We just posted this on the Data Team Page, and I thought I would post it here as well. When Facebook users in the United States logged into Facebook on Election Day this year, they were greeted by a message alerting them of voting activity on Facebook. Users could click a button to announce toContinue reading “How voters turned out on Facebook”
Category Archives: Politics
Obama: not bubble-sort
Nerds will find humor in this Eric Schmidt/Barack Obama quote about sorting: Pretending to be a technologist isn’t always advisable here, but Obama gave a convincing answer on his visit to the Googleplex in November when he was asked by chief executive Eric Schmidt about “the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers,”Continue reading “Obama: not bubble-sort”
Obama’s music taste
I was surprised the other day when I stumbled onto Barack Obama’s Facebook page and discovered that he actually filled out his music tastes: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Johann Sebastian Bach (cello suites), and The Fugees I think that given the task of coming up with a more inclusive list, IContinue reading “Obama’s music taste”
Name calling
The New York Times has a nice visualization of candidates naming each other in the recent debates. It’s surprising to see how little most of the candidates are referred to, and also how much Obama and Clinton vary despite their close poll standings. (via infosthetics)
The price of using social media for politics…
…is that you might end up with a giant pair of boobs next to your campaign videos. I commend Barack Obama for his use of Youtube, Flickr and Facebook, and I apologize for the fact that “search sexy singles” is the most appropriate advertising they could find to put alongside your campaign.
IS2K4: Internet Campaign Strategies
To mark the beginning of the Internet + Society 2004 conference, the Kennedy School of Government cohosted an event this evening with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society on the topic of the internet in the 2004 elections. The forum consisted of two panelists, Joe Trippi, former campaign manager for the Howard Dean campaignContinue reading “IS2K4: Internet Campaign Strategies”
The final presidential debate
The third and final presidential took place tonight, and while I felt undecided on the results, an early CNN poll gave Kerry a substantial margin with a 59% to 39% victory over Bush. But first, a few words from our candidates (thanks to Microsoft Word): Kerry in 100 words: 82,000 Arizonians lost their health insuranceContinue reading “The final presidential debate”
Presidential Debate Redux
I’ve rerun my presidential debate analysis (see analyses from the first presidential debate and the vice presidential debate) on the scripts of the second presidential debate. I’ve also updated the Debate Spotter to include the new text. But this time I’ve taken a slightly different approach to the analysis. Instead of some complicated weighting scheme,Continue reading “Presidential Debate Redux”
Vice Presidential Debate Analysis
Akin to my last entry, I’ve run the transcript of the Vice Presidential Debate through a part of speech tagger and identified the most popular noun phrases for each speaker (listed below). I’ve also updated the Debate Spotter to handle both scripts. Simply change the debate field and the transcript and speakers will be changedContinue reading “Vice Presidential Debate Analysis”
Presidential Debate Analysis
Whenever I watch a televised debate, I always wonder what percentage of the speaker’s message is actually thinking on the feet and how much is canned material. With the advent of available transcripts, these sorts of questions can be addressed with various computational methods. A simple way to identify repeated statements is to count theContinue reading “Presidential Debate Analysis”
overstated 