Thanks to Sam Arbesman (@arbesman) for featuring Dan and my paper, Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The United States Code, on his excellent Wired Science blog, the Social Dimension. You can read the article here, and, as a reminder, all of the code and data from the paper is available in this github repository. Abstact
Four years ago, Dan Katz and I began working on a project to measure the complexity of the law. Its genesis was, in every sense, an accident; in order to properly identify citations to the IRC in our VTR empirical review of U.S. Tax Court decisions, we had to deal with the informal, non-Blue
Last year, I covered a number of the so-called "Twitter protests" in China (#cn220), Iran (#25bahman), and Algeria (#fev12). Since these protests began in January 2011, the Arab Spring has claimed many members of both ruling and revolting groups - Mubarak in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, Ben Ali in Tunisia, Saleh in Yemen, and
Dan and I have written and spoken on legal informatics many times. Inevitably these conversations come to the same cut-and-paste list of informatics examples from legal search/retrieval and decision making. It's struck me that these examples fall into two categories. The first category sits firmly in the 20th century, while the second category belongs
The chart says it all, with nuclear winning by two orders of magnitude (via ManyEyes).
I've been playing with Twitter data over the last week, archiving Algerian, Egyptian, Iranian, and Chinese tweets. I thought I'd bring the story a little closer to home this time by archiving tweets from Wisconsin Union protesters on the #wiunion tag. Grab the dataset of 165,593 tweets here, and check out the two figure
Earlier this week, I posted a ~100k tweet dataset on the #25bahman protests in Iran. The corresponding figure of frequencies showed a strong presence on Twitter, with over 500 tweets per 5 minute period at peak. You can download the dataset or check out the figure in that post. I decided to take a quick
What do 88,831 tweets about protest and revolution in Iran look like? Following in the success of Egypt's #jan25 tag, protesters have piled onto the #25bahman tag to discuss Iran's own prospects for "revolution" (25 Bahman 1389 is the Hijri date for February 14, 2011). Curious to analyze and compare these movements, I've started collecting
I wondered yesterday whether one of the Algeria/Yemen hashtags would dominate. In order to bring some numbers to the discussion, I grabbed all public tweets on #feb12 and #fev12 through this afternoon. You can see the results below: First off, note that all timestamps are UTC. Second, based on the scale, it's pretty clear that
I've been watching the #feb12 tweets on the movements in Algeria and Yemen. One of the most common types of tweets explains how to avoid the current censorship of Twitter, Facebook, and Google by directly entering IPs. This got me thinking - while it may be fairly easy to memorize and disseminate IPv4 addresses, what
