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 lobbysphereFollowing up on this post, I get e-mail from Matthew Turner, who points to an explanation. Communications & Strategy Management Ltd. does indeed have a web site of sorts, at csm-limited.com. It appears to be a political consulting/lobbying firm that does the Tories’ demographics/voter-database work, which basically consists of the Richard Murphy mentioned in the…
Read More CSM: a useful tip-offWell, 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 laterVia this Wired piece, I see that the US Special Forces are giving up on the various “Land Warrior” projects to load down soldiers with specialised electronic gear – some readers may remember the BBC documentary on one of MOD’s efforts in this line and the image of a file of soldiers attempting to move…
Read More Better procurementIt’s not Thursday, so it must be time for non-Thursday music link. You know the rules – only covers or remixes are acceptable. Here’s DatA’s mix of Danger’s 19H11:
Read More not the Thursday music linkI don’t quite know what to make of this: Q What other sites, remember any particular internet sites you looked at? A When I was doing research about MPs, I looked at one called theyworkforyou.com and I think another one was called publicwhips [publicwhip.org.uk]. Q So, have you carried out any research to … about…
Read More Sometimes, FaxYourMP Just Isn’t EnoughSo 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?This has me thinking one thing – TheyWorkForYou needs to integrate the text-mining tool researchers used to estimate the point at which Agatha Christie’s Alzheimer’s disease set in by analysing her books. We could call it WhatHaveTheyForgotten? Or perhaps HowDrunkIsYourMP? Jakob Whitfield pointed me to the original paper, here. It doesn’t seem that complicated, although…
Read More the House of Lords is not just stranger than you think..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?Remember this post from back in September, 2005? (And what a fine month that was.) A Lebanese court has sentenced several people involved to terms of imprisonment, including highly dubious aviation identity Imad Saba and two of his managers. The aircraft captain, who survived, and Saba’s representative, who also survived after haranguing the other pilot…
Read More loose ends tied up