Even more AV

April 25, 2011 in politics

More AV comment, from a colleague: I voted “no”. Why? 1. Arrow’s theorem. Getting democracy “right” is mathematically impossible. 2. Elections are not there to select the “right” government, but to confer legitimacy on that which is elected, and to enable truly awful ones to be removed. FPTP is good enough. 3. Fiddling with the [...]

rewind to 2006

April 24, 2011 in Viktor

The log says AFRICOM wants to know what’s up with B.727 msn 22045, ex of Irbis Air and now with “Mega” of Kazakhstan. Last heard of in Shymkent in January 2010, before that in Djibouti in 2008. I’ve no new information to add.

Even more AV

April 24, 2011 in politics

OK, so I’d just about reasoned myself around to voting no. But every time I get there I run into some nightmarish turdpool of mendacity from the no campaign. I may just not be able to stomach doing anything that George Osborne, John Reid, Robert Edmiston, Dan Hodges, and “Tom” “Newton”-”Dunn” agree with. I’d abstain, [...]

Glue Labour: how you can miss out the coalition and come up in 2015!

April 24, 2011 in politics

If you were asked to write 1,572 words for a national newspaper on the role of voluntary associations in the Labour Movement, and thank the Lord neither you or I is likely to meet this fate any time soon, would you manage to mention trade unions at least once? Not if you’re Maurice Glasman. I [...]

lobbyists lobbying for lobbying

April 24, 2011 in hacker, LibDems, lobbying

Best lobby metrics (lobbylyzer? lobster, for LoBbying Social Topology ExploreR?) result yet. Today I implemented my gatekeeper vs. flakcatcher metric – it averages the edge weights of all the neighbours of a minister, and returns a ratio of the difference between this and the average weight and the difference between the minister’s weighting and the [...]

for those non-cooperative with the system

April 22, 2011 in lobbying

I was wondering what “Ingeus UK” was – it’s the 15th heaviest lobby in the kingdom with degree 0.17, just behind HSBC and ahead of GlaxoSmithKline, Microsoft, and LOCOG – but now we know.

Another lobbying thing

April 22, 2011 in lobbying

This project begins to want a name.

Routine maintenance

April 22, 2011 in hacker, lobbying, networks, politics, Python

After this post and the outstanding response to it, I’ve just been working on the lobby project’s underpinnings, specifically to backport some data cleaning from the analyser script into the original scraper, and to fix the one-edge-per-row version of the scraper. As a result I’ve had to flush the datastore and also search out some [...]

lobby: update

April 17, 2011 in hacker, networks, politics

I’m beginning to make some progress with the lobbying project. Last week I got it spitting out data; in mid-week, I optimised the process of loading the meetings from the ScraperWiki API into NetworkX. Hint: the obj_hook keyword argument in python’s json.load() function is really useful! This weekend it’s producing information about lobbies, ministers, and [...]

AV: roundup and conclusion of a sort

April 17, 2011 in politics

So I asked for your help to decide what I thought about the alternative vote. A few of you were supportive on the grounds that it was a start and it would be possible to demand further improvement later. NomadUK said..I say vote yes. It’s not great, but it greases the skids by changing the [...]