Brian’s Utah Weblog

Here’s a new tool I’ve been working on for data analysis stuffed full of political intrigue.

This is a chart of the 2008 Utah Senate. Each senator attracts the others based on how often the two agreed on non-unanimous roll call votes on bills in the 2008 General Session. If any two get too close on the chart compared to their voting behavior, they start to repel each other. Party and partisan affiliation are ignored except to color the squares.

I find it astonishing how stable the final results are. Margaret Dayton (R-Provo), Howard Stephenson (R-Draper), and Mark Madsen (R-Lehi) always drop out into the reptilian reactionary tail while Scott McCoy (D-SLC) and Ross Romero (D-SLC) elevate the progressive head of the body. Peter Knudsen (R-Brigham City) and Kevin Van Tassell (R-Vernal) sit in between the main body of Republicans and the Democrats.

See if you can make them match the seating chart like I did. Try dragging Romero into the middle of the Republicans and watch them part like the Red Sea. See if you can balance Margaret Dayton between Romero and McCoy so that she can’t go either way and gets stuck in an unstable equilibrium among the Democrats. Or just hit reset and watch how stable the results are.

Remember, I didn’t program any fixed end state into this chart. The patterns you find are the result of actual roll call behavior and a simple rule that draws closer senators who agree on each vote. If Mark Madsen always ends up in the same place on your chart, that’s his choice and not mine.

Click start to begin the simulation.

Note that this is an extract from a beta version of some new visualization tools and you can probably crash it. Also, unlike the rest of this site which is available under a Creative Commons license this post and the scripts and technologies used to build it are ©2008 Brian Earl Watkins all rights reserved and not available for Creative Commons licensing.

It seems like the IE problems are ironed out and even the brand new IE7 bugs are under control.  Please let me know if you have any problems with the new look of Brian’s Utah Weblog.

If you are using Internet Explorer, isn’t it time to say goodbye to security holes, crashes, popup advertising, and convicted monopolists who have admitted stealing Utah jobs with unethical business practices?  It’s time to get Firefox!

Ethan has started using WordPress so it’s time for me to do a small redesign.

Firefox users should see new style tomorrow. Those of you using backwards and outdated browsers like Internet Explorer will have to wait a bit longer for everything to work. Shouldn’t you upgrade to Firefox and say goodbye to popups, viruses, window bloat, and the other ugly side effects of Internet Explorer?

Chris at YDems handled the liveblogging for today. I couldn’t be at the redistricting committee, so I was happy to see another member of the Utah blogging community there to cover it.

A technology note on the difference between blogging at the county and the legislature:

The legislature’s wireless internet is great but Salt Lake County’s wireless internet is not as wonderful.  While the bandwidth is great, the county has chosen to block access to an apparently random set of sites.  And no, I wasn’t surfing illicit sites in a room with 40 other people walking in and out looking over my shoulder. The county also closes off all outgoing ports except 80 and 443, which makes server maintenance next to impossible.

The Civicspace project, which powers most of the progressive community web communities areound the nation, has redefined itself.

The Civicspace project started as Deanspace, the community organizing platform created ad hoc by the Dean For America campaign (now Democracy For America with Utah affiliate Democracy For Utah).  Later it evolved into a giant organizing platform called CiviCRM that integrated with the Drupal site management platform.

Then Civicspace Labs shut down its site for about a month and revived just this month as an online service provider hosting Civicspace sites for a fee.  Since setting up and running complicated software is expensive and time consuming, the new approach could be a success.

And now Civicspace is no longer a single piece of software.  CiviCRM integrates now also with the Joomla site management software.

Webmasters, enjoy all the new choices.

The Tribune did a story today on the Mozy computer programming Deathmatch.

Jon Jensen wrote a story about the Deathmatch on his weblog.

Mozy reports that of several hundred entries and 122 who submitted some answer to one or more challenges

• 93 were eliminated in round one
• 21 were eliminated in round two

And none of the eight submissions in the finals completely met the criteria of the challenge, although some came close.

The results page shows that my entries for the ten problems in rounds one and two were all successful but my entry in the finals, like the seven others, didn’t meet all the performance criteria.  We came pretty close, though.