In the elevator at the hotel where we are staying for three days I kibbitz with the other passenger about elevator operators. “We’re old enough to remember those days,” they joke.

This other passenger is demonstrably older than me; not my parents’ age, but surely not my age either? But I am greeted as kin.

And I do remember those days.

I’m in the colourful livingroom of a friend where an evening of loud electronic music is about to begin. The demonstrably younger person sitting beside me leans over: “Hey, are you Dan’s father?”

I’m not.

But how did they know I was anyone’s father. Do I look old enough to be someone’s father? What’s my tell? Receding hairline? Style from the 1950s? Unsmooth skin? A withered gait? A careless Dick Van Dyke Show reference?

On balance I have always loved getting older. But inflection points, man.

There are few truly selfless people in the world, but I’m pretty sure that Shirley McGinn, who died on Saturday at the age of 87, was one of them.

I met Shirley for the first time when we both volunteered as judges for the Heritage Fair at Prince Street School when Oliver was a student there. To my surprise, Shirley not only knew who Oliver was, but appeared to have a pretty good understanding of him.

It was only later that I learned that Shirley was a regular volunteer at the school, and had, for several years already, been part of Oliver’s school life.

And later still I learned that when Shirley retired from a long career as a public school teacher, finishing at Parkdale, she started volunteering at Prince Street the very next day.

Shirley had the gift of being able to remember people, and, after our first meeting at the Heritage Fair, every time I ran into her she called me by name and asked after Oliver.

During a trip though the Queen Elizabeth Hospital last year I stopped to ask for information at the front desk; there, to my surprise, was Shirley, wearing her volunteer smock, ready with directions. Apparently volunteering at the school wasn’t enough to keep her busy.

Shirley McGinn lived a life that we all would do well to emulate; I will miss her, as I’m sure will the students and others whose lives she touched over the years.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that the second “I” in “Tidings” was actually a lower case “L”.

December 10 is Human Rights Day and the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations.

I didn’t know this when I set and printed an index card with the first sentence of Article I; a fortuitous year, then.

To celebrate this day, there’s a panel discussion “Science as a Right” happening on Monday, December 10 from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. at the Beaconsfield Carriage House in Charlottetown. More details in The Buzz.

Seventeen days ago I reported a bug in the Bookmarks app for Nextcloud. Three days ago it got fixed, and today I installed the updated version.

The bug I reported concerned the way that tags are entered when the “bookmarklet” for the app is invoked: after every tag entry you had to click on the “tags” field to regain focus and enter another tag. This has now been fixed, as you can see in this short screencast that shows me entering several tags in rapid succession:

Sometimes submitting bug reports can feel akin to throwing bug reports into a black hole; it’s nice when this proves not to be the case.

This afternoon’s screening of California Typewriter went perfectly: we had a good mix of people, including friends of typewriter collector Martin Howard, who featured prominently in the film.

Last month my friend Catherine Hennessey gifted me an Olympia Monica Electric S; it had a stuck carriage return key that I’ve just this very minute managed to repair by adding some grease and moving around some fiddly springs. And so here is a short video of the sales report from the screening (with apologies for the shaky variable focus; the camera rig was sketchy and the auto-focus kept kicking in).

Keeping Some of the Lights On: Redefining Energy Security is a fascinating reexamination of what we mean by “energy security.”

Because demand and supply influence each other, we come to a counter-intuitive conclusion: to improve energy security, we need to make the power grid less reliable. This would encourage resilience and substitution, and thus make industrial societies less vulnerable to supply interruptions.

In other words, if it’s an issue that renewable sources of energy are intermittent, why not change the nature of the problem we’re seeking to solve.

I appreciate the pains that CBC editors took to make it clear that the CBC itself wasn’t accusing Dave Stewart of looking dumb in a hat.

The Third Session of the Sixty-fifth General Assembly wrapped up on Wednesday after 14 sitting days and I’ve written some code to do some statistical analysis of how the session went.

The code is rough and hacky, mostly because the Legislative Assembly’s Hansard is published only as mostly-unstructured PDF files; there’s just enough structure to ferret out who’s speaking and what they said, but the process is prone to error because there are just enough variations in the formatting that it cannot be relied upon to work 100% of the time.

Look at this snippet from November 20, 2018, for example:

While the name of each person who speaks is rendered in bold in the PDF file, this doesn’t survive the conversion from PDF to text, so post-conversion I’m left with:

Cost of campaign to Island taxpayers
Question to the Minister of Workforce and
Advanced Learning: How much did that
promotion cost Island tax payers?
Speaker: The hon. Minister of Workforce
and Advanced Learning.
Mr. Gallant: Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I thank the hon. member for the question
and that was a very good promotion and we
had, I think, there was approximately seven
people that contacted us and there was over
200 contacted Workforce PEI.

At this point I’m left to deduce the names of speakers by looking for patterns common to all, which boils down to something like “one or more capitalized words that start the line and are followed by a colon.” Which, in regular expression terms, looks like this:

/^(([A-Z][a-zA-Z\.\-]+\s?\b){1,4}):/

So in this brief excerpt this pulls out “Speaker” and “Mr. Gallant,” helpfully. But also, unhelpfully, “Advanced Learning,” which gets caught by the same pattern matching.

Things are further complicated by the presence of names in Hansard that are not Members of the Legislative Assembly or clerical staff, like “Barry Jackson,” here:

The pattern matching also misses things like “Leader of the Opposition” (“of the” not being capitalized).

That all said, it’s possible, even with these deficiencies, to get some rough, inaccurate-but-not-too-much-so statistical summaries from Hansard.

To start, I used a Python script I wrote a few years ago to harvest all of the Hansard PDFs on the Legislative Assembly website and convert them to text files (using pdftotext).

Next, for the heavy lifting, I processed the individual text files with a PHP script that used the aforementioned pattern matching to extract each person speaking, what they said, and the number of words spoken, along with the date, into a CSV file.

I limited the script to the 14 sittings days from this session, and ended up with a file hansard.csv. Each line of that file represents one speaker, so, from the above example, you’ll see this:

2018-11-20,"Thank you, Mr. Chairman.","Mr. R. Brown",4
2018-11-20,"Are you going to make an opening comment, minister?",Chair,9

There are 11,782 “utterances” like this in the file, which means that, give or take, 11,782 times over 14 days someone spoke in the Legislative Assembly on something.

Taking that CSV file into a spreadsheet and creating a pivot table by speaker and total number of words, and then hand-editing out the aberrations, I end up with 73 people speaking in total (with some duplication, as when a member is acting as Chair of Committee of the Whole House they appear as, for example, “Chair (Casey)”, not as “Ms. Casey”).

With that done, I can start to pull together some summary data.

Members of the Legislative Assembly

There were 398,088 words spoken by Members of the Legislative Assembly; broken down by speaker:

Strangers

A total of 24 people were invited onto the floor as “strangers”–including me!–this session, speaking a total of 29,040 words. By stranger:

Others

Others recorded in Hansard include the Speaker, the Clerk and Clerk Assistants, the Chairs of Committee of the Whole House, and the generic “An Hon. Member”:

An Hon. Member

When the identity of the member speaking cannot be discerned, “An Hon. Member” is credited. Stringing together these utterances makes for interesting found poetry; here’s an example:

Oh, great.
Yes.
That’s over.
Sure.
Hydrogen.
Could you table a copy?
It starts (Indistinct)
Call the hour.
No one is clapping for that one.
Oh.
Forget the facts.
Don’t confuse the (Indistinct)
There’s the truth.

Text Analysis

The excellent q utility allows SQL queries to be run on CSV files, allowing mentions of particular words or phrases to be counted. For example, here’s a query to count mentions of “Stars for Life,” the non-profit organization I sit on the board of:

q -H -d, "SELECT count(*) from ./hansard.csv where text like '%Stars for Life%'"

The result is 12. To find out who mentioned Stars for Life, I can do:

q -H -d, "SELECT speaker,count(*) as mentions from ./hansard.csv where text like '%Stars for Life%' group by speaker"

which produces:

Leader of the Opposition,1
Minister,1
Mr. MacEwen,2
Ms. Casey,4
Ms. Mundy,1
Peter Rukavina,2
Speaker,1

Donald Trump was invoked several times this session, and I can find out by who with:

q -H -d, "SELECT speaker,count(*) as mentions from ./hansard.csv where text like '%Trump%' group by speaker"

which produces:

An Hon. Member,1
Mr. R. Brown,3

To see what was said about Donald Trump:

q -H -d, "SELECT speaker,text as mentions from ./hansard.csv where text like '%Trump%'"

which results in:

Mr. R. Brown,"You’re (Indistinct), you’re like Donald Trump, you want to divide the Island and not unite the Island."
Mr. R. Brown,"Okay, Trump."
Mr. R. Brown,"You know what; 30 million litres of fuel have been saved. 90,000 tonnes of carbon have been taken out of the air; 90 ,000 tonnes have been taken out, 90,000 tonnes, 30,000 tandem loads of pollution have been taken out of the air from little old PEI. But no, do we hear thanks from the Green Party? No, Islanders are wrong. They then go on about the economy and you know, over the last couple of months there’s been a discussion going on about populism and populist leaders, polarizing things, we have it in Donald Trump, polarizing things. They’re going to give you great things and they’re going to do great things for you. We have the Green Party is saying: You have to put a carbon tax in, you have to tax – they’re sinners, you have to tax them –"
An Hon. Member,(Indistinct) Donald Trump.

Take It For a Ride Yourself

If you want to take this out for a ride yourself, here are the things you’ll need:

• the CSV file of this session’s Hansard
• q for your operating system

Where next?

To make this kind of analysis easier, having access to a  version of Hansard where speakers and text are available as structured elements would be a big improvement.

For example, something like this:

<session date="2018-11-15">
  <utterance>
    <text>You’re (Indistinct), you’re like Donald Trump, you want to divide the Island and not unite the Island.</text>
    <wordcount>19</wordcount>
    <speaker>
      <name>Mr. R. Brown</name>
      <role>Minister of Communities, Land and Environment</role>
    <speaker>
  </utterance>
</session>

Other jurisdictions have moved in this direction, and I believe the Prince Edward Island is bound to have this capability eventually.

If you have any ideas about more accurate parsing of the Hansard PDF files, please let me know.

This morning’s project: this year’s Christmas card. More work to do for the reverse side, but I was happy with the way the JOY worked out.