How We Know Us | Measuring Social Capital

NY Senate and Transparency

August 24, 2009

Congrats to the NY Senate for beginning to open more data at http://www.nysenate.gov/opendata! Here is the network of Senator Allocations of Funding to Community Projects (CPFs): 2009-2010 by Senator or group and zipcode. Line width is proportional to funding allocation. [click for full-size image] Related: how do we define what’s public data? Some transit agencies [...]

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Foreign Lobbying of NY Congressmen

August 19, 2009

Thanks to ProPublica and Sunlight Foundation: …for the first time digitized one year’s worth of FARA records, making them accessible in a searchable database that allows users to easily follow the money and connect the dots. With the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker , anyone can quickly learn what governments are lobbying whom, how often and [...]

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Health Care Lobbyists Part Deux

August 11, 2009

Thanks everyone for showing the strong interest in the Lobbyist map. I got a couple nice mentions at Mother Jones and LittleSis.org, but more importantly, I’ve added in all of the other names in the map. Circles are people, squares are organizations, and white circles are the lobbyists in question. If you’d rather the image [...]

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Best Networked Healthcare Lobbyists? [updated]

August 11, 2009

The Huffington Post, along with public contributors, has been collecting a list of former Congressional staffers turned healthcare lobbyists. LittleSis.org has been keeping track of these former staffers, and thanks to their API, we now have a social graph of their relationships. Former staffers in white (with names), and the rest of the visual field [...]

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Healthcare and the Senate Finance Committee

August 11, 2009

Late last month, the NY Times had an article about the debate over healthcare legislation taking place in the Senate Finance Committee. Coincidentally, around that time, the folks over at LittleSis, the “free database detailing the connections between powerful people and organizations,” were kind enough to give me early access to their API (thanks Kevin [...]

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Mahalo: Violating Network Trust for Fun and Profit?

July 23, 2009

I occasionally get Twitter replies to random questions I put out there from people I’m not following, but this one had a surprise: Not only did @answers respond, but also included more info. Intriguing. I followed the link. That’s when I furrowed my brow. The page it took me to demonstrated what I perceive to [...]

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If Facebook were real life

July 15, 2009

Idiots of Ants [via Tomorrow Museum].

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Astroturfing Censured by NY Attorney General

July 15, 2009

While not networking exactly, this does touch on our predilection to believe others we do not know, if there are enough of them. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has settled with a plastic surgery company, alleging the firm published phony positive testimonials and Web sites. Lifestyle Lift, associated with Michigan-based Scientific Image Center Management, [...]

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Twitter Communication is Scale Free

July 7, 2009

Creating a network from a sample of communications from approximately 900,000 people on Twitter, the distribution of distinct communication partners result fits the definition of a scale-free network. The power is a little higher than scale-free networks usually described for social networks (2<k<3), but not much.

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