2014

A thing called “Refined Practice” has made some charts of the first eight months of the lobbying data, here. I have two points. Point the first, their charts are force-directed bubbles, but they don’t use any network analysis, so once the force-directed algo converges, you get a succession of bubbles of varying sizes in a…

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Look what our reader Dan O’Huiginn is up to! I’ve always thought a great extension for DocumentCloud would be a plugin that generates a concordance of the documents, as it still strikes me as a big heavy way of just dumping out a lot of scanned-jpeg PDFs, which is what most people do with it.

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File under “Really Strange”: Southern Californian gangsters turn up fighting for Assad in Syria (from Borderland Beat of course). The explanation seems to be that if you’re an Armenian or indeed Syrian immigrant in LA, you’re considered Latino for purposes of street politics, and of course Armenians do have a dog in the fight. Here’s…

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This post by an American sociology prof about going to Soviet summer camp is so sweet it seems harsh and rude to point out that he is completely wrong about this: I would love for the major players in the Crimean conflict to take a short bus trip over to Artek and spend a week…

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Something we’ve needed for a while: a good hard stomp on the knuckles of all this MAGIC FACEBOOK DRONEZ FOR AFRICA nonsense. Provided. I especially like the point that in fact, mobile operators are building 3G coverage in these places right now using the exciting new technology of sticking the antenna on a pole. A…

Read More Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in money

Being a Salmagundi from the Talking-Pointes of the late Sieur Davide du Camerone, Gentleman of the Privy and Counsellier upon the Fourth Estate to his most Catholic Majesty, the late King Louis XVI An unexpectedly large forecast error in the Budget leads Finance Minister Necker to call an emergency Estates-General: We’re all in this together.…

Read More Dave from PR in the French Revolution