Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category

Benefits stigma: how newspapers report on welfare

Tuesday, November 20th, 2012

Benefits stigma: how newspapers report on welfare by Randeep Ramesh.

From the post:

New research out today looks at the benefits stigma in Britain. The Guardian’s social affairs editor takes a look at the most common myths and sees how content on welfare differs by newspapers.

Those working in benefits and with claimants have become increasingly exasperated with the gap between the reality of poor peoples’ lives and the rhetoric of welfare reform.

Such is the scale of successive governments’ disinformation that the report by Turn2us, part of anti-poverty charity Elizabeth Finn, calls for ministers to abandon briefing journalists in advance of their speeches and asks departments to seek corrections for “for predictable and repeated media misinterpretations”.

It is articles like this one that have me contemplating a hard copy subscription to the Guardian.

Mapping the distortions won’t stop them but might sharpen your aim on their sources.

Posted in News, Politics | No Comments »

A Semantic Look at the Presidential Debates

Tuesday, October 9th, 2012

A Semantic Look at the Presidential Debates

Warning: For entertainment purposes only.*

Angela Guess reports:

Luca Scagliarini of Expert System reports, “This week’s presidential debate is being analyzed across the web on a number of fronts, from a factual analysis of what was said, to the number of tweets it prompted. Instead, we used our Cogito semantic engine to analyze the transcript of the debate through a semantic and linguistic lens. Cogito extracted the responses by question, breaking sentences down to their granular detail. This analysis allows us to look at the individual language elements to better understand what was said, as well as how the combined effect of word choice, sentence structure and sentence length might be interpreted by the audience.”

The full post: Presidential Debates 2012: Semantically speaking

*I don’t doubt the performance of the Cogito engine, just the semantics, if any, of the target content. ;-)

Posted in Debate, Natural Language Processing, Politics, Semantics | No Comments »

Balancing Your “….Political News Reading Habits”

Saturday, September 29th, 2012

Browser Plugin Helps People Balance Their Political News Reading Habits

From the post:

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, many voters become voracious consumers of online political news. A tool by a University of Washington researcher tracks whether all those articles really provide a balanced view of the debate — and, if not, suggests some sites that offer opinions from the other side of the political spectrum.

Balancer (http://balancestudy.org/balancer/), a free plug-in for Google’s Chrome browser, was developed this summer by Sean Munson, a new UW assistant professor of Human Centered Design and Engineering. The tool analyzes a person’s online reading habits for a month and calculates the political bias in that behavior. It then suggests sites that represent a different point of view and continues to monitor reading behavior and offer feedback.

“I was a bit surprised when I was testing out the tool to learn just how slanted my own reading behavior was,” Munson said. “Even self-discovery is a valuable outcome, just being aware of your own behavior. If you do agree that you should be reading the other side, or at least aware of the dialogue in each camp, you can use it as a goal: Can I be more balanced this week than I was last week?”

The tool classifies more than 10,000 news websites and sections of news websites on a spectrum ranging from far left to far right, using results of previous studies and existing media-bias indices. For a few popular sites the tool also tries to classify individual columnists whose views may be different from those of the overall publication’s slant.

If you think being “informed,” as opposed to owning a stable of elected officials, makes a difference, this is the plugin for you.

The same principle could monitor your technical reading, to keep your reading a mixture of classic and new material.

A service that maps across terminology differences to send you the latest research could be quite useful.

So you would not have to put forth all that effort to remain current.

Posted in Politics | No Comments »

Political Moneyball

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012

Nathan Yau points out the Wall Street Journal’s “Political Moneyball” visualization in Network of political contributions.

You will probably benefit from starting with Nathan’s comments and then navigating the WSJ visualization.

I like the honesty of the Wall Street Journal. They have chosen a side and yet see humor in its excesses.

Nathan mentions the difficulty with unfamiliar names and organizations.

An example of where topic maps could enable knowledgeable users to gather information together for the benefit of subsequent, less knowledgeable users of the map.

Creating the potential for a collaborative, evolutionary information resource that improves with usage.

Posted in Government Data, Networks, Politics | No Comments »

Following Even More of the Money

Thursday, July 19th, 2012

Following Even More of the Money By Derek Willis.

From the post:

Since we last rolled out new features in the Campaign Finance API, news organizations such as ProPublica and Mother Jones have used them to build interactive features about presidential campaigns, Super PACs and their funders. As the November election approaches, we’re announcing some additions and improvements to the API. We hope these enhancements will help others create web applications and graphics that help explain the connections between money and elections. This round of updates does not include any deprecations or backwards-incompatible changes, which is why we’re not changing the version number.

Welcome news from the NY Times on campaign finance data.

I can’t say that I follow their logic on version numbering but they are a news organization, not a software development house. ;-)

Posted in Data, Politics | No Comments »

Reverse engineering targeted emails from 2012 Campaign

Thursday, May 31st, 2012

Reverse engineering targeted emails from 2012 Campaign

Nathan Yau writes:

After noticing the Obama campaign was sending variations of an email to voters, ProPublica identified six distinct types with certain demographics and showed the differences. It was called the Message Machine. Now ProPublica is taking it a step further, hoping to dissect every email from all 2012 campaigns.

Fewer emails than in e-discovery or email archives.

Same or different tools/techniques?

Posted in Email, Politics | No Comments »

Online tool can detect patterns in US election news coverage

Wednesday, April 25th, 2012

Online tool can detect patterns in US election news coverage

From the website:

The US presidential election dominates the global media every four years, with news articles, which are carefully analysed by commentators and campaign strategists, playing a major role in shaping voter opinion.

Academics at the University of Bristol’s Intelligent Systems Laboratory have developed an online tool, Election Watch, which analyses the content of news about the US election by the international media.

A paper about the project will be presented at the Proceedings of the 13th conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics held in Avignon, France.

Election Watch automatically monitors political discourse about the 2012 US presidential election from over 700 American and international news outlets. The information displayed is based, so far, on 91,456 articles.

The web tool allows users to explore news stories via an interactive interface and demonstrates the application of modern machine learning and language technologies. After analysing news articles about the 2012 US election the researchers have found patterns in the political narrative.

The online site is updated daily, by presenting narrative patterns as they were extracted from news. Narrative patterns include actors, actions, triplets representing political support between actors, and automatically inferred political allegiance of actors.

The site also presents the key named entities, timelines and heat maps. Network analysis allows the researchers to infer the role of each actor in the general political discourse, recognising adversaries and allied actors. Users can browse articles by political statements, rather than by keywords. For example, users can browse articles where Romney is described as criticising Obama. All the graphical briefing is automatically generated and interactive and each relation presented to the user can be used to retrieve supporting articles, from a set of hundreds of online news sources.

You really have to see this website. Quite amazing.

I would disagree with the placement of Obama to the far left in at least one of the graphics.

From where I sit he should be cheek and jowl with Romney, albeit on his left side.

I wonder if the data set is going to be released or if that is possible?

PBS should ask permission to carry this in a frame on their site.

Posted in Machine Learning, News, Politics | No Comments »

Campaign Finance Data in Real Time

Saturday, March 10th, 2012

Campaign Finance Data in Real Time by DEREK WILLIS.

From the post:

Political campaigns can change every day. The Campaign Finance API now does a better job of keeping pace.

We worked with ProPublica, one of the heaviest users of the API, to make the API more real-time, and to surface more data, such as itemized contributions for every presidential candidate and “super PAC”.

When the API was launched, most of the data it served up was updated every week or, in some cases, on a daily basis. But we work for news organizations, and what is news right now can be old news tomorrow. Committees that raise and spend money influencing federal elections are filing reports every day, not just on the day that reports are due.

If you are mapping political data, the New York Times is a real treasure trove of information.

Read this post for more details on real time campaign finance data.

Posted in Data Source, Politics | No Comments »

Tribeforth

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012

Tribeforth

From the homepage:

Tribeforth Foundation is a group of people developing and promoting a collective intelligence computer system to assist in stimulating new solutions ideas and connections on a global scale. The system as it is planned is not unlike an every day wiki. The key difference is that millions can speak as one with out losing a voice and the software tunes the conversation into reason. This keeps us from getting lost in syntax and helping us to work with the real semantics.

Heavily rooted in collective intelligence and the semantic web (Web 3.0) we are organizing a collection of open source software and then extending them to create the most high tech discussion platform in human history. Available to anyone, anywhere as a basic standard of living.

A handful of powerful, fundamental principles and values guide us here at Tribeforth. We use these principles to create new tools for all of us

A project built on the principles of self reflection an echo of human ingenuity.

I don’t know if topic maps would be of assistance or not but when you are talking about making connections that persist across semantic boundaries (my words, not theirs), then you are going to need topic maps or something very similar.

I suppose I am a bit old school for the disclaimer:

THE TRIBEFORTH SYSTEM WILL NOT COLLECT ANY INFORMATION REGARDING MILITARY PERSONNEL, SYSTEMS, EQUIPMENT, PLANNING OR DEPLOYMENT. INCIDENTS REGARDING HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS ARE NOT SUBJECT TO THIS POLICY.

Existing solutions/structures are not going to go into the night quietly. That is a historical certainty. I would rather be prepared for the push back.

Posted in Networks, Politics | No Comments »

LittleSis

Sunday, December 25th, 2011

LittleSis* is a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government. (*opposite of Big Brother).

Quick Summary: LittleSis is tracking “21,390 organizations, 64,453 people, and 339,769 connections between them”

From the “about” page:

LittleSis is a free database detailing the connections between powerful people and organizations.

We bring transparency to influential social networks by tracking the key relationships of politicians, business leaders, lobbyists, financiers, and their affiliated institutions. We help answer questions such as:

  • Who do the wealthiest Americans donate their money to?
  • Where did White House officials work before they were appointed?
  • Which lobbyists are married to politicians, and who do they lobby for?

All of this information is public, but scattered. We bring it together in one place. Our data derives from government filings, news articles, and other reputable sources. Some data sets are updated automatically; the rest is filled in by our user community.

Their blog is known as: Eyes on the Ties.

Just in case you are interested in politics. Looks like the sort of effort that would benefit from using a topic map.

Posted in Government Data, Politics | No Comments »