OK, it's time for another blatant plug, I'm afraid, and this time I'm asking for money. But it's not money for me (you are of course welcome to buy me books if you like). If, like me, you're one of those people who don't switch off the news, it may have come to your attention that life in the third world can suck pretty badly. Unlike most of us, Engineers Without Borders are doing something about this; I strongly encourage any of my half-dozen readers who can to sign up to donate £10 towards this project to fix solar panels and build clinical waste incinerators at a number of rural health clinics in Suriname. (More here on EWB's own site.)
(Of course, I'm also, completely cynically, asking you to help us test PledgeBank as a fundraising tool. Imagine us, if you like, as a bunch of heartless technocrats, exploiting others' good intentions to get some software tested for free. That's right: we're an evil dairy. But please don't let that stop you helping out.)
Sorry -- no graph this time. Also, if you didn't get the `evil dairy' reference, I should Heartily Endorse That Mitchell and Webb Sound, a splendid recent Radio 4 comedy series.
Comments
Posted by Francis Irving, Wednesday, 11 May 2005 17:46 (link):
I'm impressed you resisted linking to the M&W pledge as well!
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 13 May 2005 16:14 (link):
I hadn't even noticed it when I wrote the piece! Here's the pledge:
Go sign! It was a brilliant series.
Posted by Jon Ingram, Thursday, 12 May 2005 22:50 (link):
As there's no graph from you, have one from me. This is my attempt at a simple version of the three-way constituency battlemap shown by Peter Snow in the BBC's General Election coverage.
The picture's here:
http://img212.echo.cx/img212/1434/battlemap29ok.png
using results from
http://www.electoralcommission.gov.uk/templates/search/document.cfm/12570
As I'm sure you can see, every white dot is a constituency, and the dots are placed according to the relative amount of votes each party received. If a constituency received 100% Labour votes, for example, that would be represented by a white dot in the extreme top-left of the triangle, while a 100% Tory vote would be in the extreme top-right. As we move away from the sides, we start getting positive percentages for all three parties, until we get to the very centre, which represents 33% for each party.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Thursday, 12 May 2005 23:55 (link):
Splendid. (Or, rather, shocking that not only has Peter Snow nicked my idea, so are my readers doing! It's not, of course, an original idea.)
Here's my contribution, showing the change from 2001 to 2005 results. I have an animation of this in the works too, but I haven't found a good way to present it -- really it should be `Flash', but I've forgotten everything I knew about making `Flash' files.
Posted by Jon Ingram, Friday, 13 May 2005 05:17 (link):
It's not, of course, an original idea.
Yes, I didn't think it would be -- it's not a terribly complicated thing to do with the data. Your presentation of the data is interesting, and you're right that an animation would be useful, particularly if the results for a few elections were animated, rather than just 2001->2005. If not Flash, there's always the animated GIF route.
Posted by Jon Ingram, Friday, 20 May 2005 09:32 (link):
Continuing to plow this furrow, I've generated a density plot of the same data. Looks quite pretty, and illustrates well the fact that Lab-Con is the main battleground, with Lib-Con second, and Lab-Lib third.
Posted by Chris Lightfoot, Friday, 20 May 2005 18:51 (link):
That's cool. Have you considered a vector plot showing the average (and perhaps variance) of the swing in constituencies in each region of the plot?
Posted by Jon Ingram, Thursday, 26 May 2005 15:23 (link):
Yes, that sounds interesting. In the mean time, have an animation of the last four elections (Labour top left, Conservative top right, Lib Dems bottom). The 1992 data has some odd data points that probably need cleaning. Before this the data is hard to interpret in this form, as you have to decide what numbers to allocate to the Lib Dem tally.
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