So 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?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?Mark Ballard of Computer Weekly is trying to get the details of government meetings with the IT industry, and struggling. Among other things, this seems to be yet another use case for an enduring Freedom of Information Act request. It’s also one of the reasons why I like the idea of a central contacts register.…
Read More MeetingsSo, Richard Aldrich’s book on GCHQ. This looks like it’s going to be another in our occasional series of multi-part book reviews that nobody reads, as the book is nothing if not comprehensive. (It’s a mere Laundry-esque 666 pages in paperback.) Apart from being packed with good things, like paper and words, as Spike Milligan…
Read More GCHQ Review: Part 1, The World’s Most Classified Blog and Other StoriesVia Bruce Schneier’s, an interesting paper in PNAS on false positives and looking for terrorists. Even if the assumptions of profiling are valid, and the target-group really is more likely to be terrorists, it still isn’t a good policy. Because the inter-group difference in the proportion of terrorists is small relative to the absolute scarcity…
Read More three links about false positivesThere are a few details of the latest of Germany’s synthetic-aperture radar imaging satellites at the German version of ScienceBlogs, on the occasion of the latest one being launched on a Russian Dnepr rocket. Tories should be delighted, it’s a PFI. Specifically, the German government contributes the bulk of the cost through its space agency,…
Read More at last, a PFI I actually supportAnother story, but this time with real policemen – sort of. The interesting thing about the Safer Birmingham Partnership and its drive to cover Muslim areas of the city with ANPR cameras, using money from an “anti-terrorism fund”, isn’t so much the project in itself as what it reveals about the huge effort it will…
Read More parallel networksSo, I went to see Chris Morris’s takfiri flick, Four Lions. Short review – it’s desperately, barkingly hilarious. Stupidly funny. It started with the snickering. The snickering led to giggling and the giggling led to batshit honking horselaughs all night long. Perhaps too funny – one of the markers of Chris Morris’s work is that…
Read More we’re the muslimeen, creating a sceneProgress update on fixing the Vfeed. Dubai Airport has done something awful to their Web site; where once flights were organised in table rows with class names like “data-row2”, now, exactly half the flights are like that, they’ve been split between separate arrival, departure, and cargo-only pages, they only show the latest dozen or so…
Read More oiling the steel to sharpen the blade to shave the yakI recently had the opportunity to look round the Stasi’s old head office (as visitors to my photo blog will be bored beyond belief by). A couple of things – first of all, here’s something in the spirit of the last post. That – as you may be able to make out from the brass…
Read More Sunday Stasi HQ Bloggin’