Tag: politics
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Fun with Google Trends Real Time
Google Trends announced last week that they’ve upgraded their service to be real time. Using their tools, I created a dashboard so you can quickly see who’s trending in Google Search for the past 7 days. If I did this right, this page should continually update. I’ll manually add/remove names as the list of candidates…
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Presidential Candidate 404 Pages
As the 2016 US Presidential Election gets going, each candidates website 404 pages give us a rare glimpse into the personality behind each campaign. Let’s have a look. Democrats Hillary Rodham Clinton – her page looks like a misplaced snapshot and speaks to the basic, simplistic style of her Middle American base. Look what we…
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Barbara Lee, my representative in Congress
Barbara Lee is my Congresswoman. She was the lone voice of reason who, in the wake of September 11th, questioned the language around the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) which was drafted in response the the terrorist attacks because there was no one we could declare war upon. Radiolab did a podcast on…
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Visualizing the Uninsured
Another data map for you. This one by the New York Times based on the most recent census data shows the percent in each region that have either public or private insurance or are uninsured at all. Be sure to allow your browser to read your location and you’ll shortcut to your local region.
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Data Mining the Electorate
The New York Times Magazine had a cover piece on the Obama data mining team that used modern data-mining techniques to more efficiently target the undecided voters that they needed to bring across the fence to win the election. Check out the last line (emphasis mine) on their clever use of Facebook photo tags as…
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Guns in Japan
My father (who started his own blog) shares what you need to do to get a gun in Japan. To get a gun in Japan, first, you have to attend an all-day class and pass a written test, which are held only once per month. You also must take and pass a shooting range class.…
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Revenge of the Nerds
While everyone spoke of New York Times blogger, Nate Silver’s uncanny, almost witchlike ability to call the election last night, the big winner was the triumph of big data and smart algorithms over gut feel and egos. Those in tech that have been following Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times broke out…
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Obama Up, Romney Down
The New York Times’ wonky FiveThirtyEight blog posted this rather dramatic graph showing the poll numbers of Obama and Romney over the past few weeks. What used to be a 1-2 point difference is now a 5-6 point gulf with the lines getting further, not closer, together.
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Stellar Wind
There’s a chill wind blowing through the our government. Since 9/11 it’s been known that the NSA has been wiretapping email and phone calls as part of a domestic spying program. Now the evidence is piling up that as of December of this year, a new data center in Utah is getting ready to come…