A blog about things that interest me, politics, news, media, architecture, development, environment, local history, secularism, web, dublin ireland, tara

Contact me at expectationlost@gmail.com

Friday 16 May 2014

Climate Action Network Europe's Climate Change MEP scorecard is flawed and being misused

Climate Action Network (CAN)

Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe is Europe's largest coalition working on climate and energy issues. With over 120 member organisations in more than 25 European countries, CAN Europe works to prevent dangerous climate change and promote sustainable climate and energy policy in Europe.

CAN's funding.

CAN's Irish members are Earthwatch (Friends of the Earth Ireland), GRIAN - Greenhouse Ireland Action Network and Trocaire.

MEP SCORECARDS: Ranking European Parliamentarians on Climate Action.

Ireland MEPs Scorecard.

I found this because I have an interest in these political scorecards as an aid to following politics but often they don't take into account people who haven't served a full term for whatever reason, Votewatch.eu also had this problem with its previous scorecard but they made a new one for this election which is more accurate. I'm not a member of the Socialist Party I just looked at the scorecard and immediately knew it was flawed.

I'm in favour of strong action on tackling the pollution that creates climate change and I believe the Socialist Party are too. The CAN Europe MEP scoreboard looks at ten questions over the last European parliament term and gives a score out of 100 if MEPs vote match the way they think you should have in order to tackle climate change. It describes the track record on climate change Joe Higgins SP over 10 votes of as 'VERY BAD'.


The scorecard Ireland on page 16.

unfortunately it doesn't take into account that he was only an MEP for 1 of these vote as far as I can figure it, and on that 1 day he didn't vote on anything, it does asterisk the result to say he wasn't a MEP for the full term, but there is no justification for listing him as bottom of the list, 'VERY BAD'. on the basis of one vote, this is why they take 10 votes to show an overview. I emailed CAN Europe to correct this a month ago but they refuse to correct the flaw. I put together a spreadsheet to check their data and to check whether my concern about their error was correct climate votes



it also give 100% grades to people who were MEPS for 2 votes which isn't fair either.

the 10 questions CAN Europe used

This 'very bad' listing has been used by their opponents directly,



and indirectly


Paul Murphy's score is 67%, described as GOOD, obviously a scorecard can be a crude tool and may not represent considered reasons for a vote so I searched up the records of the three votes Paul Murphy got no score for on the EU parliament website.

The CAN Europe background document uses votewatch.eu to list the votes which I then followed a link to the actual vote on the EU parliament website which has links at the top of the page to explanations of votes but I'm not sure if they refer to the vote on the proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on energy efficiency and repealing Directives 2004/8/EC and 2006/32/EC and I could not a find a reason Paul Murphy didn't vote on the two other votes he scored zero for. I asked Paul Murphy for an explaination.

CAN Europe's analysis



Which New Meps Have Signed The Climate Pledge? only 1 in Ireland Nessa Childers. Paul Murphy did not get elected.

70 new MEPs become climate ambassadors 28 May 2014

Email correspondence

Apr 15, 2014

hi

does your climate vote scorecard http://caneurope.org/voteforclimateaction properly take into account MEPs who haven't served a full term, either by being replaced or replacing somebody else ?

on page 16 for Ireland you have Joe Higgins MEP at 0% and even though you point out he hasn't been an MEP is it fair to record him at 0%?

Can you published a list of the votes you scored on so I can check

thanks steve white

hi

does your climate vote scorecard http://caneurope.org/voteforclimateaction properly take into account MEPs who haven't served a full term, either by being replaced or replacing somebody else ?

on page 16 for Ireland you have Joe Higgins MEP at 0% and even though you point out he hasn't been an MEP is it fair to record him at 0%?

Can you published a list of the votes you scored on so I can check

thanks steve white

you can't score somebody at 0% deemed them VERY BAD for a person who wasn't MEP for all but 1 vote. An asterisk isn't good enough

http://www.caneurope.org/resources/doc_view/2370-ireland-meps-and-party-scorecard-2014

he was only an MEP for one vote and he wasn't there, he was absent with is unfortunate, but that's why you look at MEPs over 10 votes, so its unfair to score him on one vote so you must remove him from the very bottom of the list.

thanks steve white

May 14 2014

you can't score somebody at 0% deemed them VERY BAD for a person who wasn't MEP for all but 1 vote. An asterisk isn't good enough

http://www.caneurope.org/resources/doc_view/2370-ireland-meps-and-party-scorecard-2014

he was only an MEP for one vote and he wasn't there, he was absent with is unfortunate, but that's why you look at MEPs over 10 votes, so its unfair to score him on one vote so you must remove him from the very bottom of the list.

thanks steve white


does your climate vote scorecard http://caneurope.org/voteforclimateaction properly take into account MEPs who haven't served a full term, either by being replaced or replacing somebody else ?

on page 16 for Ireland you have Joe Higgins MEP at 0% and even though you point out he hasn't been an MEP is it fair to record him at 0%?


thanks steve white

I also sent it the following on May 17th to Wendel Trio, CAN Europe Director, wendel@caneurope.org who ignored my email.

MEP SCORECARDS: Ranking European Parliamentarians on Climate Action
http://www.caneurope.org/VoteForClimateAction

I found this because I have an interest in these political scorecards as an aid to following politics but often they don't take into account people who haven't served a full term for whatever reason, Votewatch.eu also had this problem with its previous scorecard but they made a new one for this election which is more accurate. I'm not a member of the Socialist Party I just looked at the scorecard and immediately knew it was flawed.

I'm in favour of strong action on tackling the pollution that creates climate change and I believe the Socialist Party are too. The CAN Europe MEP scoreboard looks at ten questions over the last European parliament term and gives a score out of 100 if MEPs vote match the way they think you should have in order to tackle climate change. It describes the track record on climate change Joe Higgins SP over 10 votes of as 'VERY BAD'.

the scorecard http://caneurope.org/resources/doc_download/2407-mep-scorecards-complete-collection Ireland on page 16

unfortunately it doesn't take into account that he was only an MEP for 1 of these vote as far as I can figure it, and on that 1 day he didn't vote on anything, it does asterisk the result to say he wasn't a MEP for the full term, but there is no justification for listing him as bottom of the list, 'VERY BAD' on the basis of one vote, this is why they take 10 votes to show an overview. I emailed CAN Europe to correct this a month ago but they refuse to correct the flaw. I put together a spreadsheet to check their data and to check whether my concern about their error was correct https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14IKB4sd6MuL8N4gXCoATzSJ6xuLipW9EE_neZuh6GP0/edit#gid=535807960

the 10 questions http://www.caneurope.org/resources/doc_download/2409-mep-scorecards-background-document

This 'very bad' listing has been used by their opponents directly

Mark Dearey @MarkDearey Apr 13 Green Party
Jim Higgins of Fine Gael and Joe Higgins are bottom of the class when it comes to voting on Climate Change as MEPs. http://caneurope.org/voteforclimateaction/index.php?gktab=3 …” http://caneurope.org/voteforclimateaction/index.php?gktab=3 …” https://twitter.com/MarkDearey/status/455367559223984129

and indirectly
Climate Action Network gave @EmerCostello MEP a 100% scorecard on climate change - the only #Dublin #EP14 candidate to achieve full marks https://twitter.com/labour/status/457190796337643521

CAN Europe's analysis http://www.caneurope.org/resources/doc_download/2408-mep-scorecards-analysis

you can't score somebody at 0% deemed them VERY BAD for a person who wasn't MEP for all but 1 vote. An asterisk isn't good enough

he was only an MEP for one vote and he didn't vote on anything that day, but that's why you look at MEPs over 10 votes, so its unfair to score him on one vote so you must remove him from the very bottom of the list.

thanks steve white

Matthew Keys their communications Director finally replied,

As with any analysis of this scale and size, it is difficult to arrive at a perfect methodology and to represent it graphically in a way that will satisfy everyone. We decided to incorporate all MEPs and developed a methodology accordingly. We felt that using an asterisk and a footnote to highlight the fact that an MEP had not served a full term, was the most appropriate method for these particular scorecards.

We did this because if we had deleted some MEPs' scores and not others - who had say 2 or 3 votes - then we would also be open to criticism for not providing the full picture, or of favouring certain MEPs over others.

Although we have provided an analysis of MEPs' individual records, the focus of our communication has overwhelmingly been on highlighting the political parties and their overall performance. For example, if you look at the information we are sharing on Twitter for the last few weeks, then you can see that we are highlighting the parties and not the MEPs individually.

We respect that you disagree with our approach concerning this particular issue, but hopefully you understand why we chose this approach and our reasons for not deleting certain MEPs


All the best,

Matthew



My reply May 17th 2014

it is not right to have a person last on the list based on 1 vote, that is it not right, not in slightest, not in anyway. You can not deem his voting record on climate change VERY BAD based on 1 vote, it is slanderous.

remove Joe Higgins from the bottom of the Irish list of MEPs.

thank you.


the best would not releasing misleading info Matthews Keys and not to arrogantly ignore someone correcting you because it doesn't suit you.

Im sure I sent an email to atleast one of the Irish partners but I should have sent an email to more of them and followed it up.

Thursday 15 May 2014

Oireachtas Calendar

I've turned scraper off for the momemt.

The oireachtas have finally provided a digital calendar with .ics file output which I've been looking for, but it only seems to output one an event at a time, rather then being able to subscribe to an updating calendar and http://www.oireachtas.ie/eventsCalendar/conf/en/events/event-21398.ics its not the proper file (MIME) type.

Why did they go to the bother of creating a digital calendar but then only allow people to add one event at a time, surely allowing people subscribe to an updating calendar would make it truly useful.

Oireachtas Calendar Events

I've written a python scraper which outputs these files each day adding any new information, the Oireachtas calendar file outputs each item in the Dail for one session into one file, I scraped and split these up into separate events.
finaltestdsc.py and simpler collection of each sessions at oircal.py




Full Page version of calendar

http://www.thecatchment.org/oircal/oircal.ics everything in one file
http://www.thecatchment.org/oircal/oircalf.ics everything in one file individualised events
http://www.thecatchment.org/oircal/oircalfcomm.ics Committees
http://www.thecatchment.org/oircal/oircalfsean.ics Seanad in individiual events
http://www.thecatchment.org/oircal/oircalfdail.ics Dail in individiual events

https://www.google.com/calendar/

Other Calendars > Add by URL



to have each house split into individual events and one with everything in one

but it still has all sorts of problems with the Irish language and proper ical format and not managing to deal with every malformation or variance in the source data.

there doesn't seem to be much software that make sense of this info, or say exactly how you make a file compatible.

still have problem with the file not updating due to caching issues, (maybe try adding ?noCache to the url) can't even find a simple way to refresh the file.

I found https://github.com/diN0bot/iCal-Analyzer which counts event by category, but there are no cateogories on the Dail Calendars.

some ical to csv convertors
http://www.gcal2excel.com/
http://www.projectwizards.net/en/support/?f=ics2csv

i've used tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545 icalendar specs and icalendar validators http://severinghaus.org/projects/icv/ http://icalvalid.cloudapp.net/

Government publishes Programme of Dáil Reform September 2013



Dail Reform Legislative Flow Chart

Cabinet handbook

i like timeflow https://github.com/FlowingMedia/TimeFlow/wiki but there no new development on it and it was only desktop so i tried to recreate it with tableau public