First of all: the number of votes cast for the three main political parties.
Then the number of seats obtained by those votes:
Check the “Multiple Axes” box if you want the numbers.
Thanks to Michael for alerting me to Timetric.
Quote of the day
“The voting system and the electorate have botched this election. Reality, as it sometimes helpfully does, offers a metaphor for what we’ve done. In Chingford, an Independent candidate decided to do something frightfully amusing and changed his name to ‘None of the Above’. But because of the way names were presented, he appeared as ‘Above, None of the’ – at the top of the ballot.”
John Lanchester, writing in the London Review Blog.
The ‘Sage on the Stage’ challenges the idea of the sage on the stage
Nice, thoughtful, provocative TED talk by Jeff Jarvis.
Why Twitter is different
This morning’s Observer column.
One of the most intriguing and useful features in Twitter is the "retweet" facility. If you see something in your tweetstream that you think might interest others, then you can click a button to make it visible to the people who are following you. Retweeting has become so commonplace that its conventions have already been the subject of a serious study by the anthropologist Danah Boyd and her colleagues at Microsoft Research. But it turns out that retweeting is not just interesting in terms of discourse analysis; it's also the key to understanding why Twitter is a radically different form of social networking.
We know this because of a remarkable study conducted by some researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and published last week at a major academic conference…
Politics: the state of play
BBC Political Editor, Nick Robinson has this helpful summary.
No party has enough seats to win votes in parliament without the support of members of other parties.
The Conservatives are the largest party with a total of 306 seats in the Commons – which would go up to 307 — if they win the delayed election in Thirsk and Molton – until now, at least, a safe Conservative seat.
If they tried to govern alone they would, in theory, face a combined opposition of 343 MPs.
In reality it’s somewhat different. Sinn Fein won 5 seats – and they don’t take their seats in the House of Commons – so the opposition benches reduce to 338.
A Con/Lib Dem coalition would give them a total of 364 – enough to govern comfortably.
A looser arrangement in which the Lib Dems agreed not to vote against a Tory Budget or the Queen’s Speech would mean 306 or 307 Tories facing a depleted opposition of 281 (that’s 338 – 57 Lib Dems)
If a Lib Dem/Conservative deal fails, Gordon Brown will try to form a government.
If Labour and the Lib Dems joined forces – the extra 57 votes are not enough to make them the biggest force even with the support of the Northern Irish SDLP (who sat on the government benches in the last parliament) and the one new Alliance MP who is allied to the Lib Dems. Together that’s 319 votes.
With the support of the nationalists from Scotland and Wales they would reach 330.
If the DUP joined too and the independent unionist and the new Green MP this alliance would have 338 votes in the Commons.
The BBC’s Ship of Fools
Watching the BBC’s election night coverage one wondered if the Corporation’s executives had been gripped with a death wish. If ever there was a way of illustrating the Murdoch ratpack’s caricature of the BBC as an overmighty, taxpayer-featherbedded Quango, then the idea of chartering (for £30k, I understand) a Thames party barge and loading it up with drunken celebs, most of whom know zilch about politics, was a pretty good way of doing it. And the election studio, a cross between the bridge of a starship and a design-student’s diploma portfolio submission, seemingly required so much processing power that it couldn’t keep up with a simple RSS feed. All hat and no cattle, as LBJ might have said. These and other points were nicely made by Neil Midgley in his Telegraph review. Sample:
Unlike her exemplary [leaders’] debate production, Auntie did not shine on election night. Yes, it was a lovely big studio with the potential for lots of sweeping long shots, and far nicer – despite all the computer enhancement ITV could muster – than the ITN basement in Grays Inn Road. But a big chunk of the BBC’s graphics wall failed within the first five minutes, leading to a hurried close-up of Dimbleby that was no whizzier than ITV’s presentation of Alastair Stewart.
As they promised, ITV seemed faster with the results than either the BBC or Sky. Detail matters: unlike the BBC, ITV’s on-screen presentation of each constituency’s result gave us the crucial fact – the swing – from the get-go.
ITV made much better use of social media and citizen reporting, with Phil Reay-Smith getting genuine insight from bloggers Guido Fawkes and Will Straw. (Meanwhile, the BBC was on the boat with Bruce Forsyth.) As stories of voting irregularities started to dominate proceedings in the absence of concrete results, ITV had YouTube footage of frustrated voting queues in Manchester. (Meanwhile, the BBC was on the boat with Joan Collins.)
Downfall lives!
Amazing stuff from Brandon Hardesty. Now let’s see how the IP lawyers will address this challenge. Infringement of the scriptwriter’s copyright, perhaps?
It’s had over 93,000 views already.
What iPads did to one techie’s family
Apple has announced that the iPad will be on sale in the UK from May 28 and is enabling pre-ordering from next Monday (May 10). Already members of my family are eyeing me in a meaningful way. All of which makes this blog post by Chuck Hollis, Vice-President and Global Marketing CTO of EMC Corporation, such a sobering read. He relates how he bought an iPad and then left it at home for a week while he went away on a business trip.
I get home and there’s always a certain level of chaos at that time.
But there was a new theme this week.
“Who forgot to charge the iPad?”
“Hey, if you’re going to eat pizza and use the iPad, at least wipe it! How gross!”
“You already used the iPad this afternoon, it’s my turn!”.
“How do I print from this thing?” “Can we download some more games?”. “Check out this cool video”.
Tap, tap, tap.
All the PCs and laptops are basically not being used. All the Macs are not being used. All have been powered off.
Everyone in the family is waiting for their turn at the iPad.
My wife asserted her rightful place in the hierarchy later that evening, and took it upstairs to the bedroom to relax while watching TV. Tap, tap, tap. Occasionally, she showed me something interesting she found online. And smiling.
It All Flashed Through My Eyes
I don’t think I’ll be buying any more desktops going forward. I don’t think I’ll even be buying any more laptops going forward.
They’ve all been largely obsoleted (at least at my home) by a sleek $499 device that doesn’t really have any right to be called a ‘computer’ in the traditional sense.
Sure, there’s a handful of tasks that I still would prefer a real computer, but — amazingly — that list has now shrunk dramatically. In less than a week.
The members of my family immediately gravitated to the new shiny thing — no prompting, no encouragement, no migration, etc. They are drawn to it like a moth to flame.
I now have this strange love/hate relationship with Apple. And I think it won’t be long before I’m forced to make another trip back to the Apple store.
Hmmm…..
Be careful what you wish for
That adage has been much in my mind in the last 24 hours. For decades the LibDems (and the Liberals and SDP before them) have dreamed about being the king-makers who could force the two big parties to accept proportional representation.
Now Nick Clegg is a king-maker; well, sort of. I’ve been reading today’s newspapers, and they’re stuffed with contradictory advice and analysis. The Beast (i.e. the British electorate) has inadvertently given itself a taste of what Cabinetformatie (as the Dutch call it) would be like in a fairer voting system.
It looks as though all of Clegg’s options are unpalatable. So the only thing to do is to try and work out some general principles. If I were advising the LibDems, this is what I would say:
So…
Er, that’s it. My consulting rates for political advice are quite reasonable, btw.
Library of Congress drinks from Twitter firehose
When he was in Cambridge to give the second Arcadia Lecture recently, Dan Cohen mentioned that Twitter had agreed to give the Library of Congress its archive of tweets. Here’s the NYT report of that decision.
“Twitter is tens of millions of active users. There is no archive with tens of millions of diaries,” said Daniel J. Cohen, an associate professor of history at George Mason University and co-author of a 2006 book, “Digital History.” What’s more, he said, “Twitter is of the moment; it’s where people are the most honest.”
Last month, Twitter announced that it would donate its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress, and supply it with continuous updates.
Several historians said the bequest had tremendous potential. “My initial reaction was, ‘When you look at it Tweet by Tweet, it looks like junk,’ said Amy Murrell Taylor, an associate professor of history at the State University of New York, Albany. “But it could be really valuable if looked through collectively.”
Ms. Taylor is working on a book about slave runaways during the Civil War; the project involves mountains of paper documents. “I don’t have a search engine to sift through it,” she said.
The Twitter archive, which was “born digital,” as archivists say, will be easily searchable by machine — unlike family letters and diaries gathering dust in attics.
As a written record, Tweets are very close to the originating thoughts. “Most of our sources are written after the fact, mediated by memory — sometimes false memory,” Ms. Taylor said. “And newspapers are mediated by editors. Tweets take you right into the moment in a way that no other sources do. That’s what is so exciting.”
Twitter messages preserve witness accounts of an extraordinary variety of events all over the planet. “In the past, some people were able on site to write about, or sketch, as a witness to an event like the hanging of John Brown,” said William G. Thomas III, a professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “But that’s a very rare, exceptional historical record.”
Ten billion Twitter messages take up little storage space: about five terabytes of data. (A two-terabyte hard drive can be found for less than $150.)