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Posts Tagged politics

On Texas and Ohio

As an Obama supporter, I was disappointed that Barack did not seal the deal yesterday. I have been reflecting on the delegate stalemate and the PR loss, and I have a few thoughts.
1) Identity politics: Obama has made massive progress in demonstrating that equality for all is a powerful message for whites and blacks. […]


Hillary supporters to “Swift Boat” Obama

This report by the Washington Post is disturbing. About 100 contributers have started a 527 PAC called “American Leadership Project” to air attack ads on Obama. At the moment that the Obama campaign has crossed 1 million contributors, 100 ultra-wealthy people are attempting to hijack the primary with $10mm of cynical attack ads.
Here […]


Comparing the campaigns of Obama and Lessig

Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford Law Professor, is considering a run for Congress in a special election in my neighboring Silicon Valley district. He has an interesting ten-minute video on his reasons for consider such a run on his new campaign web site, Lessig08.org. In a nutshell, his campaign platform involves three principles:
1. Accept […]


Debunking myths of global poverty

This twenty minute lecture is a tour-de-force. It is a flashy example of data visualization, but more importantly, it provides important insights about global poverty. Worth your time (after the over-the-top intro), in my opinion.


It’s better than voting with ‘invisible ink’

I had a minor voting problem on Super Tuesday in California. Unbeknownst to me, my precinct was turned into a “mail-only” precinct. According to the San Mateo County election department, our precinct was too small (less than 200 people) so we were giving the “opportunity to vote by mail.” I replied, […]


Fired up?

Well, I am ready to go for super tuesday. Please go vote, and vote for Obama!
If you want to help spread the love on facebook, please install this application that I’ve created:
http://apps.facebook.com/add.php?api_key=eced1babc5e972f996cceb31cfc1b44b
GObama!!!


How can you help?

Obama had a great win in South Carolina yesterday. Unfortunately, it was expected and seems not to have moved the prediction markets much. Yet, I think our country and the world would be much better off if he wins. With our help, he can win.
Sadly, Obama’s chances only rose slightly from 31% […]


Informed voting via prediction markets

My friend Richard sent me this interesting link and email in response to my post yesterday:

[Intrade.com is] moving beyond prediction markets that try to determine who will win
the election, towards markets that predict the effect of someone
winning the election. In other words, markets that attempt to predict
the price of oil, interest rates, # troops […]


Reading the tea leaves

Obama’s win in Iowa was quite impressive for two reasons: it is important and it was indeed unexpected. On Intrade.com’s prediction market, Obama implicit probability of capturing the nomination jumped from below 20 percent on January 1 to 64 percent after the Iowa caucus. See the huge spike in this graph of Obama’s prospects […]


Understanding Iowa

I am a little late to the game here because I was traveling yesterday, but I have some thoughts to share about Obama’s historic victory. I disagree that Thursday’s Iowa caucuses were a victory for extremism, something proposed on e-thepeople.org today. I also disagree with Kent Wicker’s highly rated comment that Hillary Clinton […]


Voter Guide Toolkit

I’ve put together two short screencasts about a neat election resource that I help run called “Voter Guide Toolkit.” We’re recruiting a campaign leader, so I created two short screencasts to help inform the great applicants that we’ve received so far. I think they came out pretty well, so I thought that some […]


The politics of parsing

I found this short video interesting for two reasons: one, it is a good example of viral campaign ads and two, it expresses a concern that I have about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. But viral videos are primarily only sent and viewed by those who already are disposed to agree with the sentiment. So, […]


Seeking: Voter Guide Toolkit Campaign Leader

It’s an exciting time for technology+politics in general, and for me in particular. I am a volunteer manager of e-thePeople.org, and I am in charge of hiring a Campaign Leader for our Voter Guide Toolkit project. It’s an exciting project, and the job is quite well-compensated as non-profits go. We’re hitting stride for […]


Considered opinions about the European Union

I am finally back in the US. After three back-to-back sleepless nights as a global data cruncher, I have the final results of the first-ever European-wide deliberative poll. I’ll have more to say about deliberative polls and this project, but for now, here is a short summary of what we did and what the results […]


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