Someone wanted an evaluation of Ashcroft polling (possibly Dan Hardie). LSE‘s election forecasting project has tried to characterise the difference between their model and Ashcroft observations. They are looking at this in the opposite sense, because they have a forecasting model and Ashcroft polls offer more observations to constrain it with, but you could also…
Read More An interesting chart on Ashcroft pollsRemember that time the Conservative Party wrote to pensioners spruiking the 4% codger bonds and pretending to be an official communication from the Government? Sure ya do because I blogged it. Back then, either Rowena Mason or Patrick Wintour got the following response from a nameless “Treasury aide”, i.e. one of Osborne’s spads aka @ToryTreasury,…
Read More No, the Treasury did not “check it was FCA-compliant”OK so, we’ve had the Tories’ big idea, Right to Buy in clown shoes, denounced at the same time by the Southwark Renters’ Maoist reading group and the Confederation of British Industry. Truly, the coalition was the golden era of the harebrained scheme and the half-baked thinktank. But let’s try to keep a straight face.…
Read More so who is meant to be getting the extra £3.9bn in LHA?Why isn’t this in this? CKAN is cool and all, but it’s no use if you don’t actually keep the data in it. Scraping, scraping, scraping, always bloody well scraping.
Read More Web scraping againRemember that time Mitt Romney bought his campaign a massive IT system that completely broke down and failed utterly, because they gave all the money to their mates’ outsourcing company and did everything on the cheap, and nobody would take any responsibility for it? Now consider the possibilities of getting Grant Shapps to procure a…
Read More After the latest update the problems will be solved…Maybe it’s my Lib Dem past, but I see this post of John Lanchester’s and think: the Y-axis of that chart has an inappropriate scale for the data.
Read More Dodgy line chartLast autumn, we were all arguing about Labour’s fiscal policy and to what extent it had pre-committed to sticking with Tory budget plans. This hinged on, among other things, whether they were going to exclude public sector capital investment from the numbers or include it. It looked for a while as if it was going…
Read More Just like the Tories.Hark at Liberal Democrat Steve Webb. Where once he suggested you might take your pension pot and buy a Lamborghini, now he is having to do the rounds of the media saying “When it’s gone, it’s gone”, as my mum says. But the interesting bit is this quote: The three government-backed “guidance” services that are…
Read More Liberal Democrat Steve Webb, you had a whole year.The Daily Hell seems to have recruited a visualisation designer from the Liberal Democrats, going by this little effort. Why are the bars in the first one of varying thickness? Why is time represented as flowing from right to left? In the second, why is a change of 10 percentage points represented as equal to…
Read More TriviaJournalists. Please, please, cut one phrase out of your vocabulary. It is “He will say”. Why? Well, try “Unseasonably Mild” Wintour’s latest. The first problem here is that something given out by a political party is being repeated uncritically. We get a complete paragraph-length Cameron soundbite, plus literally all the talking points, factoid by factoid…
Read More Sources close to Alex Harrowell will say “This is a lot of cock”