Here's a fun example of how you might use my data on Congressional bill length and complexity. Imagine you want to understand the empirical distribution of Flesch-Kincaid reading level for Congressional bills and how this distribution is related to bill stage. A first step might be to visualize this relationship. Based on this
Last August, I released an XML copy of the Michigan Compiled Laws (MCL). As an example of what could be done with the structured data, I also created a single-page HTML version generated from the XML. Since then, there's been significant activity in the state statutory arena; my favorite example is Virginia Decoded, a
A few weeks ago, Ari Hershowitz posted on Quroa calling for a Californa code hackathon. Since Ari was drumming up support for software developers to build state-level tools, I thought I'd see what data the Michigan government had to offer. However, Michigan, unlike California, does not provide any bulk access to its Code. Access to Michigan
I've been busy lately with my new day job and wedding planning , but Dan and I still managed to meet two big goals in the past week. First, we've finalized a stable version of the Electronic World Treaty Index. This is a big deal in the world of international relations and international law,
What do you do with that unfinished paper? You know, the one that's 50% there but you don't have the time to finish. Or maybe it's the one that's 80% there, but you don't want to deal with the inevitable two years of revise-and-resubmit. This problem gets even harder when you decide to leave academia. I
The chart says it all, with nuclear winning by two orders of magnitude (via ManyEyes).
Well, so much for that #march11 #Saudi day of rage. Whether it was really the "tempest in a teacup" that Prince Al-Waleed suggested on CNBC (video below, transcript here) or not, the oil complex and Saudi markets seem to have shrugged off much of the risk that was priced in after Thursday's rumors of shots.
Thanks to Sam Arbesman yesterday for pointing out that Kevin Kelly thinks the blog Dan and I run, Compuational Legal Studies, is a "signpost of the future." We were probably a few years early with some of our ideas and methods, but hey, an innovator's born to innovate, right?
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
