+Computation: Got an AWS in Education grant!

I just received a generous grant for usage on Amazon's Web Services -- cloud computing, storage space, and bandwidth. This is just in time for a bunch of heavy-duty text crunching I've been planning to do. Thank you, Amazon!

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/)

Laptop vs Clipboard

Things that could destroy my:

Laptop	Both	Clipboard
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.

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/

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?