Notes on Rereading Don Quixote

 Posted on July 25, 2019  |  10 minutes  |  2064 words  |  

I had read Don Quixote back when I was 17, and never really thought much about it at the time. I knew it wasn’t short on accolades, like for instance being voted as the best book of all time by 100 prominent authors in 2002, but there always seemed to be more exciting and relevant modern books. Then a few months ago I found myself watching Terry Gillam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and started feeling that I had missed something important along the way. [Read More]

Spend and Votes in the 2019 MEP Election

 Posted on July 23, 2019  |  11 minutes  |  2331 words  |  

The role of money in shaping political outcomes is a perennial question. In the United States for instance, the candidates that spend the most win 90% of the time. Thanks to this fantastic Times of Malta article, we have an accurate picture of the spend of the 2019 MEP Candidates. So I put these values in a table, together with the 1st count votes of each candidate, the party, Facebook likes as of 17th July (if I had the foresight, likes on the day before the election would have of been better), whether the candidate is an incumbent, and the spend on social media that my old University friend David Hudson published in this article. [Read More]

What are the MEP election polls indicating?

 Posted on May 21, 2019  |  9 minutes  |  1877 words  |  

Malta is one of the more enthusiastic EU countries when it comes to MEP elections, with only Belgium and Luxembourg managing a higher turnout in 2014. Besides determining EU and local council level representation, this election will also serve as the first test by popular trial of Adrian Delia as PN leader. How Things Stand To build an adequate polling tracker you need an abundance of high quality polling. [Read More]

Classifying Land Type from Satellite Imagery

 Posted on April 15, 2019  |  8 minutes  |  1524 words  |  

Introduction: Can we Classify Land Types using R? A few weeks ago I was looking into what sort of statistics exist on changing land types. I couldn’t find much else besides the CORINE land cover program, which is updated every 6 years. At the same time I stumbled across a fantastic book on using R for just this sort of analysis. [Read More]

What Can We Learn From Maltese Property Listings?

 Posted on March 20, 2019  |  14 minutes  |  2830 words  |  

Introduction I suppose a defining feature of being in your mid twenties is that you find progressively more of your small talk having to do with properties: how big they should be, which floor negates the value added by a lift, and even, when alternate conversation seems especially hard to conjure, the benefits of using one type of grout as opposed to another. Often during such conversations, I found myself wondering how much value can be extracted by an in-depth analysis. [Read More]

How And What Local Politicians Tweet

 Posted on November 13, 2018  |  9 minutes  |  1847 words  |  Charles Mercieca

Introduction: Political Tweets Politics has always been concerned with using any available method of mass media to disseminate its message, and social media is no exception. In Malta, the most popular social media sites, by share of their usage are, according to a May 2018 Misco survey: Facebook (87% of the population) Google+ (50%) YouTube (46%) Instagram (24%) Twitter (12%) I’ve yet to come across anyone who actually uses Google+ regularly, so those answers are probably people who just have an account. [Read More]

Text Mining Local News (Part 2)

 Posted on October 28, 2018  |  3 minutes  |  581 words  |  Charles Mercieca

Taking it one step past Part 1: But what’s really in the news? Besides answering questions like the frequency of how much individual publishers post, what distinct word or word pairs they write most about and the sentiment of their writing, text mining allows us to go one step further. If we set off from the starting point that each news article is a mixture of topics, and that each topic is in turn a mixture of words, we can measure the relative proportion in coverage one publisher devoted to topic A versus topic B. [Read More]

Text Mining Local News (Part 1)

 Posted on September 24, 2018  |  13 minutes  |  2769 words  |  Charles Mercieca

Introduction: Why Text Mine the Local News? Media ‘slant’ is a fascinating topic. Ask anyone who reads the news, and they’ll probably have a reason for choosing one media source over another. Invariably, that reason often turns out to be because, according to them, the one they read isn’t biased and all the others are. The starting point of this post was an attempt to recreate this graph for the local news context. [Read More]