I took these photos of Berlin’s forever-delayed airport terminal this summer. It’s just turned out a few days before the latest attempt to announce an opening date that the thing is still nowhere near ready after 2000 days of delay and twelve years of construction. Meanwhile, the executives bicker, the stakeholders wrestle for power, and…
Read More What if reality was more like software? Visit to a failed smart cityRemember Red Plenty, Francis Spufford’s historical SF novel about the Soviet Union’s efforts to create a real-time planned economy using computers and the ideas of Oskar Lange and Leonid Kantorovich? Sure you do if you’re on this blog. Well, it turns out that it had a dark and twisted 1980s sequel. We already knew about…
Read More That time I was nearly burned alive by a machine-learning model and didn’t even notice for 33 yearsFrom the open newslist, I’ve been asked to reflect on the 50th anniversary of BASIC. This came at the same time I read this post on the Light Table blog. I think Jamie Brandon has a point about the distinction between an evaluate-or-die and an edit-and-continue model of computing. He’s also right about the deployment…
Read More Basicer BasicVoIP engineer, Linux developer ( Asterisk, 2+ years, Perl, MySQL) ESSEX BASED – Small but growing hosted VoIP provider requiring experienced engineer to join our team. Looking for a team player who is keen to be involved in new ideas. The successful candidate is required to have: -2+ years of VoIP (Asterisk, SER/Kamailio), incl. experience…
Read More From the economy (and asterisk-biz)My 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 LobsterSo it was OpenTech weekend. I wasn’t presenting anything (although I’m kicking myself for not having done a talk on Tropo and Phono) but of course I was there. This year’s was, I think, a bit better than last year’s – the schedule filled up late on, and there were a couple of really good…
Read More OpenTech washup, and an amended resultThings 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 metricsSo I scraped the government meetings data and rescraped it as one-edge-per-row. And then, obviously enough, I tidied it up in a spreadsheet and threw it at ManyEyes as a proof-of-concept. Unfortunately, IBM’s otherwise great web site is broken, so although it will preview the network diagram, it fails to actually publish it to the…
Read More Exactly what is Communication Strategy & Management Ltd?This has me thinking one thing – TheyWorkForYou needs to integrate the text-mining tool researchers used to estimate the point at which Agatha Christie’s Alzheimer’s disease set in by analysing her books. We could call it WhatHaveTheyForgotten? Or perhaps HowDrunkIsYourMP? Jakob Whitfield pointed me to the original paper, here. It doesn’t seem that complicated, although…
Read More the House of Lords is not just stranger than you think..So I was moaning about the Government and the release of lists of meetings with external organisations. Well, what about some action? I’ve written a scraper that aggregates all the existing data and sticks it in a sinister database. At the moment, the Cabinet Office, DEFRA, and the Scottish Office have coughed up the files…
Read More so you want to know who’s lobbying?