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Senator Coburn wants to defund political science research
Today Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) has proposed an amendment (No. 2631) (PDF) to the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2010 (H.R. 2847) which would eliminate the National Science Foundation's program for political science research. I don't understand this anti-intellectual sentiment that can equate CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC with real academic analysis. There's absolutely *no* comparison between CNN et al and the American National Election Studies (ANES) and the other important political science research funded by NSF. ANES is a national survey of voters after every presidential election since 1948 widely considered the gold standard of election studies (Disclosure: Stanford University, my employer, is one of the partner institutions that manages the ANES) Please help the American Political Science Association by signing the petition and contacting your Senator, urging them to vote down the Coburn amendment.
The largest award over the last 10 years under the political science program has been $5.4 million for the University of Michigan for the “American National Election Studies” grant. The grant is to “inform explanations of election outcomes.” The University of Michigan may have some interesting theories about recent elections, but Americans who have an interest in electoral politics can turn to CNN, FOX News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet who pour over this data and provide a myriad of viewpoints to answer the same questions. There is no shortage of data or analysis in this field that would require the government to provide funding for additional analysis.[Thanks Steve Benen, Political Animal!] Continue reading
State dept asks Twitter to be eyes and ears of Iranian elections
Twitter, the 140 character social media micro-blog, was scheduled to go down for maintenance on monday night. But, according to the CNN blog, a little thing called the Iranian elections and a request from the US State Department caused them to change their scheduled downtime to yesterday afternoon from 2-3 PST (middle of the night Tehran time) in order to ensure that the flow of information from Iran remains open and that Iranians can continue to communicate internally and with the rest of the world. This is a pretty amazing development in that, despite the Iranian restrictions on journalists and news organizations, the world is still able to get up to the minute accounts - complete with video on youtube, hashtags on twitter and facebook. Now libraries just have to figure out how to collect, preserve and organize this massive flow of information ;-) Mashable has more on why this matters as well as a HOWTO guide on following the elections. Continue reading
Tag cloud of Obama’s victory speech
It was a moving victory speech from PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA! On this night, in this town, there are parties in the street, cars honking, a feeling like 11:59 on New Year's eve. Below is the tag cloud of President Obama's speech, courtesy of tag crowd. For those that weren't able to tune in, here's audio of his speech. Now the real work begins!
Google map tool shows where to vote
Here's a handy little google tool to help you find out where to vote. Go to the 2008 US Voter Info google map, put in your address and voila! you have your voting station and can easily get driving/walking directions. the sidebar also includes information on voter registration, contact information for local voting officials and a link to the Google 2008 election site to track what's happening on election day. This map tool was developed by state and local election officials from Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Los Angeles County and the Voting Information Project in conjunction with the League of Women Voters. [shout out to the UC Berkeley Library govblog from whom I got the tip!] Continue reading
CA Sec of State wants open source e-voting systems
Last week, at the Technology Review's Emerging Technologies Conference held at MIT, there was a panel on electronic voting systems in which CA Secretary of State Debra Bowen participated -- along with Moderator Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief, Technology Review; Doug Chapin, Director, electionline.org; Ronald L. Rivest, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT; and Pamela Smith, President, Verified Voting Foundation. You may remember that in 2007, Bowen ordered a complete top-to-bottom review of voting systems in CA. I'm really glad to see a top-level politician sitting on a panel of cutting edge technologists and really, really glad to hear that top-level politician advocate for [w:Open-source software]. Now, I'm not saying the open source is the end all and be all solution to the myriad issues facing e-voting (see Bev harris' Black Box Voting for more on those issues); but it's great to see that Bowen at least gets that open source software is at least part of the solution. We've been saying that for quite some time. For a complete wrapup of the panel see Lucas Mearian's ComputerWorld blog
One method of addressing software issues associated with the vast majority of proprietary e-voting applications out there is to move to using open source, especially for applications residing on optical scanners, which have been particularly troublesom. The concern is that IT administrators can't look at the software to correct errors or tweak it for a particular county's needs. Open source would go a long ways to disclosing problems associated with today's propretary e-voting applications, Bowen said.[Thanks /.] Continue reading
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