The two clusters in the core are roughly split into Democrats (l) and Republicans (r).

Chicago Olympics Bid

Built from data by LittleSis.org.  As always, click for larger image.

3.6-times as many former congressional staffers turned health care lobbyists and their immediate connections have network ties closer to former President Bush, than to current President Obama.

The connections in the network map shown below, and used for the analysis above, include people and organizations (e.g. corporate, not-for-profit, public, etc.) the people have been identified with.

Other trivia:

• 53% have equidistant path lengths between both Obama and Bush
• All are 0.45 links closer to Bush, on average
• Minimum distance of 6 in distance to Obama + to Bush
• Maximum difference of 4 in path lengths to Obama compared with to Bush

Expanding on the earlier network visualization of these new health care lobbyists, I have updated the network graph to the 500 identified by LittleSis.org.

The two easily identified clusters are close to Obama (lower left) and Bush (upper right).  Red dots are former staffers from the LittleSis.org list, and hollow dots are their other relationships.

And, not surprisingly the relationship distribution follows a power-law.  Or, as indicated in this log-scale histogram, a Poisson distribution.

]]> http://www.howweknowus.com/2009/09/22/health-care-leans-republican/feed/ 2 http://www.howweknowus.com/2009/09/22/health-care-leans-republican/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/hwku/~3/XbzVZLkQZtQ/ http://www.howweknowus.com/2009/09/08/mathematicians-do-it-randomly/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:52:03 +0000 erich http://www.howweknowus.com/?p=660

What it look like if you took all of the Mathematics articles from JSOR, the digital journal archive, and mapped co-authorship of the papers? It would look something like this.  Interesting to note, that while the distribution does hold to the small world network distribution exponent, there’s some “peakiness” about it that may suggest it’s not really one network, but the merging of several.  Given the role of mathematics on so many other subjects, that would not be a surprise.

Largest cluster of co-authorship

Zoomable image with names, after the jump.

Congrats to the NY Senate for beginning to open more data at http://www.nysenate.gov/opendata!

Here is the network of Senator Allocations of Funding to Community Projects (CPFs): 2009-2010 by Senator or group and zipcode.  Line width is proportional to funding allocation.

[click for full-size image]

Related: how do we define what’s public data? Some transit agencies are claiming copyright over transit performance.

Thanks to ProPublica and Sunlight Foundation:

…for the first time digitized one year’s worth of FARA records, making them accessible in a searchable database that allows users to easily follow the money and connect the dots. With the Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker , anyone can quickly learn what governments are lobbying whom, how often and about what. [source @ ProPublica]

Here are the firms the Congressmen and -women from my home state have been meeting with:

Foreign Lobbying of NY Congress

and the countries of the governmental department or foreign firm paying the lobbyists:

NY Congress Lobbying by Country

Thanks everyone for showing the strong interest in the Lobbyist map.  I got a couple nice mentions at Mother Jones and LittleSis.org, but more importantly, I’ve added in all of the other names in the map.

Circles are people, squares are organizations, and white circles are the lobbyists in question.

If you’d rather the image than the flash bits, here you go, all 2.5MB of it.

A zoomable version of the earlier map is here:

[Thanks to Drew Conway for the Sea Dragon zoomable suggestion]

The Huffington Post, along with public contributors, has been collecting a list of former Congressional staffers turned healthcare lobbyists.  LittleSis.org has been keeping track of these former staffers, and thanks to their API, we now have a social graph of their relationships.

Former staffers in white (with names), and the rest of the visual field to show that some are MUCH better networked than others.

If there’s interest, I can add the names of the people they are networked with and start some analysis of the group.

HCIU Congressional Staffers Turned Healthcare Lobbyists

As always, click for a larger image.

Update: network map with all names, and in a zoomable widget here.

Late last month, the NY Times had an article about the debate over healthcare legislation taking place in the Senate Finance Committee. Coincidentally, around that time, the folks over at LittleSis, the “free database detailing the connections between powerful people and organizations,” were kind enough to give me early access to their API (thanks Kevin and Matthew!).

So from NY Times:

To LittleSis:

Of the named members in the photo, neither Tom Barthold nor Phil Ellis existed at the time in the LittleSis database, but it’s still showing a pretty networked bunch.

I’d like to see someone do this one better, and include donors.

I occasionally get Twitter replies to random questions I put out there from people I’m not following, but this one had a surprise:

Not only did @answers respond, but also included more info. Intriguing. I followed the link. That’s when I furrowed my brow.

The page it took me to demonstrated what I perceive to be a grave violation of network trust: impersonation.

The website has a post, in their forum, ostensibly from me — and not just in name only. They refer back to my post where I asked the question.

I don’t want anyone to act in my name without my permission. Creating an account with my name, and referring back to a legitimate source with the same name, sure sounds like impersonation to me. Am I over reacting?  Or is Mahalo violating network trust?

Idiots of Ants [via Tomorrow Museum].