Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Political science and big data resources from JITP

I'm cleaning out papers from my files, tired of carrying around all these dead trees. Here are notes on nifty resources mentioned at the JITP conference a few weeks ago.

TDT: topic detection and tracking (http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/TDT/)

Socrata, the Open data company (http://www.socrata.com/)

Google's Data Liberation Front (http://www.dataliberation.org/)

TESS: Time sharing experiments in the social sciences (http://www.tessexperiments.org/)

TREC (Text retrieval conference) benchmark data sets (http://trec.nist.gov/data.html)

And the good old American National Election Study (ANES) (http://www.electionstudies.org/)

Monday, June 20, 2011

Laptop vs Clipboard

Things that could destroy my:



LaptopBothClipboard
Coffee
Falling
Power surges
Worms and viruses
Rain
Babies
EMPs
Losing the power cable
Tripping on the power cable
Planned obsolescence
Stomping
Yogurt
Crumbs
The AllSpark
Big magnets
Fire
Karate experts
Garbage compactors
Lightsabers
Termites
Beavers
Very strong wind



PS: This list was created as my flight into Detroit was descending, and "all personal electronic items" had to be switched off.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Resources from PolNets

Note from Saturday, at the Political Networks conference. The presentation went swimmingly. I think there are more sociologists than political scientists here today.

Here are links to nifty resources referenced in talks:

Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW): http://csea.phhp.ufl.edu/Media.html#bottommedia

Networks, Computation, and Social Dynamics Lab at UC Irvine: http://www.ncasd.org/public_html/

OpenCongress RSS feeds: http://www.opencongress.org/about/rss

Public.Resource.Org: https://public.resource.org/

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Netroots Nation

I'm at the Netroots Nation conference in Minneapolis, really enjoying it. Some reactions from day one:

* Lots of discussion of messaging and issue ownership. This is an area that academic researchers haven't really embraced, especially us quants. We should.

* The community is really open and egalitarian. I sat in the same panel with Markos Moulitsas for half an hour without realizing it.

* I've been impressed by the sophistication of research design in analytics and message experiments. It's got me thinking about what's the next step after AB testing... There's room for innovation here.

* The left-meets-right happy hour was kind of a flop. Where were all the Republicans?