Being a political scientist is not considered an exciting occupation by people who have a life, and  as party conversation topics go, electoral systems are pretty lousy. But with LibDem support somewhere in the high 20s (if the polls are to be believed), normal people start to wonder why 26% of the vote should give them 12% of the seats, while 28% of the vote for Labour would amount to just under 40% of the seats (you can fiddle with the numbers at the wonderful BBC’s election pages).

As a light-hearted follow-up to my post on the growth of the database state in the UK, here is a link to boing-boings

Well done, junior!

Continue reading “Remixes of the paranoid suspect your neighbours posters” »

Arguably, no western democracy has more surveillance cameras per citizen than the UK. I would also like to think that few European countries are collecting data on their citizens on such an Orwellian scale. In a recent report, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust has assessed 46 major government databases. Somewhat predictably, the result is devastating. Only six databases are “effective, proportionate and necessary”, 29 “have significant problems, and may be unlawful” whereas the remaining 11 are “almost certainly illegal under human rights or data protection law”.

Examples of the latter include the National DNA Database, which holds information on 2 million innocent people including 39,000 children, and (my pet hate) ONSET, a system which brings together information on children from various sources to predict which children will offend in the future. Another nightmare is the Jacqui Smith‘s dream project of a system that registers every phone call made, every email sent, and every visit to any web page.

Continue reading “Rowntree Trust Report: Britain a Database State, and not even efficient at that” »

MLwiN is one of the granddaddies of multi-level modelling software (the other being HLM).  Essentially, it is a 1990s-ish looking and sometimes quirky GUI wrapped around  an old DOS program (MLn). The one feature that set MLwiN apart in the late 1990s is point-and-click interface that allows you to build the equations for a multi-level in a stepwise fashion. The underlying command language is still slightly confusing and less than well documented, and some of the modern features (such as modelling categorical dependent variables) are implemented as external macros, which does not need to concern you unless something goes horribly wrong, which happens occassionally.

That said, MLwiN is reasonably fast, does now incorporate modern MCMC estimators, has an interface with WINBUGS and can be convinced to do most things you would possibly want to do with it.  I bought version 1.10 ca. 1998, received free upgrades to 2.02 and good support well until 2004/2005 or so.  These days, Stata, R and MPlus can all estimate multi-level models, but working with MLwiN may still be worthwhile for you (by the way, you can download the free stata2mlwin addon from UCLA academic technology to export your variables from Stata to MLwiN).

Continue reading “MLwiN 2.10: free for British Academics” »

Image via Wikipedia

Radio 4 never fails to amaze me. This morning, just three minutes before the 9 o’clock news, they interviewed David Spigelhalter. Spiegelhalter is obviously the man who gave us BUGS. But he  is also Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, and a man who can (within the 90 seconds they allocated him) explain to a lay public why a spade in knife-crime (last summer, four people were killed in the space of just one day) is not totally unlikely and does not necessarily indicate an increase in the murder rate, illustrating the idea of clustered risks in passing. He even convinced the anchor that stats is actually fun, even if you look at 170 murders per year in a population of just 7 million Londoners. I was duly impressed (you can listen here to the interview with Spiegelhalter). In fact, I was so impressed that I googled him once I reached the office and came across his website understandinguncertainty.org, which has full coverage of the London murder mystery (that is solved by modelling a Poisson distribution of the incidents).

Continue reading “David Spiegelhalter on Risk, Knife-Crime and the Probability of Being Killed in London” »

Weird, sad but apparently true: at Nottingham University, a PhD student who works on islamic terrorism and an administrator were arrested (though released without charges) because they were in possession of an al-Qaeda manual downloaded from the internet. The twist: the manual was part of an MA dissertation and had been re-submitted as part of a PhD application. Now this is clandestine. THE has the full story, and boing boing has lots of comments on it. All of the sudden, the whole point of urging students to provide proper references and go back to the sources seems rather moot.

Technorati-Tags: nottingham, university, terrorism, radicalism, islam, al-qaeda, plagiarism, uk, political, science, political science