Swinging off a discussion at Jamie Kenny’s of climate deniers, I wonder what Jamie thinks about Steve Levine’s thesis here that China’s emerging culture of mass protest, the famous Mass-Group Incidents or MGIs, may have major and positive consequences for Chinese energy policy and therefore for the world. It’s surely time we started calling the…
Read More MGIs for cleaner skies, and Power Tool of the WeekMy lobbying project has been entered in the Open Data Challenge! Someone posted this to the MySociety list, with rather fewer than the advertised 36 hours left. I was at a wedding and didn’t read it at the time. After my partner and I had tried to invent a tap routine to the back end…
Read More meet Project LobsterBest 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…
Read More lobbyists lobbying for lobbyingAfter 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…
Read More Routine maintenanceI’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…
Read More lobby: updateI’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…
Read More lobby: updateWell, if you’re the prime minister, you’re not allowed to fight back against your enemies in case you win because Gus O’Donnell says so, as long as the enemies aren’t the right kind of enemies like Coronation Street editors and UNISON hospital porters. All clear so far? When are the Tory apologies to O’Donnell going…
Read More of course, Gauck tells me my file is probably in MoscowSo, a free, jetlagged afternoon by the pool in Palo Alto, after this experience. What to do? Obviously, hack on some code. I dragged out the lobby analyzer project and got it to actually spit out ministers, lobbyists, and MPs, with their weighted degrees in the network, onto the command line. The conclusions are dreadful…
Read More I cannot begin to theorise what may have caused such a catastrophic malfunctionSo OpenSUSE11.4 was out this week. As the Jedi said here: gah! suse is never totally easy Indeed. I thought I’d do an online upgrade, so I scheduled this to happen when I was in the office and therefore had a fast Internet link available. I applied all the remaining 11.3 updates, configured the three…
Read More Specified technical incidentThings to get out of the data in this scraper of mine: for each lobby, the monthly meeting counts, degrees in the weighted multigraph, impact factor (i.e. graph degree/meetings to give an idea of productivity), most met ministers, most met departments, topics. For each ministry, meeting counts, most met lobbies, most discussed topics. For each…
Read More Self-binding note: lobby metrics