Today’s PMQs. Mr. Jake Berry, Conservative member for Rossendale & Darwen, steps up to speak. Clearly, a question of grave import for the future of the kingdom is coming. Jake Berry (Rossendale and Darwen) (Con):Leaving home before it is light and returning from work when it is dark, hard-working families in my constituency have a…
Read More Jake Berry MP Will Say Literally Any Damn Thing The Whips Tell HimOK, so I found out why data was apparently disappearing. Or rather David Jones from ScraperWiki did. It turns out the ScraperWiki datastore works rather differently to what you might expect. I theorise this has something to do with the fact it was a key-value store before it was an SQLite database, as it tastes…
Read More A ScraperWiki snippetSo I completely forgot I needed to register for OKFN’s Open Interests Europe hackathon last weekend, which even had a lobbying track, and just round the corner from the office, too. I decided to have my own lobbying hackathon by eating pizza and caffeine pills and being misogynistic spending my weekend finishing the Lobster Project’s…
Read More A Project Lobster progress report!Everyone’s talking about the coming housing disaster again, after this Polly Toynbee column. Here’s the thread at Jamie Kenny’s in which we predicted how this would all turn out way back in July 2011, and here are the StabPrin posts from October 2010, including this valuable collection of links. Here’s some more early warning. Anyway,…
Read More A simple plan to save the world and win the electionsD1.1. State of The Art and Requirements Analysis for Hypervideo from LinkedTV Interesting! BBC and ARD researchers quietly hammering away on methods to extract the visual language of cinema into structured XML. Sadly, though, the tradition that anyone in a use case must be the most boring person in the world is upheld. Also, “Nina,…
Read More A link.Here’s a photo from a MoD-BAE Systems study into future armoured vehicles for the British Army*. OK, so we’ve got some heavy-to-medium, wheeled armoured vehicles, that are clearly battery-electric drive. They’re recharging from either wind power (on the right) or from some kind of deployable, containerised nuclear reactor (on the left – note the radhaz…
Read More it began in the time of our grandfathers, but no-one now knows whySo, that PCCSpoil blog. To begin with, it was a collection of spoiled ballots from the police commissioner elections, a large (>75%) proportion of which seemed to add the hashtags #PCCSpoil or #policespoilballot. I had the impression that this suggested a campaign of some sort. After all, why the hashtag if you weren’t planning to…
Read More Going round the country, stirring up apathyThe Rude Pundit is characteristically rude about Mitt Romney’s remark that “The president’s campaign, if you will, focused on giving targeted groups a big gift.” Rmoney wasn’t the only one – Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump said something similar on the night – but the interesting bit here is unstated. Rude points out that the…
Read More No, they actually do expect you to vote against your interestsSo I picked a fight with Tom Lee of Sunlight Labs about why a rather good piece on whether the big spenders in US politics actually achieved anything with their money didn’t have any charts. Sunlight reckons campaign money was surprisingly ineffective, and Republicans had the most of it, in a post that surely does…
Read More The smart money and the dumb money in the US elections“There’s no word for accountability in Finnish,” he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. “Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted.”
Read More Quote of note