babbling blue

What does Congress really “care” about? Some political scientists tried to answer that question, using some rather innovative means. They have data-mined the text (over 70 million words in over 70,000 documents) of the Congressional Record.

The Congressional Record contains verbatim transcripts of all speeches on the floor of the House and the Senate. The team tried to determine the hot topics in Congress, and how they change over time, based on how much they are talked about. What’s so special about that?

What’s exciting about this project and others like it is that computers are at last capable of unsupervised, dynamic analysis, and they can produce meaningful results with little or no intervention (humans will still be required to interpret the results, of course). The researchers in this project turned their software loose on 70 million words of Congressional debate without doing any initial topic coding.

The computer was able to group speeches into topics, even when those speeches did not feature certain usual keywords. In one example, a speech that contained the words “terrorism,” “medical,” and “psychological” was correctly lumped in with other education speeches, even though it contained terms not normally found in an education speech (traditional searches would fail at this test). Once the computer has done its statistical analysis and grouped speeches into topic clusters, researchers then looked at a few speeches from each cluster and assigned a name to it (”education” or “terrorism,” for instance). Once that was done, interesting questions could be answered.

Among their findings is that talk about “judicial nominations” increased steadily from 1997 to 2004 whereas attention to “abortion” has decreased, going from about 5% of floor time in the 105th Congress to 1% in the 108th (we’re currently in the 109th).

I haven’t read the report, but it looks interesting. It’s definitely not light reading, though. . . much of the math is beyond what I can follow. Still, being the computer geek that I am, I think this is pretty cool.

Science just keeps getting cooler! Physicists are now proposing that devices called superlenses could potentially be used to create cloaking devices.

Using a principle called “anomalous localized resonance,” superlenses placed very close to a small object could mask its reflected light waves by resonating at the same frequency, much like how noise-canceling headphones mask sound waves by creating a sound that is at the same frequency but inverted in phase.

So far this application for superlenses (which are real) is still theoretical and they’ve only worked out the math to cloak a tiny object, like a speck of dust. But it’s really just the beginning. If they can successfully cloak the dust, they can move up from there.

Read more here on Arstechnica.com.

Happy Hump Day!

This Monday there were marches and rallies all across the country in support of immigrants wishing to live in the U.S. The biggest was in Chicago, with the official Chicago police estimate being 400,000 participants (though organizers claim there were even more). I followed the event most of the day via the local news websites. The views from Sky 5 and Chopper 7 were impressive. The marchers also walked past a block from our building, so I got a good look that way too. There were a lot of people! I worried about my commute to and from work, but it was perfectly fine. I’d like to weigh in on this immigration issue on here, but I’ll wait until I have a time to try to address it intelligently.

In other news, I’ve been in my new apartment about a week and a half and I’m uhh, sort of partially unpacked. Don’t want to rush things!

Next, researchers at Gartner are predicting that Windows Vista will be delayed even more than Microsoft admits. I’ve been saying that for awhile now, so it’s nice to have someone actually study the issue and agree with me! It’s not impossible, but I’ll be pretty surprised if Vista comes out on time.

Finally, I’d like to go on record and say I do not like Oracle. It has some very cool features, but it’s such a pain in the ass. Usability has clearly taken a back seat to other considerations in its design. I miss MS SQL Server!

That’s all. Enjoy the rest of your week!

Five completely driverless vehicles, controlled entirely by onboard software, finished a 132 mile race through the desert. The winner was “Stanley”, a VW Touareg (what was VW thinking with that name?) from Stanford University. They received a prize of $2 million of taxpayer money.

The competition, called the Grand Challenge, took place for the second year in a row. None of the entries made it past 8 miles last year. This year was a vast improvement, with 5 of 23 completing the course, and several others getting pretty far. The race was sponsored by DARPA.

The “sentimental favorite” this year was “Kat-5″, a Ford Escape Hybrid designed by students in Metarie, La. They finished in 4th place, a very impressive showing.

My Way News: Driverless VW Wins $2 Million Robot Race

Ok, I’m not really Batman, but I could be with one of these little gadgets developed for the US military.

The PowerQuick personal lifting device can raise or lower a load of up to 145 kg (320 lb) at the rate of one meter (yard) per second, enabling special forces, rescue services or even construction workers to quickly ascend or escape buildings.

New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday the operator would shoot a rope attached to a grappling hook to the top of the building and then attach the rope to a harness-like device which hauls them up.

New machine allows soldiers to hurdle buildings - Yahoo! News

The space shuttle Discovery today rolled over so the International Space Station could rub its belly.

Actually it rotated 360 degrees end over end, apparently a move never done before, to allow the ISS to photograph its belly for signs of damage. NASA says there doesn’t seem to be any.

Discovery was just 600 feet beneath the station when Commander Eileen Collins manually steered the shuttle’s nose up and slowly flipped the spacecraft over.

Cool, huh? You go Cmdr Collins!

Story

My Way News

I’ve known about this for awhile, but since it’s apparently catching the attention of the mainstream press, I guess now is a good time to point it out.

Basically in Chicago (and starting in other cities) there are these boxes that are essentially gunshot detectors. They also contain cameras. They are a part of the larger network of cameras in public areas controlled by the Chicago Police Department.

The boxes are able to distinguish the sounds of a gunshot from others such as firecrackers or a car back-firing. When a gunshot is detected, the device uses four microphones to pinpoint its origin, trains a camera on the area and alerts the police. Police can access these and other cameras from the laptop computers in their cars. Cool, huh?

I find this very interesting. For any of you living in Chicago, you may have seen one of these and not known what they are. They are boxes with the Chicago Police logo on them mounted high on poles in high crime areas. They have a blue flashing light on top of them. I guess that’s to let criminals know they should be shooting people elsewhere.

Has this progam been successful? It sounds like it.

The city in 2004 reduced its homicide rate to its lowest level since 1965 and police seized 10,000 guns …
“They have been extremely successful,” said Monique Bond, spokeswoman for the Chicago Office of Emergency Management. “We’ve been able to see the benefits that cameras and advanced technology bring to the community.”

As usual, opponents are expressing privacy concerns. I think if used properly, there shouldn’t be any civil liberties issues. The devices don’t have the ability to record voices. The only possible concern is that police may have the ability to aim cameras at private homes. Oh well. . . keep your blinds closed if you’re by one of the cameras!

However, we need to be wary of thinking like this:

“The crime rates in Chicago are the lowest in 40 years. The price of keeping the community safe far outweighs civil liberty issues,” Bond said.

While I think in this case the civil liberties issues are minimal, that kind of blanket statement is quite scary.