Text Mining Historical Mass Meeting Speeches

 Posted on March 22, 2021  |  11 minutes  |  2231 words  |  

Intro The Department of Maltese at the University of Malta launched a splendid website available here, and it also spotlights some of the dissertations by its students. Two of them immediately piqued my attention, Il-kelma Maltija ta’ Eddie Fenech Adami by James Aaron Ellul and L-arti tal-kelma fid-diskorsi politiċi ta’ Duminku Mintoff (1962) by Christabelle Borg. Both dissertations included sizable appendices with political speeches that are relatively hard to come by on the web, so I got curious to see what some old school text mining can reveal. [Read More]

Making 'Tracking Malta's Vaccine Rollout'

 Posted on February 20, 2021  |  6 minutes  |  1125 words  |  

This is intended to be a companion article to this shiny app for those who are more technically oriented and want the details. Where is the data from? Originally, I was going to use OurWorldInData as a source, but then I discovered they were actually just piggybacking off a local project on GitHub which seems to be managed by the Department of Health, so I used that! The only additional field I add is the daily rate of vaccinatations, which I calculate by subtracting the day’s total from the previous day’s. [Read More]

Donkey Voting Part 2

 Posted on January 25, 2021  |  3 minutes  |  470 words  |  

I had given donkey voting an exhaustive treatment here, but Mark Anthony Sammut brought it back to light in this video. His argument for the presence of Donkey voting is essentially the lack of a uniform distribution of MP’s surnames across all the letters of the alphabet (given there are 30 Maltese letters, and 67 seats, you would expect each letter to have 2.2 seats). This distribution would make sense if surnames are evenly distributed across the alphabet… but it almost certainly isn’t. [Read More]

No, PN probably didn’t “gain” Gozo to lose it after a month

 Posted on December 13, 2020  |  4 minutes  |  821 words  |  

Whole Survey Margin of Errors Break Down in Subgroups Some casual MaltaToday readers were in a flurry over the past month and a half over the possibility that PN had not only made a sizeable dent in Labour’s lead in the 13th electoral district, but carried it completely. A new survey in early December subsequently wrote off the gains, but disappointingly seemed to play in to the narrative of a dynamic race. [Read More]

Impact of COVID19 on Air Malta's Operations

 Posted on October 1, 2020  |  13 minutes  |  2715 words  |  

Introduction I’ve wanted to analyse something airline related for a while now, but getting my hands on data that was relevant and interesting to me was challenging. Then I read this blog post and discovered the wonderful world of opensky-network.org and their REST API. The focus of this post will be to: Come up with several numerical assessments to Air Malta’s operations. Quantify the COVID-19 Pandemic’s impact on Air Malta. [Read More]

The Reading Habits of Shakespeare & Company Patrons

 Posted on July 6, 2020  |  33 minutes  |  6829 words  |  

The Literary Utopia on Paris’ Left Bank Shakespeare and Company is as legendary as bookshops get. Owner Sylvia Beach was the publisher of “Ulysses”, written by one of her patrons, James Joyce. Besides Joyce, had you visited, you might also have of run into other literary giants like Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was so fond of the shop on rue de l’Odéon in Paris’s 6th arrondissement that he visited it with militiamen during the liberation of Paris to ensure its freedom. [Read More]

Is There a Yellow Skittle Conspiracy?

 Posted on May 6, 2020  |  6 minutes  |  1129 words  |  

How fair art thou? I could never get over this nagging suspicion that my least favourite skittle colour, yellow, popped up more than the other ones. And so I did my solemn data analyst’s duty, and recorded the data… before forgetting about it for a long time. Fast forward to two whole years later, and as I was deleting some old files, I came across the spreadsheet I had been keeping. [Read More]

Data Showing the Uptime of the Electrogas Powerstation is Publicly Available

 Posted on January 7, 2020  |  1713 minutes  |  364868 words  |  

The Great Silence Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that Enemalta ran into… a slight hitch, when a wayward anchor severed a cable it was using to import around 200MW of electricity. In the candlelit silence that followed, attention shifted to the Electrogas operated Delimara 4 powerstation. Enemalta’s initial refusal to comment didn’t help, and as so often happens, facts die in a vacuum, and wild conspiracies take hold. [Read More]

Donkey Voting in Maltese General Elections

 Posted on December 7, 2019  |  13 minutes  |  2738 words  |  

“have a look at how many MPs are in parliament because of their surname” It was July 2017, and despite being finally elected as an MP, Hermann Schiavone was still willing to talk about electoral system reform to anyone who would listen. And in this case, that someone was MaltaToday’s Yannick Pace. Schiavone wanted (and presumably still does) to reform Malta’s STV system for multiple reasons, but the one we’ll discuss here today is donkey voting. [Read More]

Analysing Frasier

 Posted on November 7, 2019  |  11 minutes  |  2148 words  |  

Frasier is my favourite TV show of all time. I’ve watched the entire series many times over from start to finish. So when I found a dataset on kaggle with both episode meta-information and the scripts, I knew I had to do a write up on it. Who has the most words? Frasier is predominantly a character oriented show: nothing very exciting or spectacular happens in terms of plot, and when it does, the emphasis is on how the characters handle and react to often absurd situations. [Read More]