April 2011

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 electoral…

Read More Even more AV

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,…

Read More Even more AV

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…

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

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…

Read More lobbyists lobbying for lobbying

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…

Read More lobby: update

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…

Read More lobby: update