Geo-mapped visualization of political party member distribution in Male'

Here is a quick mashup I cooked up today, displaying the geographic distribution of political party membership on the map of Male' on Google Maps. To view the distribution for a party, open the link for the visualization, select the name of the political party from the drop-down menu at the top right. The addresses of members of that party will then be flagged with a little red marker. You will be able to zoom in-out, pan and do all those other things typically seen in Google Maps. Click a red marker to see more details about that address, like the number of people belonging to the selected party that are registered under that address.

The party membership information used for this is a snapshot of the data (taken 7 February 2009) published on the Members of Political Parties web portal by the Elections Commission. There were a total of 4,447 people belonging to 2,711 addresses in Male' listed in the Elections Commission data. Each party had membership numbers (given in brackets) in Male' as follows: Adhaalathu Party (175), Dhivehi Qaumee Party (261), Dhivehi Rahjeyn Fageerukan Nahthaalumah Masahkaikuraa Party (650), Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party (243), Gaumee Ih'thihaadh (592), Islamic Democratic Party (89), Jumhooree Party (246), Maldivian Democratic Party (507), Maldivian National Congress (386), Maldivian Social Democratic Party (25), Peoples Party (476), Peoples' Alliance (422) and Social Liberal Party (375). The maximum number of persons listed on a single address for a party was 12 and the average was 1 person per address (per party).

The geo-location information for the addresses was derived from the excellent services at Male-map.com and EAtolls.com. A total of 1,928 addresses were successfully mapped using these services, leaving a difference of 783 addresses which were then discarded. It is worth noting that of these addresses left out, 478 were just Dhaftharu numbers.

Please note that I neither claim nor guarantee the correctness or the completeness of any of the information used. That said, I did my best to ensure data integrity throughout the whole process of generating the visualizations.

- Click here to view the visualization

Adhaalathu Party
Snapshot: Adhaalathu Party

Dhivehi Qaumee Party
Snapshot: Dhivehi Qaumee Party

Dhivehi Rahjeyn Fageerukan Nahthaalumah Masahkaikuraa Party
Snapshot: Dhivehi Rahjeyn Fageerukan
Nahthaalumah Masahkaikuraa Party

Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party
Snapshot: Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party

Gaumee Ih'thihaadh
Snapshot: Gaumee Ih'thihaadh

Islamic Democratic Party
Snapshot: Islamic Democratic Party

Jumhooree Party
Snapshot: Jumhooree Party

Maldivian Democratic Party
Snapshot: Maldivian Democratic Party

Maldivian National Congress
Snapshot: Maldivian National Congress

Maldivian Social Democratic Party
Snapshot: Maldivian Social Democratic Party

Peoples' Alliance
Snapshot: Peoples' Alliance

Peoples Party
Snapshot: Peoples Party

Social Liberal Party
Snapshot: Social Liberal Party

Phone usage (Maumoon, Political Parties, Government and Businesses)

I got curious today after reading an amusing blog post about an unsolicited SMS message someone had supposedly received from a mobile phone number registered to the current President of the Maldives Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. Now, this is a time of intense political competition between the various candidates camps and an originating number on a SMS is pretty easy to spoof, so I'm not sure if it really did originate from the said number. But that's not what really struck me...

What got my attention was the fact that there now was a publicly listed mobile phone number registered to Maumoon. I've never before seen a mobile number registered to him listed on the Dhiraagu e-Directory and a quick search through various old snapshots of e-Directory data that I had confirmed that there indeed had been none - atleast none up until early June which was the last e-Directory snapshot I had. Anyway, I grabbed a fresh snapshot of the e-Directory and spent a little while running some interesting queries on the data.

Here is some of what I found:

Numbers listed on e-Directory:
Mobile305198
Landline (Male')24423
Landline (Islands/Resorts)8750
Phones/Customer on Avg2.9


Political parties:
Dhivehi Rayyithunge Party92
Maldivian Democratic Party11
Social Liberal Party6
Adhaalath Party6
Islamic Democratic Party6
Jumhooree Party2
Peoples Party2


Registrants (Top 5):
Dhivehi Raajjeyge Gulhun Pvt. Ltd.833
Maldives Police Services200
State Electric Company Ltd.191
Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital167
Maldives Customs Service164


Most common names (Top 5):
Mohamed Rasheed1273
Ibrahim Rasheed1250
Ahmed Rasheed1089
Ahmed Mohamed1088
Mohamed Ali1087


Government (Top 5):
Maldives Police Services200
Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital167
Maldives Customs Service164
Min. of Defence & National Security141
President's Office139


Ministries (Top 5):
Min. of Defence & National Security141
Min. of Atolls Development114
Min. of Health76
Min. of Finance & Treasury76
Min. of Environment Energy and Water67


Businesses (Top 5):
Villa Shipping & Trading Co. Pvt. Ltd.163
Universal Entp. Pvt. Ltd.156
One And Only Reethirah149
One & Only Kanuhura125
Kurumba Village124


And finally...

Maumoon Abdul Gayoom
Mobile16
Landlines3


Note: The information presented was obtained using the entries on the Dhiraagu e-Directory (as available today).

Fingerprinting Thaana

What is the frequency of characters in a typical Dhivehi writing? What is the most commonly used Thaana akuru/fili in Dhivehi? Is there a general pattern of akuru and fili to be expected in any given Dhivehi document?

These questions, and especially the latter, kindled my curiosity yesterday and had me off to explore a little bit. Although seemingly trivial and of no practical use, these are serious questions that probe into the finer details of Dhivehi and help produce computational models of Dhivehi - which have practical applications. Even the generalizations and patterns that result from the simplest statistical analysis transcend the (quirks of) individual writing and give a broader picture of what a language is really like. For example, I'm employing a statistical fingerprint of Dhivehi that was generated during this little exercise as part of an experimental procedure that identifies (the presence of Dhivehi) content in web pages. It takes advantage of the fact that the fingerprint for Dhivehi and that for English are dramatically different thus allowing a computer program to discern the type of content it is dealing with - all without really "understanding" a language.

I conducted the analysis on a dataset consisting of ~5000 Dhivehi articles from Haveeru Daily and ~7000 Dhivehi articles from Jazeera Daily. They may not represent the whole varieties of Dhivehi literature available but I think they are a very good approximation - especially of Dhivehi web content which is what I was mostly interested in. My focus was on the individual character level and ran basic mean, mode, variance, standard deviation and frequency calculations with a further character correlation analysis. Despite these being quite simple analyses, I don't think anyone's ever explored as much before and hence the following should make for (exciting!) new information.

Enjoy :-)


Mean fili usage in Dhivehi writing


Mean akuru usage in Dhivehi writing


Thaana character frequencies