So I got round to reading the original paper about automatically predicting who’s likely to be a troll. This was always likely to be fun: Defining trolls as those who get banned for trolling, a pragmatic solution if nothing else, they obtained a large corpus of comments from three high-volume sources, CNN, a gamer news…
Read More if you can’t spell this you might be a trollWhy won’t Ed Miliband commit to a deal with the SNP in advance? The explanation is incredibly simple. Here are the last three Scottish polls – Survation for the Daily Record, TNS Global, and Ipsos MORI. As expected they both show a monster LAB>SNP swing. But the interesting bit is this: there are a lot…
Read More why Ed Miliband won’t commit in advance to the SNPThis talk about distributed systems architecture may be the most yorksrantery thing ever. By Mary Poppendieck, who appears to be awesome. Contains 1960s-era telecoms switching, the Saab Gripen, shipping containers, several good books, mission command, containers in the virtualisation sense, Amazon.com infrastructure, much more. No music though. Broadcast live streaming video on Ustream
Read More most yorksranter thing everSo I was all sarcastic about Iain Martin pretending Peter Lilley foresaw the great financial crisis back in 1997. And then I found out from a comment on Simon Wren-Lewis’s blog that Lilley actually claims this himself. ” …..I was shadow Chancellor when the Bill that became the Bank of England Act 1998 was introduced.…
Read More that was meant to be satireSomeone 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 chart