September 2011

Term-extraction algorithms have the disturbing property of making things sound more interesting than they really are. These are WordPress’s suggested tags for the last blog post: community organisers, multilateral agreement on investment, plymouth argyle, james purnell, crash investigation Way more fun than just another future of the Labour Party post. This is of course inherent…

Read More tagged!

OK, I’ve added hundreds more government meetings to the Lobster Project webscraper and run the analytics script. We’re up to 3,825 lobbying events between 2,725 entities, which lobster.py reports processing in 4.63 seconds. Here are two depressing findings. First of all, Francis Maude is still the fourth most lobbied minister, although his gatekeepership has dropped…

Read More the good news is that the No.1 lobby is no longer a bank…

Time for a non-Thursday music post. And again: In other “things that are good” news, I want one of these. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous…

Read More it’s not Thursday, so…

Time for a non-Thursday music post. And again: In other “things that are good” news, I want one of these. In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile’s experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous…

Read More it’s not Thursday, so…

Yadda yadda China cyberwar. I make the point that the Chinese infosec environment is characterised by chaos, there isn’t a well-defined centre of activity probably enjoying offical tolerance or more like the old Russian Business Network*, and that the great firewall is about censorship and also a sort of trade-barrier protecting the locals from competition.…

Read More Chaos as a deliberate strategy

David “I was right” Blanchflower’s Right Blog is right. On this occasion he’s right about polling results. The public apparently thinks that Osborne’s fiscal policy is bad for the economy, unfair, too fast, excessive, and is affecting their lives directly. They’re also worried about unemployment and public service cuts. Which they also think are “necessary”…

Read More Irrational policy design

Just as so much Blair era culture-page handwringing about why my kids came back from university, in hindsight, was a way of not talking about wages, student debt, and housing, people tend to lose sight of the central role of politics when they make arguments about “filter bubbles”. The original post over at Flipchart Fairytales…

Read More Boundaries. Now there’s dull for you