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Iain Dale has made a decision

Count me in, Iain.

Could the Washington Post have got it wrong?

Really fascinating post by Hannah Devlin over on Science Central. Could the Washington Post have bungled its analysis of the Iranian election results?

Tehran-next-the-sea

Question: What's the difference between Iran’s Guardian Council and Plymouth City Council?

Answer: The former baulked at banning Twitter.

Plymouth, on the other hand, has no such qualms. Council staff have barred from using the site after the city's Labour group leader Tudor Evans called a member of the BNP a “Nazi” while on the site.

Erm... That's right Plymouth, show them how it's done.

Devilish digits in Iran's election

Since the Iranian elections earlier this month, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who thinks Ahmadinejad fights a clean fight.

With hard fact mired in swirling stories and deliberate obfuscation, pollsters and pundits have jumped on the unbelievable appearance of Ahmadinejad doing well in urban areas – where the vitriol against him has swelled to its most powerful proportions – and even his opponents' home turfs.

But, as Daniel pointed out on Saturday, the devil’s in the digits. When people cheat with numbers, those numbers often give them away.

With the same thought in mind, Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco, at the Washington Post, have taken a statistician’s eye-glass to the results and revealed some intriguing trends.

“last digits [such as 7and 9 in a vote count of 14,579] in a fair election don't tell us anything about the candidates, the make-up of the electorate or the context of the election,” they write.

“They are random noise in the sense that a fair vote count is as likely to end in 1 as it is to end in 2, 3, 4, or any other numeral. But that's exactly why they can serve as a litmus test for election fraud.”

So, in a natural selection of results in a fair vote, you’d expect each number (from one to ten) to round-off the vote-count one in ten times. Not in Iran’s provincial results. The number 7 is the final digit 17 per cent of the time, the number 5 only 4 per cent of the time.

According to The Post, there’s a less than 4 in 100 chance of a fair election producing spikes and drops like that.

And the mistakes aren't only there because the little Ahmedinejad was busy plotting domination while the other children diligently paid attention to their maths classes.

Humans, not just power-crazed leaders, are bad at making up random selections of numbers. If asked to, we’ll accidently reproduce some numbers more often that others.

Tests have also shown that, if asked to jot down a random selection of double-digit numbers, our lazy minds stray towards adjacent digits like 23, 45, or 67.

So back to Iran. What percentage of number-pairs contain ‘non-adjacent’ numbers? Only sixty-two.

Meet the Parents is a Jewish plot

Meet the Nutters.

It seems to me, watching clips from Iranian television, that there are a lot of things they could do with fixing before they got round to fixing an election.

Here is their brilliant theory on how the Jews timed Meet the Parents to help them out of their problems with geo-politics.

They can't be serious? Oh yes they can...

The best of the web from inside Iran

Change for Iran: “government is now playing a masterpiece mind game, all people here are so confused about what is real and who to trust”

Tehran Live: “Finally i could upload the videos of clash and conflict between protestors to election results and riot police forces and somewhere Basij forces…”

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=ahriman46&view=videos: A collection of amateur videos charting the course of the elections

http://iran.twazzup.com/: An updating collection of Twitter messages from Iran

Whers’s My Vote?: A facebook page posting news from inside Iran

The National Iranian American Council: blogging and translating Twitter messages from Farsi into English

Why Ahmadinejad mustn't win

Blogging in Iran: 10 to watch

One can't help wondering what Iran's bloggers would have posted about the 1979 Revolution.

They'd certainly have offered up a deluge of cyber commentary. Iranians have embraced the internet: today they author more than 700,000 blogs. Some take the official line, some protest at great danger to themselves and some simply chronicle day-to-day life in Tehran. All of them offer valuable insight into a society that has often been difficult for the West to understand.

Comment Central rounds up the 10 blogs that anyone interested in Iran's past, present and uncertain future should keep an eye on.

1) Personal Memos: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

We'd better start from the top. Namely the only 'official' Iran blog, penned by none other than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He started posting with great enthusiasm for this new medium:

The purpose & objective of the formation of this site was having a straight, direct and immediate contact with the visitors and addresses

Then followed up with a message to the Americans, ruminations of a Shakespearean nature and a Merry Christmas greeting. But since December 2007, Ahmadinejad has obviously been preoccupied with other things. You'll learn more about what the leader of Iran is up to elsewhere.

2) Tehran Bureau

One of the newest blogs to come out of Iran. Tehran Bureau offers up opinions from a group of independent voices. This is the place to head if you want to know what it feels like to be an American in Iran for the first time or how a schoolchild experienced the revolution.

These bloggers are not a fan of the short, pithy post. But they offer up considered analysis and eloquent essays on Iran, past and present. Well worth the click.

3) Editor Myself

Blogging in Iran is a dangerous business. And no-one knows this better than Hossein Derakshan. Nicknamed 'the blogfather', he was instrumental in establishing Iran's cyber community. He exposed the government's crackdown on civil liberties, took several forbidden trips to Israel and posted frequently about the arrests of writers in Tehran.

Then, last autumn, Derakshan returned to Iran on break from his SOAS  graduates studies. He has not returned. The last post on his much-read blog dates from October 6th, an enduring reminder of his interrupted story. His whereabouts remains unknown.

4) Persian Paradox

The world has been watching Massoumeh Ebtekar since she emerged as the spokesman 'Sister Mary' during the Iran Hostage Crisis. A protegee of President Khatami, she became Iran's first female Vice-President and continues to be active politically.

Unsurprisingly, her regularly updated blog has a large following. The former editor posts on everything from the environment to national politics to messages for Obama. One to keep an eye on as Khatami throws his hat into the race once more.

5) Memri Blog and Iran News Blog

Two to bookmark for readers who want a quick hit of headlines and a sense of what people are talking about on the ground.

The Memri blogs have come in for their share of criticism but there is no doubt that this offering from their stable collects many of the most pertinent bits of Iran news. Good for pointing you in the direction of the story. Next, head over to Iran News Blog to see how one blogger uses cartoons and images to make his point about reform.

6) DDMMYYY

The perfect site for those Brits who want to see Iran through the eyes of someone at ease in both cultures. DDMMYYY's author is a recent transplant from the UK to Iran (his father's homeland). He records his transition in wry, anthropological fashion.

As the poster struggles to adjust to his adoptive land, his take on everything from American wrestling to spring cleaning, Iranian style, give you a taste for life in Tehran.

7) Omid Memarian

Omid Memarian is one of the poster children in the Iranian blogging community. He started out commenting in Tehran where he became one of the strongest voices for reform. He now blogs in both Farsi and English from Berkeley, USA. This relocation has seen his prose shift to a new focus on US-Iranian relations.

Memarian suffered torture and imprisonment in his early days and is a strong advocate for change in Iran. If you don't know his blog, you may have seen commentary from him in the US media.

8) 4Equality

If your Farsi isn't up to scratch, you can read this blog in a number of other languages. It's a news-source with a mission: namely to get one million signatures on a petition protesting the position of Iranian women.

4Equality won the Reporters without Borders Award in 2008 and remains widely read and updated. But it's posters continue to operate in difficult conditions. At the time it received the award, the blog had been blocked 17 times and 48 of those connected with it had been sent to prison. More arrests have followed.

9) Reza Pahlavi

The Shah may be gone but the voice of the Pahlavis lives on. Specifically in the form of Reza Pahlavi's blog. The Shah's son is now based in the States from where he comments on human rights in his homeland. Not the most restrained of blogs from a personal promotion perspective but useful for highlighting liberty issues in Iran.

10) Inside Iran

Another Iranian blogger who persists despite opposition from the government. Jadi has been banned from posting in Farsi but still speaks out in a series of English posts. His subjects vary from the moral police to his views on Obama. The blog is a little rough around the edges but it shows you what the keyboard can produce when it's used as a weapon for truth.

Looking for more?

A fuller list of Iranian blogs can be found here. For those of you with Persian proficiency, Mojtaba Saminejad remains one of the most respected bloggers around. If you're interested in military developments and defence, then Uskowi on Iran is the place for you. Plateau of Iran offers a commentary on Iranian culture while Mr Behi is a prime example of the expat cyber-community.

The mind of Iran's most powerful leader

This new FORA video takes us inside the world of Ayatollah Khamenei.

What does he really think about Ahmadinejad, America and Israel? What are his plans for Iran? And how should the West deal with him?

If you can't see this video, click here

A book to read and film to see: Persepolis

You are probably on to this already, but I've only just noticed. Marjane Satrapi's brilliant graphic account of her childhood and adolescence has been turned into a film.

What do I mean by graphic? I mean she not just written her autobiography, but also drawn. Persepolis reads and looks like a comic.

But it is, in fact, one of the best books I have read about Iran and growing up after the revolution.

Satrapi is very sensitive about Iran and her books (there are two volumes) are all the more devastating for that.