From the monthly archives:

August 2009

How Important Is China?

25 August 2009

Today I attended a presentation by TD Securities global strategist Stephen Koukoulas. While exploring the “green shoots” of recovery, Koukoulas made an interesting observation about China. Many observers of the Australian economy, Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens included, place great weight on the importance of China for Australia’s economy. But Koukoulas pointed out that, while [...]

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Taking It Too Far: Verb and Adjective Clouds

21 August 2009

I will freely admit that I am now going overboard, but commenter Lettuce All Rejoice asked what the Rudd word cloud would look like if it was broken down into nouns, verbs and adjectives. Fortunately, the Stanford Natural Language Processing Group make a statistical parser freely available for download. So, I used this to parse [...]

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Malcolm Turnbull’s Word Cloud

20 August 2009

My last post looked at the favourite words of Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd. In the interests of balance, I will now turn the word cloud lens onto the opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull’s speeches are conveniently assembled online and the graphic below illustrates the frequency of his words from speeches made in 2009. Unlike [...]

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What is Kevin Saying?

18 August 2009

Last week, Politico published an analysis of Barack Obama’s language. The words he used most often were “America”, “Health” and “Economy” (Politico included “American” in the count along with “America”). This prompts the obvious question: what are the favourite words of our own Kevin Rudd? Fortunately, the prime minster’s website publishes transcripts of all Kevin’s [...]

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Where Have the Fish Come From?

11 August 2009

After reading my posts on the international arms trade, a friend thought I might be interested in some data on the international trade in fish. While I know almost as little about fish as about arms, I always welcome good data. The data in question is published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of [...]

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The Big Arms Traders

1 August 2009

My last post looked at the international arms trade. Taking data from SIPRI, I produced maps showing arms exports for a number of countries, including Australia and the USA. While these maps gave an indication of the spread of arms trading, it did not show which are the biggest overall importers and exporters of arms. [...]

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