1.0.3 — executive corrections

1.0.2 plus two corrections to executive, the column the audit called least trustworthy.

If you are coming from 1.0.0, read the 1.0.1 notes first — everything they describe applies here. In particular row counts are 82.8% lower than 1.0.0, because that is how many rows were exact duplicates.

What changed since 1.0.2

The Obama/Trump handover was off by a year

1.0.2   Barack Obama      156,496   2009-01-20 .. 2016-01-19
        Donald J. Trump   200,688   2016-01-20 .. 2021-01-20

1.0.3   Barack Obama      179,751   2009-01-20 .. 2017-01-19
        Donald J. Trump   177,433   2017-01-20 .. 2021-01-20

23,255 rows dated inside Obama's final year were credited to Trump — 11.6% of Trump's rows. Anything grouping US documents by executive over 2016 was wrong, in both directions. Every other US handover in the file was already correct to the day, which is what made this a single-boundary fix.

Italy's composite executives are split

Romano Prodi/Massimo D'Alema (1,956 rows) and Massimo D'Alema/Giuliano Amato (536) packed two people into one string, so they grouped and joined as neither. A further 593 rows credited to Giuliano Amato predated his term.

Romano Prodi         2,058   1996-05-18 .. 2008-04-24
Massimo D'Alema        930   1998-10-23 .. 2000-04-19
Giuliano Amato       1,738   2000-04-26 .. 2001-06-08

No composite executive values remain anywhere in the release.

Nothing else differs from 1.0.2: 2,891,622 rows, 42 countries, full_ecd.parquet reconciling exactly.

A correction to what we said about 1.0.2

The 1.0.2 notes said executive terms overlapped in 15 places and that Gerald R. Ford's rows ran to 1996. Both came from the original audit and both were wrong or overstated.

Twelve of the fifteen were a bug in the validator, which compared each executive's first and last date rather than counting documents. Any leader with two non-contiguous terms — Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Netanyahu, Putin — appeared to overlap a successor they never overlapped. In Denmark, Israel, Russia, Austria, Greece and Italy the first executive holds zero documents in the window supposedly shared.

Ford's rows running to 1996 is not a defect. It is 14 rows, one URL, type = 'Convention Speeches': Ford addressing the 1996 Republican National Convention. A further 33 Ford rows inside Carter's term are all dated 1977-01-20, Carter's inauguration, when both men legitimately published.

The validator now counts documents inside the window, and distinguishes alternating terms and handover days from real mis-attribution. Full correction in #13.

Still broken

ecd_validate.py reports 0 CRITICAL, 5 ERROR, against 19 CRITICAL and 55 ERROR in 1.0.0.

• #18 — Colombia is sourced entirely from YouTube.
• #19 — file and office are empty everywhere; url is null for Russia.
• #20 — type holds president names in the US file.
• #13 — six rows across Brazil and Chile are dated before their executive took office.
• #15 — the unit of observation is still a paragraph in some countries and a whole document in others.
• #21 — coverage is very uneven; ten countries hold fewer than 500 documents. See COVERAGE.md.
• #22 — Russia is the English kremlin.ru edition, not the Russian originals.
• #16 — 100 Venezuela rows could not be re-decoded; a byte was lost at ingest.
• #30, #31 — the duplication and the malformed Jamaica urls are repaired in these assets but not in the pipeline that builds them, so both will recur on the next build.

Using it

Until the packages are re-published, ask for this version explicitly:

load_ecd(country = 'United States of America', ecd_version = '1.0.3')

ec.load_ecd(country='United States of America', ecd_version='1.0.3')

Built with ecd_repair.py from the 1.0.0 assets. 1.0.0, 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 remain published and unchanged.