Phil Swatton

@philswatton.bsky.social

299 Followers 433 Following

Work as a senior data scientist at the Alan Turing Institute, background in political science. Views my own and not necessarily shared by my employer. https://philswatton.github.io/

First part of report cover page containing title saying "Detecting AI-Generated Text" followed by "Informal Literature Review" and the first paragraph of the executive summary.
A JFK campaign poster with a picture of a machine with a face and several arms. An alarmed worker looks on. The text reads "If Automation takes over your job... who will you want in the White House?"
Cover page of a house of lords report titled 'Bleeding to death: the science and technology growth emergency'
Screenshot of discussion of 1st contribution from PDF
Screenshot of start of section exploring why demographics are so popular in political discourse.
Plot with first PCA dimension on x-axis and second PCA dimesnion on Y-axis. Large counts of Lab, Con, and LD suggest it would be difficult to predict voters of other parties without additional information.
Screenshot from the PDF introducing mutual information.
Plot showing that as the % of largest two parties increases, expected accuracy of ideology models increases. Regression is on EES models only, but extrapolates roguhly in line with BES.
Plot show EES results. Broadly, CIs prevent establishing a best model for any single country. However, in 13/15 countries ideology models perform better than than demographics models. Ireland and Portugal are the exceptions to this pattern.
Plot breaking down Kappa by party. Without constituency variables, most models only successfully predict Conservative and Labour and maybe the Lib Dems. With constituency variables, or for the model including past vote choice, third parties start being predicted.
Graph showing predictive performance of models in BES. Baseline in terms of assuming all vote Conservative is at roughly 45%, demographics models at 52% (56% with constituency variables), ideology at 65% (71% with constituency variables), combining both at 66% (71% with constituency variables), and past vote choice at 75% (in both cases)
Screenshot of BES demographic variables list from the PDF
Screenshot of section making argument on non-selection of mediators from the PDF
Screenshot of how predictive inference contributes to abductive process via pragmatic inference from the PDF
Screenshot of paragraph setting out role of abductive reasoning in poli sci from the pdf
Screenshot of start of section introducing the sociological modelling tradition from the PDF
Screenshot of the introduction from the PDF
Screenshot of the abstract from the PDF
Cropped photo of text from Supermac by DR Thorpe. Text reads: "Although Macmillan, as a Privy Councillor and former Cabinet Minister, was on the Opposition fring bench when he returned to the house in November 1945, he was still regarded as a maverick figure, 'reputed to be overprone to philander with the Socialists'. Brendan Bracken regarded him as a 'Neo-Socialist' and was relieved when Macmillan's proposal to change the party's name to 'The New Democratic Party' was rejected by the 1946 party conference.
A photograph of Abraham Lincoln with the quote "Don't believe everything you read on the Internet just because there's a picture with a quote next to it."
A photo of some text in a book. The text reads: Gödel, as his latest biographer writes, 'believed that his proof was profoundly encouraging for human activity. Humans will always be able to recognize some truths through intuition, he consistently maintained, that can never be established even by the most advanced computing machine. A machine that can literally duplicate the reasoning, learning, planning, and problem-solving ability of the human mind will be forever impossible if Gödel was right about what he believed to be the more far-reaching implications of his theorem.'
A screenshot of a complete translation task in duolingo, where I have successfully translated "cappuccino" (English) to "capuccino" (Italian)
A photo of an essay titled "In Praise of Unpunctuality"
Screenshot of the title and first two paragraphs of the blog post.
Screenshot of the title and first two paragraphs of the blog post.
Plot showing the economic left-right versus EU positions of West European parties in different survey years. The party positions show a non-linear pattern, where far-left and far-right parties are more anti-EU, while centre-left and centre-right parties are pro-EU.
A screenshot of the title of the blog post: "What Makes the British Party System Spatially Distinctive?"