The Brass Liberation Orchestra celebrated 5 years of playing music in the streets for politics and pleasure. We threw oursevles a party at Balazo Gallery on Mission St. and took a quick tour down to 16th and back. As jamie put it, “we are now ready for kindergarten.”
In this clip we are playing our arrangement of the Fela Kuti song “Dog Eat Dog.” There are also some photos posted online.
..its what they do in office. The nice thing about politicians is, a lot of what they do is a matter of public record, increasingly available on the internet for free. Wouldn’t it be great if ordinary people had the tools to make this political landscape visible?
I’m posting here some examples I’ve come across of intriguing maps and representations of political data. Mostly these fall under the broad heading of “mapping congress” based on data available from the THOMAS db of congressional record.
I found a nice preprint in arXiv that explores the hierarchical relationships formed by the pattern of overlap of Representatives in committees:
I’m looking for people to team up with to build a non-profit commons based R&D organization. Here’s the current state of my evolving pitch:
I see this as a project running on a couple of different time scales with various goals. The broader and longer term of which is to test and demonstrate the feasibility of an R&D business model based around intellectual commons. So organizations, academic institutions, and companies would pay for expertise and specific tool delivery, but intellectual property is drawn from and returned to the public domain. Clients would be buying the innovation, the implementation (that final 20% it takes to hook up all those great free libraries into something useful) and saving big bucks by not re-writing everything from scratch. This kind of model is especially appropriate for academics and NGOs which are (nominally at lest) working for a common good rather than directly competing for monopoly.
Continue reading A Call for Collaboration (0.1)
Since 1979, more than 20% of the Polar Ice Cap has melted away.
From www.keepwintercool.org original author unkown. NASA? Copyright says NRDC which could be Natural Resources Defense Council?
Several weeks ago I created wiki to archive discussion and documentation of the various formats for storing network data, hopefully leading to future work converging on some common standards. For now, it is a quick-and-dirty archive to collect and sumarize information about data formats and software for Social Network Analysis and related fields. Most of the material has been lifted from an interesting discussion on the SOCNET listserv. Please feel free to edit and add to documentation, especially if you are the author of any of the formats (or to fix my spelling ;-) Hopefully this could move to a more centralized server at some point…
Interesting project EVA with goal of creating a semi-automated system for parsing and extracting corporate relationships from SEC 10-K filings, ‘tho they did use some existing ownership dbs as well. Software uses a nice technique of identifying paragraphs likely to contain owership information and presenting to user for verification. Seems that much of the work was done in 2001, I can’t tell if it is an ongoing project. 
Continue reading Extraction, Visualization & Analysis of Corporate Inter-Relationships
from socnet:
 Local Citation Activity Environments of 7,525 Scientific Journals in 2005
pajek files for citing and cited journals for 03,04,05
http://users.fmg.uva.nl/lleydesdorff/jcr05/citing/index.htm
Loet Leydesdorff, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research
Skye Bender-deMoll and Daniel A. McFarland (2006) The Art and Science of Dynamic Network Visualization Journal of Social Structure. Volume 7, Number 2.
It is still very rough, but I’ve been having a very interesting time looking at contributions among PACs in FEC Data. This image shows transactions to Senate candidate’s central committes that were reported in May of 2006. Colors by party, grey is unkown / unspecified. Labels are on candidate’s committes, but some are violently truncated. Names of PACs have been removed to protect the guilty (actually because they are too long and make the graph cluttered)
They layouts are not converging very well, so the structure is not that accurate. This is also only showing one month’s data, so not very representative. But need much more specific queries and good aggregation rules to deal with longer time periods. Easy to imagine making it interactive, zoomable, animating the time data, adding to SNA metrics, etc. A long ways to go to build software to do this, but I’m excited to have something to show!
I started poking around in omidyar.net a few days ago, curious if it can be a resource for locating activist techs and funding. As I’m not really a member of any of the “social networking” sites, I don’t really have a sense of the social protocol. It is kind of like stepping blind into a cocktail party. A few people immediatly contacted me, but I didn’t know who they were other than by reading their profiles. So I got curious about the structure of communication of the site. After a day or so of coding with a little help from carnivore, htmlparser and sonia, I’ve got a few pictures of the network of positive feedback on comments. (people have the ability to give points to eachother’s posts in the fourms, kinda like slashdot)
