of the area, so the number of population density, presented here, will not give a much insight into the actual number. However, the relationship between different region for the population density is still valid and required further discussion to make sense out of it.

Where do People Live in Bangkok?

Bangkok, the capitol of Thailand, is the center of everything that you can think of about one country. It is the location for the Grand Palace where the King lives, a large financial distinct in the center of Bangkok, several markets and shopping malls for everyone to buy something, and hundred of Buddhist temples scattering around Bangkok. The Siam Paragon (สยามพารากอน)—a massive shopping complex, movie theater and aquarium in Bangkok–often ranked the most-Instagrammed places for several years. And we also said that Bangkok is the first step to come to South-East Asia because of our enormous airport, Suvarnabhumi Airport.

But where do people actually live in Bangkok? We often saw an ordinary scene of bad traffic in the morning when people are rushing to go to work from different places, students are trying to get to school before 8 am and locals are opening up their stores for another day. Have you ever wondered where do they live? And how far they have to drive to come to work or study in the center of the city?

As a picture is worth a thousand words, I would say that a map is worth a thousand picture. But I could not find any online map showing the details of population of people who live in Bangkok, so I decided to make my own. Fortunately, it is not too difficult to find this data online. Specially, I found the data for the boundary of different khwaengs (แขวง)–an administrative subdivision used in the 50 distrincts of Bangkok and also population within each khwaeng from the Ministry of Transport of Thailand (MOT). In this map, I showed the population for different khwaengs in Bangkok. You could see where people tend to live in Bangkok. I also put in some public transportation like subway train and express ways to see whether there is a correlation between the number of available modes of transit and the population of people.

Which Region do you live in Bangkok?

If you live in Bangkok, you might have heard that Bangkok is divided into 3 main regions based on the location of each district. If you are not sure which region you actually live, here is the list of all 50 districts with its region (the data is from a Pantip forum).

1) Inner City (เขตชั้นใน - blue) including 21 districts: PHRA NAKHON (พระนคร), POM PRAP SATTRU PHAI (ป้อมปราบศัตรูพ่าย), SAMPHANTHAWONG (สัมพันธวงศ์), PATHUM WAN (ปทุมวัน), BANG RAK (บางรัก), YAN NAWA (ยานนาวา), SATHON (สาทร), BANG KHO LAEM (บางคอแหลม), DUSIT (ดุสิต), BANG SUE (บางซื่อ), PHAYA THAI (พญาไท), RATCHATHEWI (ราชเทวี), ห้วยขวาง (HUAI KHWANG), KHLONG TOEI (คลองเตย), CHATUCHAK (จตุจักร), ธนบุรี (THON BURI), KHLONG SAN (คลองสาน), BANGKOK NOI (บางกอกน้อย), BANGKOK YAI (บางกอกใหญ่), DIN DAENG (ดินแดง), WATTHANA (วัฒนา).

Summary of where I visited during my two months in Tokyo and nearby location.

Once you have a chance to live in one city for two months, you will have visited so many places around the city that you might not remember them all. I am also one of those people. However, there are at least two of my friends who asked me for the recommendations for places to stay and where to visit in Tokyo once they knew that I lived there for two months. So, I thought it is a good idea to write down a summary for places that I have visited so that other people will be able to follow some of these places that I found as well. I would say that this will easily be the longest post that I have ever written so far on this blog. Feel free to skip around and find only stuffs that you are interested in. Here is the list of places that I like about Tokyo.

Place to Stay
Flaxstayinn Iidabashi: The hotel is very close to the city, and it was where I lived while I had my two-month internship in Japan. The location is good too since it’s in the middle of Tokyo and lots of subway lines went through there.

Flexstayinn Higashijujo: Here is the place where my mom live when she visited Tokyo since Flaxstayinn IIdabashi was full.

Place to go
Shinjuku: The biggest subway station in Tokyo with lots of malls and business area. Great place to get food and shopping.
      - Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building: You can go on top of this tall building for free to get the good view of Tokyo. On the nice day, you should be able to see Fuji Mountain as well.

View looking at Tokyo Tower from the top of Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building which you can go for free.

      - MK buffet: Thai famous hotpot restaurant that also has a branch in Tokyo. Good place for me since I haven’t been back to Bangkok for awhile.

Books about US Politics: Network Visualization

Network of books about US politics with its frequent copurchasing of books by the same buyer.

Now, I am working on the project at the Knowledge Lab about books and its political spectrum from conservative to liberal. And I found this publicly available dataset online, so I think it would be good for me to try to visualize this network and see the relationship between books and its copurchase.

I got this dataset from Prof. Mark Newman's personal website page of Network data (If you are interested, you can check his website as well.) He is a physics professor at University of Michigan, conducting research on the structure and function of social and information networks. According to Prof. Newmann's website, this dataset contains

A network of books about US politics published around the time of the 2004 presidential election and sold by the online bookseller Amazon.com. Edges between books represent frequent copurchasing of books by the same buyers. The network was compiled by V. Krebs and is unpublished.