Something else. Around the table sat his son James– the head of News Corp’s European and Asian operations – Rebekah Brooks, the chief executive of its British newspaper division News International, plus the editors of the Sun and the Times, Dominic Mohan and James Harding respectively. Meatballs were on the menu, although staff preferred not…
Read More someone has to stay in controlSo what about that Murdoch? Gordon Brown is suing, and the government has been claiming that meetings between David Cameron and Rebekah Brooks were covered by MP-constituent privilege; Tessa Jowell (for it is she!) alleges that the monitoring was going on as recently as last week. The police investigation is back on with a new…
Read More the tapesFor George Osborne read Bernie Madoff: he’ll take your money and take your job, but don’t worry – if you wait long enough, he promises you’ll get it all back from someone else. (Ed Balls, here.) Note he didn’t say “Of course, we accept the necessity of cuts, but George Osborne is really like Bernie…
Read More I thought I was following you…My only complaint about this post from Duncan Weldon is that his caveats are better than the ostensible point. The problem with arguments about the budget is that a very large chunk of the spending side is either made up of long-term capital projects, or worse, PFI-ised capital projects, which often can’t and arguably shouldn’t…
Read More Nice caveats, shame about the pointIf the former Tunisian president’s plane overflew Malta going north, that doesn’t mean he’s going to France by any means. North of Malta is…Italy. Surely not…
Read More disgraced presidents piling up?Now here’s a worthwhile Canadian initiative for you, from here. And he names the guilty men.
Read More operationalising postmodernismThis would do as a HOWTO start a war. The document, drawn up by John Williams, press adviser to the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, spells out ways to soften up the media, including “critics like the Guardian”. Under the heading Not taking the UN route, Williams wrote: “Our argument should be narrow, and put…
Read More repetition, repetition, repetitionOh yes, so the IBM ManyEyes people fixed their computer. I’ve got much more data now – I still need to do the four (key) departments that release in PDF format, and flush the existing stuff to replace the records with ones with standardised dates, but that should give you an idea. Hit the button…
Read More lobbyOdd 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 failSo 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?