How We Know Us

Category: Research

  • NY Senate and Transparency

    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…

  • Foreign Lobbying of NY Congressmen

    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…

  • Health Care Lobbyists Part Deux

    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…

  • Best Networked Healthcare Lobbyists? [updated]

    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…

  • Healthcare and the Senate Finance Committee

    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…

  • Twitter Communication is Scale Free

    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.

  • Statistics::SocialNetworks Perl mod is live!

    Statistics::SocialNetworks has just been uploaded to CPAN, and as it percolates through the system I put forward the question, “What are we going to do with it?” My goal in getting a module into CPAN is easy access, and a starting point to where we can decide what tools we want, and not have to…

  • Election Influence by 527’s: Browsable Map

    I wanted to put out what’s been done so far on making yesterday’s post more interactive. There’s an awful lot that could be better about this map. Particularly legibility of labels in the core (it’s just too dense). If you want to see names, I suggest looking at the edges of the map. Michael Bommarito…

  • Influencing Elections: Network of Expenditures by 527s

    OpenSecrets.org is offering free access to their collected data about political contributions, and in that vein, I’ve created a network of expenditures by 527’s*.  I am looking for a way to make this more detailed for your ease of exploration, so please stay tuned. *Groups whose primary purpose is to influence elections are exempt from…

  • Network Analysis Application to Game Theory (with Software)

    When will network analysis provide additional insight into game theory? In a word: inequality. There must be some form of quantifiable inequality in the game: access, strength of relationships, goals, etc.  This difference creates opportunities for the individual players to use information (or resource) asymmetries and broker to their benefit. On the left all of…