NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Statistician Scores One for the Geeks

President Obama wasn't the only one who did a metaphorical mic drop last night. So did Nate Silver, the New York Times' statistical wizard behind the political analysis blog FiveThirtyEight.

In case you forgot, Silver's audacious predictions of an Obama victory caused quite a stir among political pundits in media both big and small. Last week, when most talking heads where predicting a neck-and-neck horse race between Obama and Romney, Silver predicted Obama had 74.6 percent chance of winning reelction. By Nov. 6, that number had risen to 90.9 percent.

PHOTOS: Top Ten Social Netwroking Sites

Naturally, Silver's mathematical model, an election simulator based on past elections, polling data and economic figures, didn't sit well with some of the pundits on the right claiming the race was too close to call.

DNEWS VIDEO: IS IT FUTURE YET?

Dylan Byers' POLITCO hit-piece called Silver a "one-term celebrity" and quoted Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC's "Morning Joe," calling Silver an ideologue and "a joke." New York Times columnist David Brooks dismissed Silver's predictions as "not possible" and that they came from "silly land."

However, Dean Chambers of the right-wing blog Unskewed Polls wears the crown of King of the Silver-bashers. Chambers minced few words in his outright attack on the openly gay Silver, calling him a "thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice" and of "average intelligence."

Despite facing an imminent swirlie as jock-bully pundits held him by the ankles over the toilet bowl, Silver stood his ground. He even challenged Scarborough to $2,000 bet to which Scarborough declined.

BLOG: Why Betting Markets and Polls Don't Agree

Well, Silver got the last laugh when he correctly predicted the outcome in all 50 states. He said Obama would get 332 electoral votes, and assuming Obama holds his lead when Florida is done counting votes, that's exactly what the outcome was. Silver wasn't the only one throwing bull's-eyes last night. So too did Josh Putnam, Donna Brazile and Sam Wang. Slate has a nice graphic showing just how close or far off the pundits were.

However, the messianic media beast has spoken and Silver stands to be anointed, though something tells me that's already happened. The day before the election, FiveThirtyEight was responsible for 20 percent of visitors to the New York Times website. Google Silver's name and see if your computer doesn't catch on fire.

Regardless, score one for data-driving journalism and geeks everywhere.

 via Mashable

Credit: Images.com/Corbis

---

Email:

---

Obama Victory Tweet Most Retweeted: DNews Nugget

Obama Victory Tweet Most Retweeted: At 0416 GMT, Barack Obama tweeted a photograph of himself and wife Michelle embraced in a hug along with the words,"four more years." Since he posted it, the image and tagline has been retweeted more than half a million times, the most retweeted Twitter post ever. That number underscores the importance of social media in the role of voters or even up-and-coming voters. The same picture was also uploaded to Facebook, where it also broke records by becoming the most 'liked' photo ever posted to the site. via BBC News

GET MORE MUST-READ DNEWS NUGGETS HERE!

---

Email:

---

Landslide Victory! For Infinite Bacon

When all the receipts are tallied, it's estimated that this year's presidential election campaign's tab will come to $6 billion, making it the most expensive election in history. Bacon sales, on the hand, were only $2.5 billion in 2011. There may be a lot of pork in Washington, but most meat-eaters agree that there's room to grow.

NEWS: Nanoprinter Achieves Insane Resolution

DNEWS VIDEO: CYBORGS, WIRELESS INTERNET, EXOSKELETONS, SYNTHETIC LIFE AND MORE …

Now, thanks to the 3D-printing wizards at Shapeways, there may be more bacon to go around. That's because they've created a Mobius strip of bacon that goes on and on and on...to the break of dawn.

However, like politics, you don't always get what you think you're voting for and nothing ever is quite what it seems. Sadly, this Mobius strip of bacon is not made of meat, but of sandstone. It's really more of a gift idea for that bacon lover who has everything.

The good news is that it's vegan and kosher. And if we've learned anything from those that enjoy the subtle mercury flavor and sharp texture of fluorescent light bulbs, it's that anything can technically be edible.

But a wise butcher once told me "Before you stick a piece of bacon in your mouth, make sure it came from a pig that wasn't wearing lipstick."

BLOG: New Jersey To Allow Voting By Email, Fax

Good advice. The same could be given for election day. So before you cast your ballot, don't just drop any vote into you mouth into the box. Know where your swine politician is coming from and do your research.

But if you're sick of all this political talk and want a new topic to gnaw on, you can purchase the Mobius strip of bacon for $19. It may not fill you up, but it's a heck of a conversation starter.

via dvice

Credit: Shapeways

 

---

Email:

---

New Jersey To Allow Voting By Email, Fax

On Saturday, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie's administration announced that voters displaced by Hurricane Sandy will be allowed to vote via email or fax.

"This has been an extraordinary storm that has created unthinkable destruction across our state and we know many people have questions about how and where to cast their vote in Tuesday's election. To help alleviate pressure on polling places, we encourage voters to either use electronic voting or the extended hours at county offices to cast their vote," said Lt. Governor Kim Guadagno in a press release.

DNEWS VIDEO: COOL JOBS: HACKER

BLOG: Twitter Map Shows Who's Profane and Polite

To cast their ballot electronically, displaced voters must submit a mail-in ballot application either by e-mail or fax to their county clerk. Once the application is approved, the clerk will send a ballot back to the voter, either by email or fax. Voters must email or fax their e-ballots no later than 8 p.m. on election day.

E-voters will also be sent a "waiver of secrecy form" that essentially waives their right to privacy since election officials will have to crosscheck names on the e-ballot application with voter registration lists.

New Jersey is not expected to be a close race, as Barack Obama is currently polling approximately 10 points higher than Mitt Romney.

NEWS: Surprising Factors That Could Affect Your Vote

Had New Jersey been a swing state, considering e-voting's vast potential for fraud, this initiative surely would have come under more scrutiny. But for now, score one for state officials making sure Sandy's fallout doesn't destroy New Jersey citizens' right to vote.

via NJ.com

---

Email:

---

Reagan Hologram Was Slated For RNC

If the surrealist Dada dinner theater that was Clint Eastwood's speech last night at the Republican National Convention made you think your mind was playing tricks on you, you might have really gone a little bonkers if former President Ronald Reagan rose from the dead to deliver a speech.

While the GOP is quite firm in their beliefs on resurrection, the Gipper was scheduled to appear as a holographic projection similar to the Tupac Shakur recreation that dazzled audiences at the Coachella music festival in April.

BLOG: Twitter Map Shows Who's Profane and Polite

DNEWS VIDEO: CYBORGS, WIRELESS INTERNET, EXOSKELETONS, SYNTHETIC LIFE AND MORE …

The hologram was organized by Tony Reynolds, founder of crowdsourcing website A KickIn Crowd, who obtained rights to a Reagan speech where he discussed small businesses. Reynolds worked with AV Concepts, one of the companies involved with the Tupac hologram, to develop the hologram.

"It wasn't officially going to be part of the convention," Reynolds told Yahoo! News. "It was going to be outside of the convention at the Lakeland Center."

Despite this, Republican strategists quickly pulled the plug on the holographic machine, fearing that the optical illusion would upstage Mitt Romney's acceptance speech.

"At the time" Mitt Romney "hadn't chosen Paul Ryan, so I think they were a little worried about his energy," Reynolds said. "Even in a hologram form I think Reagan's going to beat a lot of people in terms of communicating."

BLOG: Romney Campaign Buys Twitter Trend

After all, Reagan was called The Great Communicator. But RNC honchos made a wise decision to keep Dutch under wraps. Getting upstaged by someone who's been dead for eight years was probably not the way the Romney campaign wanted to kick off their run for the White House.

The official unveiling of Reagan's holographic projection has been put off until later this year or early 2013. But if you're starving for some sort of reanimated puppet version of ol' Ronnie, there's always Genesis' "Land of Confusion" video.

via Yahoo! News

Credit: Ralf-Finn Hestoft/CORBIS

---

Email:

---

Congress Shelves Cybersecurity Bill

Last month, with the hopes of encouraging Congress to pass the cybersecurity law, President Obama penned an op-ed ed piece for the Wall Street Journal that began with a realistic scenario of what could happen if private sector companies were cyber attacked.

“Across the country trains had derailed, including one carrying industrial chemicals that exploded into a toxic cloud. Water treatment plants in several states had shut down, contaminating drinking water and causing Americans to fall ill,” Obama wrote.

NEWS: In Case of Cyber Attack...?

DNEWS VIDEO: COOL JOBS: HACKER

The piece was pretty much ignored. Last week, the Senate was unable to come to an agreement to pass the law, earning only 52 of the 60 votes needed to pass it and shelving it until after their August recess. Being that it’s an election year, the bill’s outlook looks bleak. It's sponsored by Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and would allow the government and private companies to share information like user data and communications if it pertained to national cybersecurity.

It’s important to point out that this kind of information is already collected by companies, just not shared with the government. The bill originally contained minimum security requirement measures for infrastructure providers like water treatment facilities and electricity plants, based on information collected on their high susceptibility to cyber attacks. The Senate shot this down, claiming too much involvement in private company issues, and made the precautions optional in July.

NEWS: Cybersecurity System Mimics Human Immune System

Opponents of the bill, like the advocacy group Fight For the Future, praised last week’s shelving of the bill because of privacy concerns for everyday citizens. However, staff from Senator Lieberman’s office told the digital political new organization, Talking Points Memo that, “Neither the Cybersecurity Act, nor its failure to gain cloture would have any affect on ordinary Web users,” adding that the focus of the bill is the critical infrastructure networks that supply the nation with basic life services.

 via TPM

Credit: Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

---

Email:

---

Mind-Reading Camera Knows Your Politics

Last week, when Scott Walker survived Wisconsin's recall election, he became the first U.S. governor to do so. No matter what side of the aisle you sit on, it's safe to say you likely saw or read Wisconsin's election results sitting in front of a screen, be it from a computer, television or smartphone. Now researchers want to capitalize on that fact by using a screen-mounted camera designed to read your facial expression when you read the news.

BLOG: Top 10 Social Networking Sites

DNEWS VIDEO: IS IT FUTURE YET?

Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Media Lab have designed MindReader, software that can, in just a few seconds of video, interpret facial expressions. It does so by tracking 24 points around the mouth, eyes and nose, noting the texture, color, shape and movement of facial features. Based on what it sees, it can interpret a person's feelings, sometimes more accurately than a humn.

NEWS: Will Social Media Predict Super Tuesday Election Results?

Researchers trained the software to differentiate between happiness and sadness, boredom and interest, disgust and contempt.

While the technology has piqued the interest of the advertising industry, it's real significance may lie in aggregating peoples' reactions to big events as they watch them on screen. This could provide new, more thorough methods for opinion polls that could potentially sway elections and fuel revolutions.

"I feel like this technology can enable us to give everybody a non-verbal voice" and "leverage the power of the crowd," Media Lab's Rana el Kaliouby told New Scientist.

via New Scientist

Credit: Dimitri Vervitsiotis / Getty Images

---

Email:

---

Candidate's Popularity Determined Using Twitter

Social media plays a huge part in political campaigns, especially when it comes to presidential ones. Senior engineering students at the University of Cincinnati developed Twipolitico, a Web-based application that can gauge the popularity of the 2012 presidential candidates using Twitter.

BLOG: Randomly Selected Leaders May Make Politics More Efficient

The goal of the site isn’t just to find out who’s popular, but to discover who's influential. What potential voters tweet about the candidates is analyzed, which provides information on how voters feel about their choices. According to Twipolitico, this makes the results more accurate and credible than just counting how often the politicians show up in a tweet or hash tag.

Data from Twitter is used to track terms that relate to each candidate. The ranking algorithm analyzes each tweet that mentions a candidate and then calculates a “tweet score.” The score is crunched by what the developers call a “complicated math equation” to become a “twipolitico score.”

Daily and monthly scores are displayed on a chart as well as one that shows how many tweets were positive or negative. All of this data comes together to predict not only the popularity of President Obama and Mitt Romney, but also the outcome of the November election. The site is constantly updated and can even show maps of how popular a candidate is in each state.

Check out the project and see how influential your political tweets are here.

Credit: Screen grab, Twipolitico

---

Email:

---

Supercomputer Predicts Civil Unrest

 

In Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series, the future of masses of people can be predicted with "psychohistory," a method of predicting future political and social trends, using a device called the "Prime Radiant." In the 1950s, there wasn't the math or the computational power available to make such a thing reality. Now there might be.

Supercomputers, such as the Nautilus at the University of Tennessee's Center for Remote Data Analysis and Visualization, may have brought the world closer to Asimov's vision, though it is still early days. The key is seeking patterns in massive amounts of data and being able to visualize them. Kalev Leetaru, assistant director for text and digital media analytics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, did just that.

SCIENCE CHANNEL: Hacker Quiz: Can you distinguish a "phish" from a "pharm"? Or a "phreak"? Well, then, take the quiz, and get cracking … er, hacking.

Leetaru used a database of 100 million news articles spanning the period from 1979 to early 2011. The data is from the Open Source Center and Summary of World Broadcasts, both set up by the U.S. and British intelligence agencies to monitor what amounts to nearly every news source in the world and translate them into nuanced English. By analyzing the text in the news stories and the tone -- whether they were largely positive or negative -- Leetaru found patterns emerging that seemed to line up with major periods of unrest. For example, in Egypt, the tone of news articles about Mubarak grew increasingly negative as the protests grew, until eventually Mubarak resigned.

DNEWS VIDEO: CAN YOU REALLY DETECT A LIE?

It isn't just the tone of the articles, however; it's also the change in tone over time. According to Leetaru's findings, Saudia Arabia's government has remained in power because the tone of the news there has been equally negative in the past, whereas the tenor of it in Tunisia and Egypt has hit new lows. Leetaru notes that many country experts on Egypt said Mubarak would likely ride out the uprising, as he had done before.

Another pattern the supercomputer was able to tease out was evidence of Osama bin Laden living in Pakistan. It did so by checking how often his name was recorded in association with the country. Visualized as lines on a map (pictured above) connecting the cities mentioned in stories that also referenced bin Laden, a pattern emerged that centered on northern Pakistan -- within a couple of hundred miles of Islamabad.

BLOG: Bin Laden Conspiracies Rely on Complex Scenarios

All this is possible because the supercomputer can seek patterns in networks with 100 trillion connections and 10 billion nodes (or actors). An ordinary computer, Leetaru says, can only look at small parts of the data at a time, and even attempting to run many in parallel wouldn't do the job. That's because when mapping networks, the amount of memory required goes up exponentially with the number of connections. Only a supercomputer could do it, and it was getting the time on the machine (140,000 hours per processor, or about a week with the whole thing running at once) that really enabled Leetaru to make the kinds of conclusions he did. 

The technology isn't able to predict events precisely yet. Leetaru likens it to the early days of weather forecasting -- at one point, not much better than a guess, but now reliable enough to base decisions on. It won't predict individual actions, but it might be able to say what the reaction to something like the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia would be.

It's obvious why Intelligence agencies and militaries would be very interested. Asked if they had called, Leetaru said, "I can't answer that."

Image: Kalev H. Leetaru

---

Email:

---

Clever E-Voting Tech Reduces Fraud

Current systems for tabulating votes during an election are not reliable, both here and in other countries. Remember the hanging chad debacle during the 2000 Bush vs. Gore election? And in places like Afghanistan, where democracy is still germinating, problems with elections are rampant. At this very moment, the Afghan attorney general, Rahmatullah Nazari, is investigating nine cases in which election officials are accused of rigging votes.

David Bismark, a voting system designer, has come up with a simple method that makes elections transparent and verifiable. His system uses computers but doesn't depend on them. It consists of a two-part ballot form, with one side showing the list of candidates in random order, and the other side displaying the tick-boxe. The side with the tick boxes also contains an encrypted 2D barcode unique to that ballot.

After the person has voted, she tears the perforation, giving the side with the 2D barcode to the election official. Since the list of candidates were in random order, the order of the tick marks alone cannot indicate who she voted for, just in case an election official wants to peak. The ballot is put into an optical scanner, which decodes the 2D encryption, reads the tick marks accordingly and registers the vote.

The information is stored on a website, which the voter can access later using a unique code, to be sure her vote was recorded. The data can also be made available to anyone who wants to count it to be sure the election is free from fraud. If any fraud occurs, the voter's receipt won't match the vote registered online.

Watch the video; it's quite interesting.

Election workers count votes after the parliamentary elections at a polling station on September 18, 2010 in Mazar-e-Sharif, Balkh province, north of Kabul, Afghanistan. Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

 

---

Email:

---