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Big Data Attempts To Find Meaning In 40 Years of UK Political Debate (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: International researchers have analyzed 40 years of political speeches from the UK Parliament in an effort to move the study of political theory from social science towards the quantitative analysis offered by Big Data analytics techniques. The group used Python to crunch publicly available data from theyworkforyou.com, comprising 3.7 million individual speeches. A few strange trends emerged in this initial experiment, such as the decline of 'health care' as a trending Parliamentary topic, with 'welfare' consistently on the rise, and the decrease of fervent interest in any particular topic during the more pacific years under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
"The decrease of fervent interest in any particular topic during the more pacific years under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair."
WHAT??
Brit here. I recall a few comments on the Miner's Strike, under Mrs. T. Something about the Iraq war under Tony Blair, as well.
Or does this just show how out-of-touch the 40 years of political speeches were with what people were actually concerned about?
... decrease of fervent interest in any particular topic during the more pacific years under Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.
I am trying to envision the turn of events that rendered during periods of political stability into this typo for the ages.
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Ernest Hemingway
Theres your problem.
There is nothing scientific about politics.
Politics are 100% emotion, just like the stock market and the economy.
These things could be based on sound deterministic things, but they will never be because they all depend on human interaction. You simply can not predict human behavior. Ever. You can make plenty of reasonable accurate generalizations, but there will always be enough people in that generalization who break it horribly and destroy any plans you made based on that generalization.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Prime example of GIGO
Big Data Attempts To Find Meaning In 40 Years of UK Political Debate
Good luck with that....
Have you ever watched parliament? For as long as I've ever seen it (occasionally through the years on streams), the ratio of deeply ironic statements to sincere ones would make it almost impossible to interpret systematically. Even judging the number of 'harumphs' after a statement, or forced group laughs wouldn't give you a clear clue in that audience.
It's like trying to judge violence in a group of young apes who do nothing but posture all day, only accidentally actually hitting eachother. It's all a strange mix of false outrage, forced laughter, crude imitation, lies, and accusation of lies. Things get done in a way, but not without a mountain of pagentry and indirection.
If you want signal from noise in that scenario, you're better off looking at finances, rather than speeches.
Ryan Fenton
Attempts to find Meaning in 40 Years of UK Political Debate. Good luck with that. The answer isn't even 42, it's probably 'Punch and Judy'.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
James Hacker: [reading a speech written for him] "We shall of course be reviewing a ... Bernard, this doesn't say anything.
Bernard Woolley: Oh, thank you , Prime Minister.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
The UK's youngest member of parliament had this to say after here first few weeks in the job:
"So you’re not allowed to clap like an ordinary person, but you’re allowed to bray like a donkey? I mean, see PMQs, especially the Conservative side, they’ve got this weird noise they do. It actually sounds like a drunken mob."
But there are trends, and some of these trends are predictable given the rise of technologies. For example, nowadays social media has made conventional wars between major world powers highly unlikely. Censorship only works for short-duration wars like Desert Storm before the sight of bloodied soldiers and civilians spread through the Internet and turn public opinion against the war.
Actually one of the odd rules in parliament is that you cannot (in parliament) accuse another MP of lying. You can do it outside parliament of course, which is why this rule is so dumb.
== Jez ==
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Is how the turkeys consistently vote for christmas. It seems weird that working class people would vote in the very toffs that keep them 'in their place' so to speak but it's an old tradition.
You can only vote for people on the slip and most people actually voted against the current government (they got ~37%).
I think it's one of those conventions to maintain some form of order, and it's not a good idea anyway since the accuser looks silly / hysterical.
It's more or less impossible to accuse someone of lying in the UK as you open yourself up to slander lawsuits unless you can prove malicious intent.
You seem not to realise that politics is an end-to-end demonstration of the fact that the unintended consequences will always exceed the intended ones.
The left are committed to a "fight for the right to be exploited", while the right are mainly struggling not to look like Marie Antoinette.
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you open yourself up to slander lawsuits unless you can prove malicious intent.
So we can say whatever we're like, as long as we're being malicious?
I don't think that adds up...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Maybe they can use big data to find a meaning in life.
Wouldn't performing a spectrographic analysis on the hot air coming out of these guys' mouthes reveal more quantifiable data?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
>> Even judging the number of 'harumphs' after a statement, or forced group laughs wouldn't give you a clear clue in that audience. I didn't get a harumph out of that guy!
...would be to look through 40 years of landfill. You'll get the same conclusions and will have contact with less filth.