slovenia Archives - Page 3 of 4

by virostatiq - September 7, 2014

Voting and attendance in Slovenian Parliament from 2004 to current term

In Slovenia, we have a love/hate relationship with our politicians. We hate them, because at almost every single step they make, they let us know they are corrupt and they can easily get away with it. But in each new election new faces appear, promptly get elected and are hailed as saviors, who will finally clean the Augean stables of greed and corruption that has been accumulating for too long.

Most emotions are reserved for those in the front row, mainly government members. Members of parliament are somehow exempted, as they are not so widely known. Somehow, they are not monitored properly, at least in my book. There is a site that contains session records per member and per session, but it’s not widely known. It was an inspiration for this attempt to present members’ activity in an easily understandable and graphic way for current term and a few terms in the past.

See the interactive version: Slo Eng

Interest groups

The main idea was to group the parliamentary members by similarity of their voting record. Most parliamentary members are bound by strict voting discipline, imposed by the parties they belong to. This way the parties can guarantee that some or another act will pass and become a law. But is this really so? I tried to use a simple machine learning technique to answer that question. First I collected all the voting results from parliamentary term and sorted them in chronological order, then applied the technique (k-means clustering, for technologically minded). Number of groups was set to ten, but I could increase it to see smaller groups – maybe fractions inside parties, or cross-party interest groups.

Below you can see an example of two groups from recent term.

Here is the first:

And here another:

It’s apparent that groups do not contain representatives from one party only, and the visual representation imparts a feel for the differences in voting. As I mentioned above, I arbitrarily constructed ten groups, but a serious researcher would play and tinker with the number, as every clustering technique is an exploratory process and must be iterated upon for best results. It’s interesting that the results also show other parliamentary tactics. This one below could be interpreted as obstruction, or simply passivity or indifference. So what is it? To ask this question is to answer it, I guess.

To put it in context, this is a group of left-wing opposition representatives during a period when they were in heavy minority.

In contrast, this is the right-wing voting machine that prevailed:

The contrast between these two groups is so dramatic that it would be funny, if these were funny affairs. While the opposition was idling away, the majority voted into existence law after law that, together, still influence the lives of the Slovenian citizenry. In interactive version (English) you can explore what the votes were about by simply moving the mouse over horizontal stripes.

See the interactive version: Slo Eng

Attendance record

Session attendance is another telling indicator of particular representative’s zeal in upholding democracy and fulfilling the interests of his constituency. It’s already apparent from charts above, but I still constructed a separate graphics for that. It’s sorted by presence and more easily readable.

It has to be noted that some representatives were excused from voting sessions for various periods of time. Among them are those who became ministers and those who replaced them in the parliamentary seat, not being there before.

Here’s an example from the recent term. At the bottom, you can see two blocks with alternating presence. That’s because there were two governments. When the first one fell, the ministers returned to their seats; those who originally replaced them, returned to the party’s roster; new ministers were sworn in and abandoned their seats; and new replacements came from opposite camp.

See the interactive version: Slo Eng

Yes-men and rebels

Another interesting statistics is: representatives with most votes for yea or nay. I don’t really know how to interpret this, but I did it nevertheless. One could say that in terms with only one governments, members of ruling majority with most yea votes are those who unquestioningly toe the party line. Conversely, those with most nay votes are most fervent members of the opposition. In terms with two governments, this is a little less clear-cut: one would have to separate the timelines and run the statistics on subperiods for each government. I didn’t do this, but a serious researcher would. I made this report to let them know that they are being monitored, but it’s a task of an investigative journalist to delve into the data and interpret it in a meaningful way. I don’t have time for this, and I don’t really know the particulars of daily politics here enough to be able to do that.

But I’m offering the database to anyone who would like to do that. Send me a mail for details, I’ll gladly oblige.

Here are a few simple pie charts that illustrate what I just wrote:

See the interactive version: Slo Eng

Unity index

While programming, it struck me that I could calculate a synthetic measure that would show the unity in the parliament. The reasoning goes: if the vote was unanimous, the parliament as a whole was united in cause at hand. But if half of representatives voted yea, and the other half nay, the parliament was divided. So I constructed a timeline of all voting sessions and colored every session according to this measure. Blue for unanimous vote, red for evenly split vote, and violet hues as nuances of disharmony.

Additionally, the bar heights indicate the presence ratio. Lower heights obviously mean lower presence.

In some terms, the presence falls toward the end, and the proportion of red bars increase. This means that the representatives lost heart and abandoned their posts, and those who stayed, quarreled bitterly.

Here are these graphics for various terms. They are stretched to same length. Perhaps a more correct, but less visually appealing approach would be not to stretch them, so the length of particular term would be apparent.

indexEN — IV (2004 – 2008) – PM Janez Janša

See the interactive version: Slo Eng

Session timelines and voting networks

The drive behind this section was to find out whether the attendance is falling, as the session progresses into small hours. I found that not to be so, which is encouraging in a way. These charts at least show which sessions were bitterly contested, and which were almost unanimous. You can see examples of both behaviors in the graphic below.

Going one step further, I constructed a separate network for each session in a way that if a representative voted for a proposition, he or she is connected with it, otherwise no.

Networks are a little bit messy, and people tend to not understand them well. This network below shows three groups of representatives (you can zoom in and out in the interactive version). They are grouped close to the propositions they voted for. So this is another opportunity to find out the interest groups on the micro level, for each proposition. Some propositions don’t have a name, just a date. That’s not my fault, but the parliament’s, as they didn’t bother to publish it on the web.

See the interactive version: Slo Eng

Seating order

Finally, here are some heatmaps for various variables, mapped on to seating orders. The first is partitioned according to representatives’ party. Sorry, no legend here. You can mouse over in the interactive version to show details.

The second is attendance heatmap. Green is full attendance, red is total absence, and there’s a linear color scale between them. This one provides at-a-glance overview of attendance of entire party blocks.

Next two are yea and nay heatmaps, so you can see which party blocks mostly voted yea, and which nay. They are normalized to their local maxima for visual appeal, but a more correct approach would be to not normalize them, so it would be apparent that a nay vote is much less frequent than a yea. Why, I have no Idea, but I imagine there must be a lot of technical votings, for example establishing presence and so on.

These seating orders are approximate, as I couldn’t get them for past terms from the parliament. They asserted that they didn’t have them, and claimed they don’t even have the current one, even if it’s published on their own website. There were more lies, but I won’t go into that here. They are, after all, in power, and I’m just a blogger.

Why they should engage in such behaviour is beyond me. Maybe they think that the information is theirs and should be kept from the public.

Again, if anyone needs the MongoDB database, drop me a note. My email address is on the About page.

See the interactive version: Slo Eng

by virostatiq - May 20, 2014May 20, 2014

Ours and theirs – an endless duel between computer generated Slovenian news commenters

I’ve been following comments under Slovenian web news items for quite some time. The commenters there are well known for their animosity towards anyone who disagrees with their political worldview. Reading the comment section usually means immersing yourself in verbal filth, depravity and all imaginable kinds of hate speech.

Some time ago I wrote software for scraping comments off these websites and have been since then storing them in a database. They are useful for a number of things. For example, I’ve had some success with stylometry (identifying commenters by their writing style, even when they post under different name), but this is a matter of another post. I also helped SAZU compiling a list of new slang words for the new Dictionary of Slovene Language.

So here’s a lighter project for people who don’t read these comments, neither they want to. If you want to see it all, just click the image below and behold the auto-generated stream for a minute or two.

Note that these are not real comments. The text is generated from two Markov chains, which have been initialized with texts of left-wing and right-wing commenters. The comments used are approximately a year old, lest someone accuses me of participating in election campaign of some kind. The web page simply generates a few sentences from one, then from the other, and so it continues ad ~~nauseam~~ infinitum.

I think it’s a fitting commentary of Slovenian mentality. Slovenian-speaking visitors will notice that, even if the texts are probabilistically computer-generated, there’s still ample hurling of insults based on the outcome of the last World War. There’s quite a lot of that.

Also, even though both sides pack serious vitriol, the right wingers use more classic hate speech, and they write comparatively worse.

See for yourself!

Technically, it was a breeze to make. First I pulled entire corpora of selected commenters from the database in text form, then I used RiTA, a generative text tool, for initializing the two models and generating sentences. The code is very short, most of it has to do with displaying and scrolling.

But initializing models from loaded text:

model.loadText(text);

And then generating sentences with just:

var sentences = model.generateSentences(nr);

Such is the beauty of RiTA.

by virostatiq - April 3, 2014April 11, 2014

Addresses with most registered companies in Slovenian towns

There appeared an article, in which an attempt was made to expose questionable practices of some Slovenian enterpreneurs. The scheme is such: establish a company, perform some work, bleed it dry, then establish a new one and move all workers into it, at the same time avoiding paying benefits and a sizable portion of salaries. When the new company has server its purpose, establish a new one, and so on, as far as it goes. These companies are frequently registered at the same address.

The article says that there are as many as 120 companies registered in one residential building. But because of a weakness of the law, state inspectors can’t put an end to such practice.

I wanted to see these addresses on the map, so here’s an attempt. For every address with more than five companies, there’s a dot, with color and radius proportional with number of companies registered there. The biggest dots represent business buildings, in which a predominantly legitimate businesses reside. My data sources didn’t allow for filtering out just residential buildings.

You can see the standalone map here. (In Slovene.)

Clicking on a marker displays a popup with a list of companies, sorted by date of establishment – youngest first. There’s also a chart of predominant business categories at that address. The categories that the article mentions as most prone to scheme in question, are Construction and Retail. So even of this map can’t really show the locations with these questionable companies, it can maybe help their discovery. If there’s a big dot with predominantly these categories, there’s a certain possibility that some of these fraudulent companies are there.

Most addresses shown here of course don’t have anything to do with any illegal activity.

Data source: Zemljevid Najdi.si.

by virostatiq - December 24, 2013April 11, 2014

Slovenian business activity by city as animated heatmaps

A few months ago, while researching business times of various categories of establishments in Slovenia, I thought it would be nice to somehow visualize a map with a graphical representation of density of open establishments. I decided on heatmap style, although I later discover that my chosen implementation had some drawbacks.

Getting the data

Data with business hours of commercial establishments is traditionally not open for many reasons, two of them being that (1) this information can be commercially exploited, and (2) the opening hours can be subject to frequent changes, which can tax the database owner with considerable effort should the database stay current and reliable.

First I toyed with the idea of crawling entire directory of odpiralnicasi.com, then I actually thought about making a version for London, Amsterdam or San Francisco with Yelp data, for which I would have to crawl an entire Yelp city directory, a task I’m not sure it would succeed. Yelp would probably block my IP before I could harvest a significant portion of what interested me.

So I decided I would use the Najdi.si maps business directory. Disclosure: I work there, so I have access to the database with various business data, which is being kept current.

For every company, I took out only the name, geo coordinates, business hours and business category, then I constructed the animated maps. Before I delve into that, a short video of economic activity in Slovenia in course of a typical Monday.

Economic activity in Slovenia from Marko O’Hara on Vimeo.

The animated chart you see on the bottom shows the number of active establishments in various economic categories, such as Restaurants and catering, Industry, Shopping, etc. The full list is:

blue: Computers and IT,
red: Restaurants and catering,
green: Home and garden,
yellow: Beauty and health,
pink: General business,
orange: Free time,
violet: Industry,
magenta: Culture and schooling

Rendering the maps and constructing the visualization

Rendering one frame in one city at a specific time is just a matter of setting appropriate latitude, longitude and zoom level on the map, selecting the desired time and plotting on the map all establishments that are open at that time. I used Processing to do that, and for the heat map part I used this excellent example by Philipp Seifried. As a finishing touch, I made maps to switch between day and night styles at appropriate times.

To do entire video, I had to write a parallel rendering queue lest the rendering of a single video took an eternity – Eclipse project available by email request.

To complicate things a bit I decided to include up to four different places on the same map, so the viewer could compare opening hours in Ljubljana in different economic categories, or see how different cities woke up and went to sleep at different times.

A typical frame looks like this:

Video frame / comparison of business activity in Nova Gorica, Koper, Celje and Novo Mesto at noon

Here’s an example for different economic activities in Ljubljana:

Economic activity in Ljubljana – four categories from Marko O’Hara on Vimeo.

top left: General business
top right: Restaurants and catering
bottom left: Industry,
bottom right:Beauty and health

Here’s a comparison between Ljubljana and the city of Maribor:

opentimes ljmb.mp4 from Marko O’Hara on Vimeo.

left: Ljubljana
right: Maribor

And here a comparison of business activity in Nova Gorica, Koper, Celje and Novo Mesto:

opentimes kpnmceng.mp4 from Marko O’Hara on Vimeo.

top left: Nova Gorica
top right: Koper
bottom left: Novo Mesto,
bottom right:Celje

Commentary

I mostly did this to be able to visually compare levels of business activity in Ljubljana. First of all, the heatmap technique I employed here turned out to be somewhat unreliable for video purposes, because it colors the dots relative to the highest concentration. But concentration and absolute numbers of active businesses change from frame to frame, so it seems that at night there’s more activity that during the day.

Even so it’s still clear that restaurants, bars and clubs are still pretty much open when other activity starts to die down.

This is Ljubljana at noon, again:

top left: General business
top right: Restaurants and catering
bottom left: Industry,
bottom right:Beauty and health

The big spot in the northeast is the mall region, where untold number of business operate in ten or more big malls. Business concentration there dwarfs everything else in the city, except maybe in industrial category.

Below is Ljubljana at eight o’clock in the evening. Pretty much everything has closed down except for eating and drinking, and maybe the cinema theater in the mall.

Below: Ljubljana at ten o’clock in the evening. Some businesses don’t close down at all. I double checked the primary data source and it’s true. There are cleaning services that stay open during the night, etc.

I’m relatively satisfied with results except for the heatmap issue. I may correct that if I get the data for a bigger city.

by virostatiq - October 8, 2013April 11, 2014

Slovenian real estate prices mapped

There has recently been a flurry of activity by self-made mappers on the net that major media have noticed. It seems that proliferation of tools such as the excellent TileMill does help to make custom maps a relatively painless, yet still laborious process.

In my experience, a major hurdle in this process is getting good data. Governments and corporations around the globe have made acquiring the goods easier, but the quality frequently leaves one wanting. More about this particular dataset later.

This map is my attempt to visualize real estate prices in Slovenia. Buildings are colored according to the most expensive unit they contain, except in some cases where data is bad. More below.

See the map!

A map of real estate prices in Slovenia.

About the dataset

This dataset is provided by GURS, a government institution. I used it before, to make the map of structure ages in Ljubljana. It comes in a variety of formats, such as SHP (geometry) and text (building properties) files, which were clearly dumped from database tables.

It has some severe problems. For example, some bigger and more expensive buildings contain many units, but these units all hold the same value regardless of their useful area. To make matters more complicated, other multiunit buildings don’t hold the same value for the units they contain. They are, in other words, evidenced correctly. Then, there are building compounds, like the nuclear power plant in Krško, in which every building clearly holds the exorbitant value of entire compound. Some other buildings have price value as zero, and so on.

All of this doesn’t even start to address the quality of valuation the government inspectors performed. In the opinion of many property owners, the values are too low. There’s a new round of valuation coming, in which the values are reportedly bound to drop by further five to twenty percent, if I remember correctly. It will be interesting to make another map with the valuation differences some day.

Massaging the data

This means that the above map is my interpretation of the dataset beyond the visualization itself. In calculating values for visualization, there were several decisions I made:

For multiunit buildings, I calculated the cost of square meter for every unit, then colored the building with color value of the most expensive unit. This was necessary, because some buildings contain many communal areas, garages and parking lots, which are all independently valued. I first tried with a simple average value, but the apartment buildings with many parking boxes and garages were then valued deceivingly low. I tried to make the map more apartment-oriented, so this was a necessary decision to make it more accurately reflect the market.
For incorrectly evidenced buildings with same value (high) unit value, I took the price of one unit, divided by sum of unit areas. I could do this on one unit only, but which one? There’s no easy answer. The average seemed the way to go.

I also made a list of the most expensive buildings by their total Euro value. Individual unit values were summed, except in cases described in the second bullet point above. there I simply took the price of one unit. It’s accessible as a separate vector layer under “Most expensive buildings” menu item.

Findings

Turns out the most expensive buildings are mostly power plants, which is not surprising. In Ljubljana, two of the most expensive buildings were completed recently. Well, the Stožice stadium was not really completed. I don’t know whether it was paid for or not – this is a discourse best suited for political tabloids. See the gallery:

It’s also hardly surprising that the capital and the coast are areas with the most expensive real estate available. The state of city of Maribor is sad to see, though, at least in comparison to Ljubljana.

I suggest taking the tour in the map itself, where I go into a little more depth for some towns and cities. Also, be sure to click the “Most expensive buildings”, then hovering the mouse pointer over highlighted buildings to get an idea of their total cost and price per square meter, which in many cases diverges dramatically.

Here are two charts showing price/m2 distribution at different intervals in time.
This one is an all-time chart. Most buildings are valued low, since all ages were taken into account.

This one shows the period between year 2008 and now, in other words, since the crisis struck. Nevertheless, more expensive buildings seem to prevail. No wonder, since they are new. But that probably also means that there’s more apartment building construction relative to countryside development. I’m not really a real estate expert, so if anyone has a suggestion, comment away.

Credits

Inspiration for the tour was this excellent visualization by the Pulitzer center.

I also have to thank the kind people at GURS for providing me with data. They know it’s flawed somewhat, but all in all it’s not so bad.

Disclaimer

As I’ve noted before, this map is a result of my interpretation of government data. I’m in no way I responsible for any misunderstandings arising from this map. If you want to see the actual valuation of your building or building unit, please consult GURS or use their web application to find out.