November 2010

Odd thought, working on NetworkX visualisations of lobbying activity. So much of whether the finished image is any use or not is an aesthetic decision, nothing to do with the actual graph metrics in any formal or programmatic way. Randomly fiddle with the scaling factor, or increase the multiplier you apply to the nodes’ link…

Read More fail

I wrote about this piece about brewing beer in southern Sudan, and incidentally creating a power station and a water works and a tiny industrial working class. Well, SAB-Miller did a scenario-planning exercise about this sort of thing and came up with some truly odd answers. In the worst-case scenario: a market with limited access…

Read More le bateau ivre, port of call: Mogadishu

So the government thinks this is clever. They also think it constitutes a “searchable online database”. It is not searchable, nor is it a database. It is a collection of links to department web sites, some of which actually lead to useful documents, some of which lead to utterly pointless intermediary pages, some of which…

Read More killing data.gov.uk, and thinking aloud about mapping the lobbysphere

Well, this looks pretty ugly. I have a question. We know that unofficial, non-doctrinal training material was being circulated around the joint services intelligence centre in Chicksands in 2003-2005 – there’s an interesting quote about it in the Guardian piece here: Any public inquiry into the activities of the JFIT would be expected to examine…

Read More I didn’t think I’d still be blogging this six years later