In late February, something happened to the Italian government that had never happened before: a hung parliament. After 75 percent of the population turned out to vote, it took two days to tally the results. Now, almost three weeks later, the center right and center left parties remain in a steadfast gridlock. A third party–the ...
Until yesterday, I hadn’t thought too much about the term “political science.” I probably first heard it in high school or college, when I accepted it as an item of potential academic study that I would not pursue and went on with my life (I consider politics to be the single most abstract and frustrating ...
Last week I met with associate professor of political science W. D. Kay, hoping for a primer on the federal budget. I keep hearing terms like sequestration and appropriations and wanted to find out exactly how they will affect the future of science research. Before we got into it, he pointed me to this petition, ...
Just about every kid within a 50-mile radius of Boston’s Museum of Science visits that place at some point in his or her early education or scouting career. If they’re lucky, they might even get to do an overnight, sleeping under the life-size dinosaur model on the first floor. I remember my visit well and ...
Debate season is an exciting time for professor David Lazer’s lab, and I’m delighted to be able to bring you more analysis from their team. This time, research assistant professor Yu-Ru Lin explains what their Twitter-meter had to say about Tuesday night’s presidential debate. Together with Drew Margolin, Lin led a team from the Lazer ...
As expected, last night’s VP debate was engaging, to say the least. David Lazer‘s lab was at it again, analyzing real-time Twitter data to gauge the public’s response to the event. Below, Lazer explains their Twitter “winning index,” which fluctuated across the two candidates’ performances. Twitter allows real-time calculation of audience responses to the debate. ...
Thursday night’s vice presidential debate is bound to be a good one. If it weren’t for the silence rules, I bet we’d be hearing lots of Hoorays and Boos from the crowd — those age-old auditory cues signaling sentiment. Those same cues accompany David Lazer’s newest visualization, which portrays the way money is spent by ...
Sixty million people are expected to tune in on Wednesday night to watch the first presidential debate of this election season. While the debates themselves may not determine the outcome of an election, the voters watching them do. So, wouldn’t it be nice if we could crawl into the minds of those voters and catch ...
In the coming months we will be inundated with political messaging from a host of sources. This is always what happens in the period leading up to a political election and this time it’s no different. Well…one thing is different actually: this time we can use new data visualizations from professor David Lazer’s lab to ...
Here’s another Twitter-analysis post for all you network science junkies out there. And although I’m a bit late to the table (New Scientist reported on this a week ago) I couldn’t resist. Bruno Gonçalves, a postdoc in Alessandro Vespignani‘s research group here at Northeastern, and three colleagues at Indiana University expanded their research on partisan ...
Happy day-after-super-Tuesday, everybody. If you’re as political as I am, you may not have realized that yesterday was different than any other day, but apparently it was. Last night, we got a chance to see if money really does talk, as the fab-four of remaining republican hopefuls — Romney, Paul, Santorum, and Gingrich — awaited ...