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I just got the statements from the various people who want to be the Labour candidate for mayor of London. The good news is that candidates Christian Wolmar, Diane Abbott, and David Lammy all seem to be supporting some version of the simple plan. Wolmar wants to set up a London Housing Development Agency. Abbott…

While we’re rejecting stuff, here’s something else to reject. The notion of a progressive alliance or progressive majority involving the Lib Dems wants rejecting, badly. You might think 2010 killed it, but it stumbles on. (Before you all write at once, yes, I believed in it, but I got over it and there’s no reason…

A new piece is up at the Pol, with maps made in CartoDB. The Stamen Design basemap is lovely, and PostgreSQL is…quirky, but it’s nice to be able to do things like reduce a webmercator shape to its centroid with one function in a SELECT.

National Savings has information about the codgerbond mailshots, but wants until the 29th of May to look for an excuse.

This 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

Someone 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…

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.

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.

Last autumn, we were all arguing about Labour’s fiscal policy and to what extent it had pre-committed to sticking with Tory budget plans. This hinged on, among other things, whether they were going to exclude public sector capital investment from the numbers or include it. It looked for a while as if it was going…

The Daily Hell seems to have recruited a visualisation designer from the Liberal Democrats, going by this little effort. Why are the bars in the first one of varying thickness? Why is time represented as flowing from right to left? In the second, why is a change of 10 percentage points represented as equal to…