Rocking the boat

 digital humanities, eresearch, gadfly, Humanities Computing, Politics  Comments Off
May 112013
 

wlp_logoThere are some really interesting political developments at the moment in Australia. And I suppose they are digital humanities related in someways, at least in terms of making humanities (ie. political) information more widely available in new and challenging ways on the Internet. And I do worry that the humanities in Australia has become bogged down in a 1960s style politics that conveniently aligns with a certain time in US hegemony, but hasn’t really developed the intellectual nor digital tools to confront the complex and challenging international information-politics of today (ie. the politics of engaging with digital technologies on our own terms at the highest possible level so we can tell the nation’s stories political or otherwise through and with them). Maybe I am being too general here (and maybe not generous), but hey it is a blog post, call the police!

The WikiLeaks Party is a very interesting development in terms of rocking the boat a little; of reminding people that the great political narratives of Australia are often an impoverished lens to view and address the many political challenges of today. The great unspoken history of Australia, our dirty little secret, is that our nation is dull, in fact on new global ranking that I just developed, we are the world’s second most boring nation and only Norway is more boring. Let’s hope that my calculations are wrong and that something interesting happens in the Australian parliament to remind us that its view of the world has severe limits.

Liberal Party of Australia, NBN Plan

 digital humanities, eresearch, Humanities Computing, NBN, Politics  Comments Off
Apr 092013
 

Here is the Liberal Party of Australia’s NBN policy (link).  The policy promises that the NBN will be built more cheaply and more quickly, but the down-side is that it is also an inferior solution. The main contention is that the Conservatives will not offer fiber to the premises and will keep the existing copper network.  Fiber to the premises will only be offered in new housing developments and copper to the premises will be kept when it already exists. The problem here is that if your house is a long way from an exchange, then the NBN Internet connection will be slower (as is the case today).

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Australian Wikileaks Party launch

 digital humanities, eresearch, Events, Humanities Computing, Politics  Comments Off
Apr 092013
 

The Australian Wikileaks Party Senate campaign was launched on Saturday (6 April, 2013) in Fitzroy, Melbourne.  The Campaign manager is Greg Barnes and the Secretary of the party is John Shipton; Julian Assange’s father. The party is a welcome entry into the Australian political landscape bringing with it a whole new dimension of openness and a new style of politics. It is a politics that engages with some of the urgent challenges of a period dominated by information technology and the new power relationships enabled by it. As a house of review, a Wikileaks representative is well-suited for the Australian Senate.

The Party has a web site that is accepting members and will develop its social media strategy over coming months.

National Council of the WikiLeaks Party convenes for a meeting in Kindness House, Melbourne.

National Council of the WikiLeaks Party convenes for a meeting in Kindness House, Melbourne.

Underground: The Julian Assange Story

 digital humanities, eresearch, Humanities Computing, movie, Politics  Comments Off
Mar 222013
 
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Alex Williams, Laura Wheelright, and Robert Connolly

As part of their ‘Meet the Filmmaker’ series, Underground: the Julian Assange story has been playing at Cinema Nova all this past week in Melbourne. The movie was principally made as a tele-movie and was largely funded by Channel 10 (and it was aired last year).

The movie is based on the book Underground by Suelette Dryfus (1997). Suelette is a researcher in Computing and Information Systems at the University of Melbourne where I also work. She has given guest lectures in subject that I have taught in and I was first introduced to the book whist studying hypertext theory with Dean Kiley back in 1997.

I identified with the movie on a number of levels, partly because I am about the same age as Assange and share a similar history in terms of the broader development of computing. And along with many of my peers, I dabbled in ‘hacktervism’ around the year 2000 within the ‘’ant-globalisation” movement, but nowhere near on the scale and boldness of the individuals in Dryfus’s book (well, we built disobedient web-pages when this was a special thing to do)

I met Alex Williams (who played Assange) and Robert Connolly (Director) in the Nova Bar after the show and was struck by how approachable and generous they both were. This is Williams’ first major role and I am sure that his performance in Underground will lead onto other outstanding roles. Connolly I liked a lot, especially how he handled the Nova audience with the inevitable nutters mumbling in the background and asking odd questions that had very little to do with the themes of “movie making and directing actors”.

It is a delightful movie and a wonderful time in history; the early days of the hacker underground and the adolescent development of Julian Assange. Assange is one of the two greatest phone hackers to come out of Melbourne and for this we should all be extremely proud. Proud of both Rupert Murdoch and Julian Assange!

Lithuanian dual citizenship still requires amendment

 Lithuania, Politics  Comments Off
Mar 162013
 
Applying for a Lithuanian passport

Applying for a Lithuanian passport.

It was an issue more appropriate to a different blog, but I have done a bit of writing about the situation regarding dual citizenship in Lithuania. But assuming you’ve not had need for my Guide to a Passport, you’ve probably not followed the story carefully. In which case, here’s the short version:

  • The Lithuanian constitution limits dual citizenship.
  • The Constitutional Court (KT) has interpreted that limitation to mean that dual citizenship is given in extremely rare cases.
  • All the same, people like me (descendants of Lithuanian citizens who fled Lithuania between 1940 and 1990) are eligible to have dual citizenship, as they’re understood as de facto citizens from birth. I did not, then, apply to become a citizen, I applied to exercise my right to that citizenship.
  • People who receive another country’s citizenship automatically (by birth or marriage) can also be dual citizens, though born Lithuanians have three years to choose a citizenship once they reach majority.
  • The other way in which dual citizenship is granted is by the President, who can bestow citizenship in honor of a person’s efforts done on behalf of Lithuania.

The situation has not moved much since the KT stopped rampant dual citizenship in 2006 by introducing the rareness limitation. Organizations and the Seimas (legislature) have tried to get around this limitation by legislative means, but they’ve not been successful. I’ve argued since the beginnings of this debate that if one doesn’t like the KT’s rulings, they need to change the constitution, not pass laws that are a priori unconstitutional.

But earlier this week, the KT responded to a specific petition from the President regarding dual citizenship. President Grybauskaitė wanted to know if there could be a law passed that granted dual citizenship to Lithuanians who left Lithuania after 1990 and received some other citizenship. She also wanted to know about yet another situation where an American ice dancer wants to represent Lithuania with her (Lithuanian) partner in the Olympics. “Um, no, lol.” is the short version of the answer to both questions.

In the meantime, the KT explained that it’s not a political organ, therefore its makeup (and when that changes) should not influence its decisions. Nor would political or sociological findings or surveys or anything like that. These external influences would threaten the court’s impartiality. This is, of course, a very weird and archly conservative position to take, but it has a kind of sweetness to it. The KT finds answers in the constitution. That’s its brief, the end.

So this is news in that, as far as I can tell, it reaffirms something we (or at least many of us) already knew. Only a referendum that amends the constitution will open up Lithuanian dual citizenship. And athletes can’t get citizenship for honor and glory they will bring to Lithuania in the future, only for honor and glory they have already brought.1

But I was reminded of one other thing: should I run for Seimas, I would have to renounce my US citizenship, which, of course, has a precedent: Valdas Adamkus renounced his US citizenship when he took the office of President of Lithuania.

 

  1. This situation has come up again recently, as Isabelle Tobias, an ice dancer, has had her recommendation for citizenship denied. However, interestingly, the caption on lrytas.lt is a bit misleading. It reads, “American I. Tobias, despite learning Lithuanian, cannot become a citizen of Lithuania.” As far as I can tell, this is only half true. It’s missing a clause at the end that reads, “without giving up her US citizenship.” She’s perfectly able to naturalize, if she should so choose.
 Posted by on March 16, 2013

Rape: A Lack of Conviction

 People, Politics  Comments Off
Feb 152013
 

Today is One Billion Rising protesting violence against women and rape, world-wide.

There have been a few infographics visualizing the remarkably low conviction rate for rape, compared to other crimes.

We wanted to go a step further and explore the many complex and sensitive reasons why this figure is so low.

Without these reasons, the explanations that circulate are convenient or political. The reality is much more complex.

» See the graphic.

We’ve focussed on the UK as an example. Partly because the crime data here is so good and the conviction rate so bad. This gives us a detailed insight into how rape is often dealt with by victims, police and the courts.

Many of the statistics are applicable to situations in other countries.

There’s also a lot of supplementary data and background information we wanted to share with you. http://bit.ly/UKRapeData

We hope this data and the graphic can help increase understanding of this terrible and complex crime.

 Posted by on February 15, 2013

Holding pattern in Lithuanian parliamentary elections

 Lithuania, Politics  Comments Off
Oct 312012
 

I’m on the road until next week, so any sort of map-based reflection on the second round of Seimas elections will have to wait. Which is fine, since the results are both not shocking and still in a bit of a holding pattern themselves.

Before the second round of run-off voting, I was reading that the President, Dalia Grybauskaitė, who has veto power over the Seimas’s choice of Prime Minister, said that she would never accept a government in which the Labor Party’s chairman, Viktor Uspaskich, held that role. The man remains under a stormcloud of charges relating to fraud, and it would not be proper for him to head the government. For what it’s worth, Andrius Kubilius, the outgoing PM and head of the conservatives, said that he’d never go into a coalition with the Labor Party, trumping the President’s ultimatum.

Of course, now that the second round is complete, it seems as though neither warning needs to be heeded. The Social Democrats passed the Laborites in terms of total seats in the Seimas, and they’re now solidly in the driver’s seat regarding coalition haggling between, as everyone predicted, themselves, Labor, and Paksas’s Order and Justice Party. Between them they have 79 out of 140 seats in Seimas (one seat will be contested in a special election in six months because of Laborite vote-buying shenanigans).

So though the results are more or less done, the government is still in the process of being formed, with latest news hinting that not only will Uspaskich be frozen out of the new coalition (not surprising, as he’d only leave his post as MEP for something more prestigious, like PM), but so too will be his second in command, Vytautas Gapšys, who is under the same stormcloud as his mentor. Gapšys had been touted as a possible Parliament Speaker, but Algirdas Butkevičius, the head of the SocDems and likely next PM, categorically insisted that his moral code would force him to deny, with 100% confidence, a minister or Speaker role to either man. Butkevičius is confident that he’ll reach a compromise with his coalition as well as with Grybauskaitė, but Uspaskich is waiting to see what the future will bring.

So I, too, will wait. In the meantime, I can give one nugget of election analysis: Drąsos kelias (Path of Courage), the anti-pedophile protest party, failed to win a single election in the second round, where each of their candidates was dismissed by a conservative candidate. They will, however, because of the logic of the proportional voting system in the Seimas, still have seven seats in the upcoming term. This seems fair; they showed that they have a certain amount of support (even if it’s largely limited to Kaunas and its environs) to earn some representation, but it was not enough to topple the conservative party structure. On the flip side, the Peasants and Greens Union, which did not break the 5% threshold in proportional voting will get one voice in Seimas, as they managed to win the constituency around Šiauliai.

 Posted by on October 31, 2012

Predicting the second round of Seimas elections

 geography, GIS, Lithuania, Politics  Comments Off
Oct 202012
 

A friend looked over my recent posts and said, basically, that this analysis of things that had already happened was all find and dandy, but might it be possible to predict the results of the second round? On Tuesday, I speculated that a coalition of the Labor Party (Darbo partija), Social Democrats, and Order and Justice (Tvarka ir teisingumas) would be at most 11 seats away from a majority, meaning that the three parties have 11 second round elections against other parties that they have to win. But what are the chances of getting those 11 seats? Similarly, considering that the conservatives (TS-LKD) are the most represented party in the second round, how likely is it that the Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius’s words—that his party will be the largest faction in the new Seimas—will come true?

I’m not an elections prognosticator—there’s already one alum of my university who does that rather well—but, I am a bit of a hobbyist. So I decided to take the results of the first round and develop a predicting methodology for the second round. For the TL;DR crowd, here are the results:

  • The conservatives will pick up 11 seats.
  • The Social Democrats will pick up 11 seats.
  • The Labor Party will pick up nine seats.
  • Order and Justice will pick up four seats.
  • The Polish Action (Lenkų akcija) will pick up two seats.
  • The liberals (LRLS) will pick up one seat.
  • The Path of Courage (Drąsos kelias) will pick up one seat.

That’s 37 of 68 seats. The rest my methodology considers too close to call. But it does indicate that the Social Democrats, Labor, and Order and Justice still have some work to do to get to a majority. What was the methodology? Both of the parties in each run-off were awarded bonus points based on certain criteria. If a party scored more than three bonus points, it was solid for that party. If a party scored more than one point, it was a slight favorite. If both parties picked up less than one point, it was considered a toss-up.

Here’s the rather arbitrary way the points were distributed:

  • +1 for an incumbent (or if the candidate is a member of the incumbent party). +.5 if the incumbent party is not represented at all. (This second part was a bit tricky, since parties are so volatile in Lithuania)
  • +1 if the candidate won the first round by more than 20 points. +.5 for a win of more than ten points. +.25 for a win of more than five points. The inverse was true for the first round runner-up.
  • +1 if the candidate’s party also was the party that received the most votes in the constituency in proportional voting.
  • +1 if the candidate’s party received votes at a percentage two standard deviations (or more) above the party’s national mean in the constituency. +.25 if it was more than one standard deviation above the mean. The inverse was applied if the party underperformed its national average within the constituency.
  • +1 if the candidate’s party was the leading proportional party and received 28% or more of the vote in proportional voting (one standard deviation above the mean of all top parties in all constituencies of ~24%).

The rationale was:

  • Incumbency would be rewarded, even in an election about change. There would even be a trace effect if a new candidate represented the incumbent party. But both sides benefited a bit if it was a clean slate.
  • Beating up on the second place candidate in the first round bodes well for the second round.
  • Representing a popular party in the constituency helps.
  • If your party is especially locally popular, it helps.
  • If your party demolished the others in proportional voting, it helps.

Interestingly, only two candidates received 4.5 bonus points (against .25 for their opponents), and both represent the Polish Action. Somehow I’m a little skeptical that these are locks, since I suspect the non-Polish population in both constituencies will rally and vote for the Lithuanian candidate. The question is if there will be enough Lithuanians voting to offset the Polish vote. In the other constituencies, the matrices get too complicated for me to consider.

So how does it play out spatially? Glad you asked (as always, click to enlarge):

It’s no surprise that there’s some correlation with the maps from the previous post; that correlation is built into the means by which I hand out bonus points. The toss-ups (mostly) have the showdown indicated on the map. The party that got more votes in the first round is the first mentioned. I’ll also include a few explanations of abbreviations: TT = Order and Justice. LCS = other liberals. Indep = Independent candidate. VZ = Peasants & Greens. Also, the three “decided” constituencies feature candidates who broke the 50% threshold in the first round and face no run-off.

In the Vilnius inset, the northwestern toss-up is Fabijoniškių constituency. It’s TS-LKD vs. Darbo p. The eastern constituency, Naujosios Vilnios, is Lenkų a. vs. Darbo p. The large one in the southwest, Lazdynų constituency, is TS-LKD vs. LRLS.

All three Kaunas toss-ups are TS-LKD vs. Drąsos k. In Klaipėda, the northern toss-up, Danės constituency, is TS-LKD vs. LCS. The southern constituency is actually Pajūrio constituency, which makes up much of the coast. It’s TS-LKD vs. Darbo p.

A few small consituencies are obscured in the main map. Alytaus constituency is a Darbo p. vs. SocDemai toss-up. The northern constituency of Panevėžys, Nevėžio, is TS-LKD vs. Darbo p., and the southern constituency, Vakarinės, is Indep. vs. Darbo p. Marijampolės tiny constituency is mostly blocked by the label for the surrounding Suvalkijos constituency. It’s a slight SocDemai favorite.

So there are some predictions. We’ll see in just over a week how ridiculous they were.

 Posted by on October 20, 2012
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