Here’s an interesting sidelight on the satellites post below – “somebody” is trying to restrict access to commercial satellite imagery of the so-called “Box on the Euphrates” in Syria, the suspected nuclear reactor the Israelis blew up. And how are they doing it? They’re buying the rights and trying to use intellectual property law. Another…
Read More ASATing with lawyersVarious people asked what would happen if I excluded London and Northern Ireland from the BNP analysis. Here’s a table showing the R-squared for each factor, first for the whole data set and then excluding these two outliers. (After all, who needs statistical analysis to know those two are weird?) Factor R-Squared R-Squared Excluding NI,…
Read More Even More BNP Data…OK, so I’ve spent some time getting more data together on the correlates of BNP membership. I’ve created a table which contains the following metrics: population growth (%), change in population density (%), Gross Value Added(GVA) in 1991, 2006, change in GVA, % GVA growth, unemployment, long-term unemployment as a % of total unemployment, the…
Read More Yet More BNP Data Analysis: Does Not Compute!You will hear all kinds of people in authority say that immigration, or population growth, is causing people to turn into racists and vote BNP, either just because (the rightwing version) or because of “pressure” on public services (the Decent Left version).Therefore, they usually say, we need a stingier immigration policy. If you’re reading this,…
Read More The Swamping MythOh yes, gleeful leftie hacker tournament after the BNP did a 0.16 megarecord datafart. My effort contains absolutely no personally-identifying data; it’s made with this guy’s count by region and population data from National Statistics, to show the number of BNP activists per 100 citizens in each UK region. People kept asking for that kind…
Read More don’t compromise, visualiseHere’s one political movement struggling with the technological environment, at the Washington Monthly: Frank Luntz, speaking at a panel discussion at the Republican Governors Association yesterday, noted Barack Obama’s enormous email list. “He’s got 10 million names and our candidate doesn’t know how to use this,” Luntz said, holding up a BlackBerry. “There is a…
Read More the third decade, our moveThis looks like being the ultimate TYR event. Via Ballardian, yer man from BLDGBLOG is going to be speaking at UCL on the 26th November on Feral Cities and the Scientific Way of Warfare. Quote: At the very least, you’ll get an early preview of Antoine’s forthcoming book – in which he introduces the term…
Read More the stars are right…An unremarked-on aspect of the 1.5% interest rate cut last week. Namely, are we already living in a near-real time planned economy, as Stafford Beer foresaw? It sounds like I must be joking. But how else are we to interpret Sir Terry Leahy’s trip to see the Bank of England and the Treasury? Tesco boasts…
Read More tesco value beerAs I said here, much as I love ManyEyes, it would be drastically better if it accepted data in the same format (tab-separated columns of values) that it expects to be submitted as a form from a URL, so your visualisation could be based on a source of regularly updated information. If you can parse…
Read More technical noteSo Hazel Blears thinks blogs are terrible, rightwing, shallow, cynical, contributing only snark to the debate, no new ideas, no policy analysis, no organising. Her evidence for this consists of cites to Iain Dale and Paul Van Der Staines. Well, you can see how she got those ideas. I should, I suppose, Engage More Fully,…
Read More may the work speak for itself