Who will become the next Massachusetts Senator

The race to fill Ted Kennedy's vacant senatorial seat in Washington has turned into a real shocker. At the outset, it seemed clear that in deeply democratic Massachusetts only a Democrat could become the next senator. As of today, it seems to be the other way. Republican candidate Scott Brown is ahead of Democrat Martha Coakley by 5 points.

I wanted to know what the Web would tell us. The picture below shows the daily betweenness values of the two candidates, we can cleary see how Scott Brown is gaining on Martha Coakley.

It seems however, that there is a silver lining for Ms. Coakley, at least in the blogosphere.
The next picture shows her centrality as of today (January 15). She is ahead by 6 percentage points.

The last picture, just for fun, shows the Blogpost-Network leading to the percentages. The red dots are the Web sites promoting both candidates. The brown dots promote Mr Brown, but it seems that the green (should really be blue) Web sites carry some more weight, leading to Martha Coakley's slight lead.

Let's wait until January 19, then we will know for sure.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Predicting Stock Market Indicators Through Twitter “I hope it is not as bad as I fear”

Image
We have been working on trying to predict market indicators for quite some time by analyzing Web Buzz , predicting who will win an Oscar, or how well movies do at the box office . Among other things we have correlated posts about a stock on Yahoo Finance and Motley’s Fool with the actual stock price, predicting the closing price of the stock on the next day based on what people say today on Yahoo Finance, on the Web and Blogs about a stock title. The rising popularity of twitter gives us a new great way of capturing the collective mind up to the last minute. In our current project we analyze the positive and negative mood of the masses on twitter, comparing it with broad stock market indices such as Dow Jones, S&P 500, and NASDAQ. We collected the twitter feeds from one whitelisted IP for six months from March 30, 2009 to Sept 4, 2009, ranging from 5680 to 42820 tweets per day. According to twitter this corresponds to a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volum...
Read more

My life in Alternative Realities - fatherlanders and nerds don’t go well together

Image
We are all living in different alternative realities, people with different personalities see reality from very different perspectives, potentially leading to a lot of friction and misunderstandings. “Nerds” are open to change, they believe in the progress of technology and innovation. “Fatherlanders” abhor change, they like tradition and authority, valuing the fatherland above all, and would like to reestablish the good old times. “Spiritualists” believe into supernatural forces, they are religious, meditate and hope that the forces of nature will heal their ailing. “Treehuggers” believe into sustainability and global warming, they want to save nature by restricting technical progress. I experience  this friction frequently in my daily life. As a computer and technology nerd with spiritualist and treehugger inclinations, my communication with members from other tribes sometimes does not end well.  My interactions with officers of the US Department of Homeland Security and the...
Read more

How Blind Trust in Generative AI Undermines Creative Work

Image
This summer, we experienced firsthand the damage caused by blind faith in the "superhuman" capabilities of generative AI, even among otherwise intelligent individuals. Here's what happened. We submitted a research paper to an academic conference, and after it was accepted, I paid the registration fee, booked flights, and arranged accommodations. A week later, we received an abrupt email from the organizers stating that our paper had been rejected. The reason? Their AI-based plagiarism and ChatGPT-detection tool flagged it as containing both plagiarized content and text generated by ChatGPT. This accusation was entirely unfounded. Our paper presented highly original work by our team, proposing novel AI algorithms to predict animal emotions—a concept never explored before. We detailed the development of an AI model to validate this approach, something completely unique to our research. By its very nature, it was impossible for our work to be plagiarized or generated by Chat...
Read more