Generalising

Following on from the previous post, some more notes on a somewhat odd article on FiveThirtyEight.

The bulk of the article seems to be criticising the system for drawing parliamentary boundaries on four points:

1. …the census data used is quite elderly

2. …the boundaries take account of things other than population distribution, such as council areas
3. …some geographical oddities like islands are dealt with as special cases
4. …Wales, Scotland and NI are required to have fixed seat numbers

The main objection here – barring the first point, which I broadly agree with, but which is hard to improve on in most cases – seems to be with the use of non-demographic boundaries in drawing the lines, and I’m just not sure why that is a problem. When electing a representative, the key point is that they be able to represent a constituency; that it be practical for them to find (and be found by) their constituents, that they can identify a distinct section of the population, etc.

Taking the Isle of Wight as an example, it’s big, but how would we split it? We could split it in two – but these would be unusually small constituencies. We could carve off a third and put it in with a Hampshire constituency – but this would disadvantage that third, who would find it more difficult to be in contact with their MP than those who remained insular. In the north of Scotland, you could easily add Caithness to Orkney and Shetland – total population thus “correct” at around 60,000 – but would this have any effect save to further marginalise voters in Lerwick, already pretty distant from the seat of power, and make it vastly less likely they’d ever see an MP?

Political boundaries matter in the same way as geographical ones; if you have existing subnational boundaries like counties or local authorities, then matching the constituencies to these where possible saves a lot of work. People know, much more easily, who their MP and their constituency are; the MP is much more able to focus on issues relevant to a given city or county rather than two or three. In a more practical sense, constituencies have names not numbers; if you’re going to have constituencies with a fixed name, it cries out for a certain degree of geographical coherence.

This is, of course, saying that the absolute “each vote should count equally” principle doesn’t work, that constituencies shouldn’t be made an absolute size and that some people have a theoretically “more powerful” vote than others. This is true – but it’s endemic in the system anyway. If we were going to carefully sculpt constituencies so as to be identically-sized, and demographically balanced, then we may as well drop the constituency idea altogether and go to proportional representation, as in the Netherlands – an ideal case of a balanced constituency.

All this may seem like a bit of overemphasis on some pretty trivial points, but I think those points are telling. FiveThirtyEight ran excellent, intelligent, detailed and basically interesting studies of the last US election; plenty of people outside the US read it avidly for this, myself included. We had to take a lot of its basic assumptions on trust, though; we didn’t have the underlying understanding of the system to do a quick sanity-check and know whether they sounded right or not.

So, come this election, they write about here, and the problems start becoming apparent. To pick a quote from a subsequent article:

Supporters of the Liberal Democrats, while not ordinarily inclined to vote Tory, may do so to push through proportional representation.

This is the sort of thing that… well, hands up, who’s ever met many committed Lib Dems who say, hey, I might just vote Tory to stop those evil Labour people getting in? Um.

Yes, there will be swing voters from LD to Conservative – though not as many as sometimes thought – but those will be classic swing voters; they’ll swing based on the economy, or other overall political issues, or simply because they no longer see the Tories as… quite as messy as they used to be. They won’t be core LD voters, devoutly wedded to PR, who are trying to produce a hung parliament in the hope that this will somehow extort PR from the resulting trainwreck.

In a comment on the last post, cim points out another delight from the same author:

And then there was this one from the EU elections where they decided that it was meaningful to group Plaid with the BNP as “nationalists”. I conclude that they don’t actually know anything about UK politics, and look forward to more amusement as their election coverage continues.

I think that last comment says all I was tempted to, really.

There’s a slightly odd post on FiveThirtyEight which I noticed: Breaking News: U.S. and U.K. Redistricting Processes Equally Boneheaded. I wonder if this is what we Brits sound like when we pontificate on US politics.

The part I couldn’t help laughing at.

In the UK by contrast, the net effect of these aspects of the mapping system is one-sided against the Conservatives. The Conservatives have little presence in Scotland (where they hold 1 out of 59 seats) or Wales …

…and a nice large illustration of Scotland to show how terribly the constituency boundaries oppress all those hordes of Tories. Um.

This is a problem of first-past-the-post, first and foremost; there are arguably ancillary problems with the system being marginally skewed pro-Labour due to urban voting concentrations etc etc, but they just don’t come into play at this level. Why?

The reason the Conservatives don’t have many seats in Scotland is – let us be sadly honest – that the average Conservative parliamentary candidate is about as popular on a Scottish doorstep as the rent collector. In 2005, they were fourth, with one seat and 15.8% of the votes; in 2001, the same, with 15.6%. In 1997, they took a staggering no seats on 17.5% of the vote – whilst the SNP, on 22%, took a mere six out of 72.

Coming fourth with ~16% of the vote in an overall campaign, without a great deal of concentration of your voters in specific regions, is almost guaranteed to be a damp squib in a first-past-the-post system. It doesn’t matter if you’re the Conservative Party or the Labour Party; any marginal systemic biases the system may have are vastly wiped out by the sheer scale of the problem.

We can see this using a (very non-Tory) example – look at the Liberal Democrats in 1992, across the whole UK. They took 18% of the vote, but only twenty seats – 3%. In 1987, the Alliance took 22.5% of the votes, but still only ~3.5% of the seats; in 1983, 25% of the vote… and still only 3.5% of the seats.

Would it be better under a non-FPTP system? Well, we actually have a perfect laboratory system here – Scotland. Let’s look at the 2007 Scottish elections – the Conservatives took 16.6% of the “constituency” vote and secured 5.5% of the seats, but 14% of the “list” vote – and 23% of the seats. This puts them on an average share of 15.3%, with 13.2% of the seats – not particularly unrepresentative number-wise, but definitely polling around the same as they did for Westminster elections.

In 2003, the same pattern – 16% of the overall vote, 14% of the overall seats – and again in 1999 – 15.5% of the votes and 14% of the overall seats. In both cases, they took the lion’s share from the proportional-representation list votes; indeed, in 1999, they didn’t get a single constituency seat.

So, yes, if there were not a FPTP system the Conservatives would do better; there is one, and they get hammered. But to use the situation of Scotland – where the Conservatives manage to be a third-place party if they do well – as though it is indicative of the rest of the UK is either disingenuous or just confused; the political realities of Scotland just aren’t the same as the nation as a whole. We cannot logically leap from “the FPTP system is wildly biased against a local minor party”, when we know that FPTP is already biased against minor parties, to “the FPTP system is therefore wildly biased against that party when they compete nationally as a major player”.

I am, as I type, rolling over the viaduct in Durham (we’re not stopping, the Cathedral just flashed by) and it struck me that it’s been just over ten years since I started taking the East Coast line regularly, when I first went down for an open day at… York, it must have been? Lot of change since then, not least of which is that I am wearing a suit – I’m on my way to a wedding – and connected to the internet on a netbook substantially more useful than any PC I had access to at the time. I might just have had mild terror at the idea of paying £110 for a weekend return ticket back then – and been equally surprised at just whose wedding I’d be coming back home for.

The line is the same, but the trains are refurbished; this is their third owner in that time, having gone from GNER to National Rail to the magnificently dully-named East Coast. Thinking about it, it’s probably their second stint in public ownership – some of the rolling stock here must be a good twenty years old, pre-privatisation. The spirit of British Rail manages to live on in the new nationalisation; even the hasty repainting of the carriages seems to have been done shoddily. (I have yet to test the quality of the sandwiches.)

Still, it’s fun. In the late eighties, when I first remember taking trains – very rarely – it was an exciting adventure because, well, it was a train, and I was six. In 2000, when I started taking long-haul trains regularly, it was exciting because there was a new life ahead, and it was all bound up with that. (“The noblest prospect”, etc.) In 2010, it’s almost mundane, but there continues to be a small thrill – there’s still that faint sense of wonder that I can amble up to the station, buy a cup of coffee, wave some paper, take my seat, settle down, and get whisked to the other end of the country, quietly and cleanly and unobtrusively. No security checks, none of the nonsense that makes flying unpleasant, just the enjoyment of being taken somewhere, the scenery flicking past the windows, and not having to worry about how.

Via Andrew Garrett, this amusing image: two signs, one advertising a $50 reward for a lost ipod… and the other advertising a $51 reward for a lost ipod. Amusing, but I can’t see anyone actually calling the $51 guy.

Let’s assume you were indeed some kind of conniving scammer; how would you go about this, presuming that “take down the first poster” isn’t an option? The person who lists second needs to pick a value that increases the plausibility of their poster (is a round number) and provides an economic incentive to call them (is larger) without being self-defeating (is too expensive compared to just buying one).

If the poster had said $60, we might have taken it more seriously – it’s a round number, so it looks more independently plausible – but this doesn’t automatically make it more convincing than the first. When you’re approaching the two signs with the knowledge that one of them is a scam, you’re thinking more critically than usual, and so you’re trying to deduce which one is legitimate.

Seeing the two signs, you’re likely to run through something like the above chain of logic and conclude – one of these two is a scammer, and it makes sense that it’s the higher one. Would it, then, be smarter to deliberately flout the economic aspect and undercut the legitimate poster? Your price is the only way of signalling your plausibility you have, and a lower price implies that you were first to advertise – because it’s irrational to make a lower bid after a higher one.

There is a counterargument that most finders wouldn’t be this honest – they would be motivated by nice simple economic motives first, and so would call the person offering an extra $10. But this doesn’t really reflect the situation: we know that the market value of a second-hand ipod must be more than the amount the scammer offers as a reward, and so a large number of those motivated by purely economic motives would no doubt want to sell the ipod (or keep it). If someone is already contemplating the reward posters at all, they’ve indicated a willingness to take a nominal loss in the interests of “justice” by returning it to its owner.

Alternatively, I suppose, you could counterbid $50, thus anulling pretty much any benefit either you or the original poster would have and turning it into a game of chance. Which offers better odds?

I wonder what we’d get from testing this… is there a sweet spot, just above or just below the original reward, where you’re most likely to get a response?

From today’s spam filter, a comment which amused me deeply:

Howdy, i read your blog occasionally and i own a similar one and i was just wondering if you get a lot of spam comments? If so how do you prevent it, any plugin or anything you can advise? I get so much lately it’s driving me mad so any assistance is very much appreciated.

I suppose the best way to disguise comment-spam is to have the boilerplate text be complaining about it…

The government has published its response (PDF) to the review of the 30-year rule.

The rule itself is a bit of a historical oddity – a blanket rule saying that government records should be opened after thirty years is a hangover from before the “on-demand” FOI Act, where you can apply for material regardless of its age. However, it survives in Part VI of the legislation; any record is deemed a “historic record” at thirty years after creation, and as such loses a lot of its ability to be exempt from disclosure. A document which was originally kept secret because of commercial confidentiality, for example, loses this exemption after thirty years.

The review recommended reducing this to fifteen years; the government response has advised twenty. In Scotland, which is subject to a similar but not quite identical piece of devolved legislation, the time limit has recently been dropped directly to fifteen years, in three tranches, with full release being completed by later this year.

The counterproposals are, on the whole, sensible. Other than the fifteen/twenty year change…

• The thirty-year rule will remain for a set of material: anything commercially confidential, anything sensitive touching on the devolved administrations, and the “effective conduct of public affairs” clause. It’s a little vaguely worded, and this worries me that in the eventual legislation we may find a much more flexible (ie, long) term for some material. How long is the average PFI contract for, for example?

• The new system will be phased in a year at a time – so, for example, we would release records from 1981 and 1982 in 2011, then 1983 and 1984 in 2012, letting the threshold creep steadily down to 20 years. This is in contrast to Scotland, which tried to clear the backlog in a couple of years – but then, it’s a bigger problem.
• There is to be a presumption in favour of anonymity for civil servants; names in records released as historical documents will be redacted unless decided otherwise or they’re very prominent.
• The legal position of communications with the monarch is to be clarified; records will be absolutely exempt for twenty years, or five years after their death, whichever is the longer. This also applies to the heir and the second-in-line to the throne, but all other members of the Royal Family have a qualified exemption – they’re presumed closed, but can be released under request.

On the whole, good things. I’m moderately concerned by the alterations to the commercial confidentiality clause – by the time this report turns into a statute, that looks like it may drift into actually making things worse than the current state of affairs – but it is, to mangle the old quote, currently moving in the direction of goodness. The anonymity proposals I am not sure about – there are good reasons for it, but there are also serious impracticalities, especially from a historical perspective. The amount of redaction appropriate at the twenty-year mark may well not be the same as the amount appropriate a hundred years on, but if we only have the one point of release, we’ll be stuck with whatever decisions were made at that point. Hmm.

Some details emerge from the report that reflect things which’re already happening. The government has formally clarified that “special advisors” are indeed legally civil servants, and subject to the provisions of the Act; they’re also grinding slowly forward with making a number of additional bodies, including UCAS and the legally ambivalent academy schools, subject to the Act.

So, twenty versus fifteen. This is an interesting debate.

A key part of the philosophy behind the thirty-year-rule is to avoid governmental records being turned into political ammunition, and relatedly to reassure the authors that they don’t have to keep material off the record for fear of it later being used against them. (It’s assumed that once you’re retired or dead you can live with the opprobrium.) The main example of this is ministerial papers, but from this standpoint, fifteen years is often just a little too short – it would have meant, for example, that papers relating to Callaghan as Chancellor (1964) got released when he was Prime Minister (1979), and in the event Brown wins the coming election, he’d have the same issue.

The current government will have lasted fourteen years, almost at that threshold, and the previous one eighteen – it’s true that no-one held senior office through the Conservative period, but it does demonstrate how prolonged a spell in power can be. If the modern trend is to parties holding power for long periods with occasional grand shifts, which it may well be, twenty years is a little safer; it also covers for the rare case of someone, like William Hague, whose ministerial career seems likely to bracket one of the prolonged spells of opposition.

There’s also a good case to be made that for politically touchy material like, say, Brown’s records from the early chancellorship, it wouldn’t be released regardless of the threshold, due to the section 36 exemption, likely to prejudice the conduct of public affairs. But a fifteen year rule would imply the time and expense of specially auditing an entire tranche worth of departmental and cabinet records to decide if they’re sufficiently sensitive to be restricted, then doing it again a couple of years later once the person in question is out of office in order to clear them for publication. The extra few years would, presumably, sharply cut down the number of such cases; is it a worthwhile payoff from an efficiency standpoint?

I am ambivalent on this one, I admit.

In the Scottish context, of course, this is currently academic. Holyrood is not overly concerned with the prospect of a former Scottish Secretary looking a little silly, and there won’t be any Scottish Executive (as was) records released until well into the coming decade. On current form, it seems likely that with the less monolithic nature of devolved politics we’ll have shorter ministerial tenures, as well, and thus less need for the extra few years.

We shall see. It’s an unfortunately timed announcement, coming as it does just before an election, but hopefully whoever gets in will pick up the ball and run with it. It’s not something either side would particularly benefit from more or less than the other, after all – they all have ticking skeletons in the closet waiting for the cabinet papers to be released.

BBC News:

Sachin Tendulkar created history with the first double century in one-day internationals as India thrashed South Africa by 153 runs in Gwalior.

The Guardian:

…the accolades that poured out of Gwalior after Sachin Tendulkar became the first batsman to score a double hundred in a one-day international, to lead India to victory over South Africa by 153 runs.

The Telegraph:

…the news that Sachin Tendulkar has scored the first double-hundred in one-day internationals.

…and, judging by Google News, around a thousand other journalists saying pretty much the same thing.

Of those thousand news stories, however, only one – the Independent Online in South Africa – manages to actually include a small but salient point:

…while Tendulkar is the first man to reach the magical number, [Belinda] Clark did it 13 years ago, against Denmark in the Women’s World Cup in India in 1997.

For those who follow the sport (unlike me, I admit), there’s an interesting article here on cricketing firsts which were actually first obtained by women.

Another old book on books, this time from Project Gutenberg:

The Enemies of Books, by William Blades [1888]

It breaks down the various threats to the survival of books by topic (fire, water, neglect, vermin, collectors, children…) and then lists a succession of anecdotes about collections destroyed in this way. Surprisingly interesting, in some cases, if a bit depressing; it’s interesting to know what has been lost over the years but is still known about. I wrote last month about the monastic libraries being dissolved at the Reformation; here is a contemporary writing about what happened to their contents:

A greate nombre of them whyche purchased those superstycyouse mansyons reserved of those librarye bookes some to serve their jakes, some to scoure theyr candelstyckes, and some to rubbe theyr bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and sope sellers, and some they sent over see to y^e booke bynders, not in small nombre, but at tymes whole shyppes full, to y^e wonderynge of foren nacyons. Yea y^e Universytees of thys realme are not alle clere in thys detestable fact. But cursed is that bellye whyche seketh to be fedde with suche ungodlye gaynes, and so depelye shameth hys natural conterye.

I knowe a merchant manne, whych shall at thys tyme be namelesse, that boughte y^e contentes of two noble lybraryes for forty shyllynges pryce: a shame it is to be spoken. Thys stuffe hathe heoccupyed in y^e stede of greye paper, by y^e space of more than these ten yeares, and yet he bathe store ynoughe for as manye years to come. A prodygyous example is thys, and to be abhorred of all men whyche love theyr nacyon as they shoulde do. The monkes kepte them undre dust, y^e ydle-headed prestes regarded them not, theyr latter owners have most shamefully abused them, and y^e covetouse merchantes have solde them away into foren nacyons for moneye

On Friday, wandering through town after my haircut, I dropped into a butcher’s to buy a few sausages, or a bit of pork, or something. I came out with a rabbit.

I am not entirely sure how this happened. Still, never say die. What can you do with a rabbit? We thought for a bit, and decided on stewing. After consulting with the usual oracles (thanks, Ewan), this is what we came up with:

Ingredients:

• One rabbit, skinned and cleaned and rendered visibly less fluffy

• Several slices of bacon
• A handful of carrots, an onion, some garlic
• A bottle of cider
• Honey, some dried mixed herbs (or fresh thyme & bay, if you have it), salt, pepper
• A large casserole dish, with lid, and an oven at ~120 degrees

First, start the bacon frying; when it’s lightly done, decant into casserole, and start on the onion and garlic ditto.

Meanwhile, prepare the rabbit. (…I suppose there are people who don’t want to read this…)

End result : one pile of rabbit meat (small), one skeleton fit for stock or feeding to any carnivorous animals you have around the house (small), one sense of achievement (medium). I don’t know if you can actually feed rabbit bones to small carnivorous animals, so you might need to check that bit first. Or bury it in the garden, dig it up in a year, and present it to a small child who wants to be a vet.

Anyway, when we went into surgery the bacon, onions and garlic were lightly sizzling. Decant them into the casserole, leaving the fat in the pan, and then fry your rabbit with enthusiasm. Get it nice and golden, and in it goes too. Chop the carrots into lumps, and in they go; add a couple of spoonfuls of honey, the herbs, salt, pepper, stir it all around. Top off with enough cider to cover it all; if you’ve not enough, then a little warm water to suit. (If you’ve too much, have a drink. Thirsty work.)

Pop it all in the oven at about 120 degrees for about two hours. (A little warmer or a little longer won’t hurt at all, of course). Serve with rice or bread or potatoes – something solid and absorbent. Serves two to four depending on whether you remembered to eat lunch.

Next experiment: do it with wine. Rabbit in red wine does sound delightful…

From a Glasgow bookseller writing to The Bookman in February 1895:

…some publishers are doing their utmost to ruin the trade by selling to the drapers, who buy large quantities at reduced prices

(The “drapers” were, of course, the large general retailers. By the 1890s, the term was about as exact as calling Sainsbury’s a grocers.)

That was not the only complaint that could have been lifted straight from last week’s Bookseller. This one from 1905 -

…[the Bookman] was quite relieved to note that recently published children’s books, though dangerously full of humour, were not so absurdly grotesque as in recent years.

Both quotes are from Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by “The Bookman”, 1891-1906 (2001) [JSTOR], a study of the most popular books sold in Britain at the turn of the century. (There were no bestseller lists per se at the time – the bulk of the article was an attempt to retractively construct one based on returns from booksellers. It is sobering how many of them are completely forgotten…)