Sentiment analysis

DWP signs £100k deal for AI ‘sentiment analysis’ tech tool

Government’s benefits department has renewed an arrangement with a specialist firm that delivers a tech system designed to use artificial intelligence to turn ‘siloed, messy, verbatim’ information into data dashboards

On 1 April, the DWP entered into a two-year contract with specialist tech firm Wordnerds. The deal, which is valued at £100,800, covers the provision of technology which supports “text analytics and sentiment analysis”, according to a newly published commercial notice.

A chap is bound to wonder if sentiment analysis is intended to form a barrier between DWP staff and the more robust public comments about the work they do. 

Credibility in Government is at stake

Healey warns Labour must get serious as leadership row puts credibility at stake

John Healey warned Labour’s “credibility in Government is at stake” in an apparent rebuke of leadership jockeying among rivals looking to oust Sir Keir Starmer.

The Defence Secretary urged colleagues to “get serious” and put Britain’s security before politics in a speech in Westminster on Tuesday after more than a week of turmoil following the party’s May elections mauling.

Speculation has mounted over who might run in any challenge for No 10 after a path opened up for leadership hopeful Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham to return to Westminster via the Makerfield by-election.

It's an embarrassing thing for Mr Healy to say as credibility in Government went AWOL some time ago. Maybe he is reminding us that Andy Burnham won't restore it, but neither would any of the other people touted as replacements for Keir Starmer.

That's the problem of course, Labour doesn't produce credible political leaders and in that restricted sense Healey may be right - what's the point?

Okay we've done appalling - what comes after that?

World's 'most expensive' high-speed rail line to be slower and cost more

A high-speed train line between London and Birmingham will be more expensive, take longer to make and go slower than previously announced.

The HS2 project will cost between £87.7bn and £102.7bn (in 2025 prices), with the first train services not starting until at least May 2036 and possibly not until October 2039, Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander told the Commons on Tuesday.

Mrs H and I are off out for coffee and breakfast this morning. 

We'll walk.

Masterpiece

Collector Jennifer Gilbert Is Selling Masterpieces at Sotheby’s to Fund a New Arts Nonprofit in Detroit

The Detroit patron and philanthropist is parting with major works by Joan Mitchell, Kenneth Noland, George Rickey and Harry Bertoia to fund Lumana, an arts hub opening in Little Village in 2027.

One of the masterpieces -

 

Kenneth Noland’s Rare Circle,
which has a $4-6 million estimate

The dirty tricks campaigns

The dirty tricks campaigns trying to stop Burnham in race for No 10

A meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) on Monday evening has inadvertently confirmed that the underhand tricks and backstabbing by MPs has got out of hand.

At the meeting, both foreign secretary Yvette Cooper and chief whip Jonathan Reynolds did their best primary school teacher impressions and gave their colleagues a dressing down for all their briefings against the prime minister and various leadership candidates.

It was apparently meant to be an appeal for unity. But one MP suggested it was the 21st-century equivalent of King Cnut shouting at the sea to stop the tide coming in. It was seen as both a complete waste of energy – and a little hypocritical on a day it was revealed that Sir Keir Starmer’s allies are briefing against Andy Burnham, claiming he would bring back Jeremy Corbyn if he became prime minister.

Imagine a headline - 

The clean tricks campaigns trying to stop Burnham in race for No 10

Goes against everything we know doesn't it? May as well leave out "dirty tricks" in the original headline - it's political squabbling among people nobody should ever have voted for.

Timeless History Invented Yesterday

Robert Hill has a very interesting Quadrant piece on the wildly exaggerated modern histories of Aboriginal Australia. 

Not something I'm familiar with apart from picking up hints on the periphery, but well worth reading even for someone with such threadbare knowledge as mine. A familiar political theme of course.

Timeless History Invented Yesterday

I have never read the “First Knowledges” box set and, after a decade spent immersed in this field, probably never will. That is not intellectual laziness. It is recognition of a relentless and deceitful genre. The first box set of six books was released in 2023 and in June this year we are told we will be privileged to have a box set of 10 books for $195.

This article is not a review of the 10 books but rather a consideration of a cultural moment: one in which Aboriginal Australia has been steadily transformed from a small-scale hunter-gatherer society into a profound ‘civilisation’ of extraordinary sophistication retrospectively credited with astronomy, engineering, politics, mathematics, economics, architecture, agriculture and environmental science in forms supposedly hidden from every serious observer until the present age.

What may have begun as an attempt to elevate awareness of Aboriginal culture has metastasised into something else entirely: a sprawling house of cards in which every human achievement must now be retrospectively rediscovered in pre-contact Australia.

Moonlight

Sir Edward Elgar : In Moonlight. John Atkinson Grimshaw : Paintings.