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Road crack detection with stacked neural networks
My blog for the Amsterdam Intelligence website. The full Masters Thesis is available here. The municipality of Amsterdam is responsible for 1,727km of roads. Stretched out in a row, this would take you from Amsterdam to the tip of Algeria, and every year these roads need inspecting and maintaining. So how should the Mobility and Public…
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The Greens’ path to breakthrough runs through the Labour Party
Since the 2019 election, the Greens have been quietly creeping up in polls. Now sat at 5-7% in averages, the party is at its highest point since summer 2019, which was itself the Green’s best polling since before 2015. 5-7% might not seem like a lot, but in a FPTP election with dozens of seats…
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Five Lessons from the Metro Mayor Elections
Back in April, I tried to consider what our expectations of the 8 combined authority (metro) mayoral elections should be. As I said at the time, these weren’t meant to be predictions, but an attempt to think about what a “baseline” result would look like, based solely on national polls and general election results. On…
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Labour stands to gain in the metro mayor elections
As May 21st’s ‘Super Thursday’ elections come into view, all eyes are on whether Nicola Sturgeon will secure her majority for independence, and whether Labour will cling on in Hartlepool. But Super Tuesday also features 8 of England’s biggest electoral tests, in the form of combined authority mayoral elections. These elections will give individual politicians…
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If the Alba Party gets more than 5%, it could be catastrophic for unionist parties (but it probably won’t)
When it comes to political news, there is little more sensational than a prominent politician setting up a new party. Today, Alex Salmond, former First Minister of Scotland, announced he would be starting a new pro-Independence party – The Alba Party – to contest the Scottish Parliament election in May. Will it make any difference?…
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Weaver Vale Constituency Labour Party becomes the 166th to back PR, one quarter of all CLPs
Weaver Vale CLP became the 166th local branch of the Labour Party to pass a motion calling for Proportional Representation this week. That means over a quarter of CLPs have passed a motion in recent years, making PR one of the most called for policies in Labour history. The renewed push for PR among Labour…
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Which states should have the first four primaries? The case for picking the weirdest ones
This week, Democratic National Convention chair Tom Perez declared his support for changing the order of presidential primaries and caucuses so that Iowa and New Hampshire are toppled from their respective ‘first in the nation’ positions. Perez argues that more diverse states should be prioritised in selecting the Democrats’ future presidential candidates, presumably driven partly…
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What’s up with the Sunday Times MRP projection?
All over Twitter today has been discussion of a Sunday Times MRP model which reportedly showed that if an election were held today, Boris Johnson would lose his majority and his seat. It’s a striking result but not totally inconsistent with recent national polls which have shown Labour making gains. It caught my attention, though,…
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What can mapping a Hungarian by-election tell us about authoritarianism?
In October, voters in Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén’s 6th district voted in an interim election to replace Fidesz MP Ferenc Koncz, who had died in a motorcycle accident in July. With Fidesz’s two-thirds majority at stake, the by-election became an important test for the opposition’s ability to turn out voters. In 2018, Fidesz did not win a majority…
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Uniform swing outperformed state polls for the first time in US polling history in 2020
The 2020 election had a huge focus on state polls – far more so than in 2016, when more national polls were commissioned and discussed. This makes sense given the distorting effect of the electoral college. The renewed focus was supposed to ensure another upset would not happen again, with higher quality polls in swing…
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Owen Winter 