Recently bumped into this interactive flash app and pdf showing funding links from Bush’s fund raising network. From a washington post article in 2004. Nice work Sarah Cohen and Louis Spirito!
Heavy SoNIA movie in the New York Times
..although in a minor supporting role ;-)
James Fowler used the SoNIA software to create an animated movie of the core of the social network in the Framingham Heart Study as part of a paper that came out in the New England Journal of Medicine last week.
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years (NEJM)
The story (that heavy people have heavy social contacts) has been all over the media and showed up in the Health section of the Paper of Record. Find Yourself Packing It On? Blame Friends
[original in high quality .mov format w/o voice over]
It is a good nudge to me to get the newer version of SoNIA released. One criticism I have of the animation is that the multiple components of the network are overlapping, making it difficult to see the structure well. Some of the newer features funded by the CSDE help with this, but at the cost of a much longer running time to compute the movie.
Moving with Meaning Movie
A few months ago Dan McFarland and Jim Moody asked me to create a movie showcasing some of the work done in SoNIA as submission to the netsci06 visualization contest. We didn’t win, but here it is any way for your viewing pleasure.
Continue reading Moving with Meaning Movie
MAPLight takes on congress
This month Berkley-based non-profit MAPLight.org expanded their coverage of the relationships between interest groups, legislators and votes to include data for US Congress.
MAPLight.org for Congress combines all campaign contributions to U.S. legislators with legislators’ votes on every bill, using official records from the Library of Congress web site and the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org). The resulting database of bills, voting records, and campaign contributions powers the search engine at MAPLight.org and enables people to see the links between dollars spent and votes cast in Washington D.C. [maplight press release]
Maplight is doing some serious legwork to augment the CRP data with industry positions on bills. They are also doing neat things with timelines so that the user can get a better idea of the relations between donations and key votes.
I took a quick stab at creating a network from some of their example California data on a Bottled Water Bill
Local Acts, Global Consequence: Dr. Martina Morris presents to the NIH
.. and includes a network movie of a disease transmission processes that I worked on.
Continue reading Local Acts, Global Consequence: Dr. Martina Morris presents to the NIH
Prez Candidate PCA
I’ve been thinking for a while about using a methodology called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to create visual comparisons between various political candidates. Finally stole a few minutes to give it a shot using industry sector contributions to the current presidential races.
Unfluence Project Launched!
Greg Michalec and I just launched a website that allows users to interactively explore political contribution data as a network map. We won first prize in the Sunlight Foundation Mashup competition! Try your own query at http://unfluence.net/
This was done as an entry in the Sunlight Foundations Mashup Contest. Cross your fingers that we win and get some resources to continue the project! ;-)
Continue reading Unfluence Project Launched!
Light in the House
source: CMD PR Watch from an AP article
Source: SunshineWeek.org
On March 14, the U.S. House of Representatives “passed three bills to open government records to the public, brushing aside White House opposition, and in one case, a veto threat.” The bills “would force government to be more responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests, make contributions to presidential libraries public and overturn a 2001 presidential directive giving the president authority to keep his records from public view,” reports Associated Press.
Heaney-Rojas Antiwar Co-Mobilization Networks
I was excited to learn that academic researchers have been out in the streets in the past few years surveying participants in social movements. Continue reading Heaney-Rojas Antiwar Co-Mobilization Networks
API access to US state political funding data
The National Institute on Money in State Politics now provides a service where users can submit queries and download data in xml format. The documentation for the service (which requires setting up an account login) is here.
They also include services for generating various graphic reports including a Political Contribution Logorithmic Scatterplot Profile with interactive javascript inspection of candidates.
I did quick cut-and-paste from another site which uses thier data, and was able to generate network maps of the top tend funders for a few california candidates. But with access to the full DB via the API, it is possible to do much more sophisticated maps and even animations – for most states they have data going back several years.
