Slashdot Mirror
Tracking the Congressional Attention Span
Turismo writes "Ars Technica covers a new research project that uses computers to look at 70 million words from the Congressional Record. The project's goal was to track what our representatives were talking about at any given time, and researchers were able to do it without human training or intervention. From the article: '...researchers found, for instance, that "judicial nominations" have consumed steadily more Congressional attention between 1997 and 2004. In fact, the topic produced the most number of words published in a single "day" of the Congressional Record: 230,000 on November 12, 2003.' It looks like automated topic analysis has truly arrived."
"It looks like automated topic analysis has truly arrived."
+ topic+analysis%22&btnG=Google+Search
Not according to my in-depth research. Looks like "automated topic analysis" isn't arriving at all.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22automated
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
If Pro is the opposite of Con.... what'd Congress mean?
Just playing around with some silly words... do we need to analyse what Congressmen speak, to understand their intent or motivations? Following the money would be a better option.. and we'll find a Very High Attention Span for words like money, dollars and Big Bucks..
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Think about it: "Who thinks we should elect Joe Six-Pack"
Lots of talk, chit-chat, chatter, etc...
"Okay, now who would want to oppose the True American, Patriot, Love, Peace Act*"
Cricket! Cricket!
*And of course this Act happens to have about thirty-thousand ridders attached to it...
So what scored the lowest? Individual freedoms? Constitutional Rights? Fair use?
The project's goal was to track what our representatives were talking about at any given time...
Isn't that like "Big Brother"'ing your goverment?
I hate citizens with double morals. Leave those fine representatives alone and let them represent!
is this a double dupe by Ars AND /. ?
7 ( http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060802-7408 .html )
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/02/22122
from the current one:
While text mining 330,000 New York Times articles poses an interesting challenge, it's not as interesting as sifting through 70 million words (from over 70,000 unique documents) found in the Congressional Record. A team of political science researchers has done just that (PDF), and found that their software was able to answer questions too difficult for humans to handle on their own.
from the one posted yesterday:
The discipline of text mining took a step forward recently as a team from the University of California-Irvine used a new technique called "topic modeling" to sift 330,000 articles from the New York Times archive (hardcore geeks can read one of the team's papers [PDF] for more information). The team's goal was to have their computers sort the stories by topic--without requiring any human training or intervention. Computers have trouble understanding large fields of unstructured text without guidance, but the new approach enables them to engage in some unsupervised learning that could soon pay huge dividends for academics, corporations, and government security programs alike.
Are there really that many speeches? TheyWorkForYou.com offer a similar service for the UK's Houses of Parliament, except it's done manually, and there's only a dozen volunteers working on it.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The conclusion. Congress has ADD, just like me.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Does it take really a sophisticated tool to count the number of times "judicial" and "nominations" appearing in the same sentence?
May be the submitter forgot to cite a little bit more impressive examples?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Great. Now we know what congress has been talking about.
Big deal.
Wake me up when you can tell me what in the hell they were thinking.
--MarkusQ
P.S. Other than how to make sure that they--and Joe Lieberman--get re-elected I mean.
That disease that has so infected business - talking about process (how) rather than products (what) - is readily apparent in Congress as well. I added up the percentages of the "Procedural [HouseKeeping]" categories (egads, there were 6 different line items - not sure what the distinctions were), and it was 50%!!! So, for half the time Congress is talking about *how* they are going to talk about things. Ugggh. I suppose, as one who believes that the less the government does, the better, I should be happy. But oh, the global warming from all that hot air!
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
The congressional record is a false document of what happened in congress. Watch C-Span one day and hear each person request "Unamious support to change or extend". This allows 30 second comment say to begainst the bill to become a 2 hr speech to supporting the bill WITHOUT editing marks.
This program may count time on paper but can not count time that congress is actually spending.
The record isn't actually way they talked about...
...it's what they want you to THINK they talked about.
0 6/05/31/myths_and_lies_on_the_record
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/JohnStossel/20
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
Or maybe that's just what Google wants you to thing...
tracking the what and the what?
30 years ago, I learned in my high school civics class that any Senator or Representative can insert anything he or she wants into it at any time. Examples that were pointed out to us were speeches on the floor of the Senate that were never made, modifications to committee meetings, etc. The CR is by no means an accurate measure of anything. Except maybe the size of their combined egos.
... "judicial nominations" have consumed steadily more Congressional attention between 1997 and 2004.
In the U.S., there has recently been a strong focus on appointing judges who will help the rich get richer.
-
Operation Iraqi Liberation, OIL, has liberated Iraqi resources, not its people.
It would be really interesting to see a cost analysis on this data. How much did it cost to talk about a certain topic.
:)
Then everyone can get a warm fuzzy feeling about their tax dollars.
Shouldn't penis size be discussed twice, before and after Jessica Alba and Angelina Jolie are discussed? Things change, you know. And I'd bump "pay increases" down to 5, replaced by "baby oil." Just a thought. Whoa, look out....
So in web2.0 terms, this is Google Zeitgeist meets the Statistically Improbable Phrase analysis like you see on Amazon. Find pairs or sets of words which are out of the statistical norm for English, then start to track their rise and fall among the "marketplace of ideas" in Congress. Also, on the c|net news site, they have two graph views to visualize connections between similar-topic stories or often-viewed "hot" stories.
It would be interesting to see how many phrases are just a matter of the odd language that Congress uses. There's a stock metaphorical phrase for just about anything, and there are also a lot of phrases that are steeped in tradition which often get misunderstood by layfolk.
[
They know, don't they, that a representative can have arbitrary text inserted in CR as if it had been read?
Also, if you watch CSPAN while Congress is in session, in the evenings you'll see long stretches with just a few people who are delivering their rants into a nearly empty room. Can that be separated from the rest of the text?
Now there's a way for the slashdot editors to help pick story submissions better. They can use this technology to sift through the queue and post those hot stories quicker. :)
"If you insist on using Windoze you're on your own."
Run the search for "not a dumptruck" and "A series of tubes"!
Our state legislature likes to do thing the archaic way, in order to hide their dirty deals etc.
Well, someone figured out how to scrape the PDF journals they regularly post on their web sit. Very interesting to say the least.
You might also be interested in another topic model that not only automatically discovers topics, but also automatically discovers topic-specific groupings of the senators by their votes. http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mccallum/papers/grouptopi c_linkkdd05.pdf "Group and Topic Discovery from Relations and Text."
It uses not only word data (from the text of 16 years worth of bills voted on in the U.S. Senate), but also the senator's voting records.
For example, you can see that Sen. Chafee (R-RI) (who was mentioned on this morning's NPR as a "liberal Republican") actually does fall into a cluster of Democrats, not fellow Republicans. When automatically discovering topics using word data alone (without the votes, as does the wustl.edu paper above) the topics on this Senate data are reasonably coherent, but the topics created by this "Group-Topic" new model are even more interesting because their discovery is driven by the need to predict the votes as well as the words. For example, "Social Security" doesn't appear in the old model, but pops out clearly in the new model because it has such a distinct voting pattern.
Some of the other results are also pretty interesting---on Education and Domestic policy the Republicans are more split than the Democrats (forming 3 groups, to the Democrats 1 group). On other topics, the split is the other way around.
Using the same technique, there is also an analysis of 60 years worth of voting records from the U.N. On the topic of "human rights", Nicaragua, Papua, Rwanda, Swaziland and Fiji all get clustered together---ouch!
I imagine that the length of time a congressman/woman talks on a subject is directly proportional to the importance of that issue to them personally.
This would of course be subject to certain modifiers.
- Time to next election
- money from interested lobbyists
- need to oppose the issues raised by competitors to keep their succes rate down.
I'm sure if you could accuratelly calculate the above modifiers and apply them to any subject spoken about in congress you'd get an accurate prediction.
... only if they can make measurements as small as planck intervals...
"researchers found, for instance, that 'judicial nominations' have consumed steadily more Congressional attention between 1997 and 2004."
My interpretation: "inter-party power struggles" have consumed steadily more attention...
Or the flip-side: "actually running the damn country" has consumed steadily less attention...
Libertarians, rejoice. Though I feel sick.
I suspect the reason Congress is spending more time on judicial nominations is that in the last 20 years judges have been playing a bigger role in government. They seem to have become the final authority in the government. The balance of power seems to have shifted toward the Judiciary.
If you want more proof, read this article by John Stossel, which takes a look at what the "Congressional Record" is really all about. Or like parent says, watch CSPAN.
I just finished reading John Stossel's new book (quite good, though not as good as his first). He has a section in it about the Congressional Record.
If you think the Congressional Record is an accurate account of what happens in Congress you are dead wrong. Congressmen use taxpayer dollars to manipulate the Record because there is nothing that says they can't. They insert bogus info, like "Congressman Bob Blowhard addressed the House with a commendation for the 4-H Club of Woohah, Oklahoma". Which never really happened but it makes Senator Blowhard look good with his constituents. They also change the words of what they really said on the floor to make themselves sound better.
Here is a blog post mentioning the problem Stossel brings up and a small excerpt
Carl
Vote Libertarian
... I found the article interesting and entertaining up until "To boldly go where no one has gone before" and then I started thinking about Star-Trek and decided that I would watch some of that... but I got bored half-way through that and thought I would post here... hmmm... what's that over there?
John Stoseel is fake!
REG: Right. Now, uh, item four: attainment of world supremacy within the next five years. Uh, Francis, you've been doing some work on this.
FRANCIS: Yeah. Thank you, Reg. Well, quite frankly, siblings, I think five years is optimistic, unless we can smash the Roman empire within the next twelve months.
REG: Twelve months?
FRANCIS: Yeah, twelve months. And, let's face it. As empires go, this is the big one, so we've got to get up off our arses and stop just talking about it!
COMMANDOS: Hear! Hear!
LORETTA: I agree. It's action that counts, not words, and we need action now.
COMMANDOS: Hear! Hear!
REG: You're right. We could sit around here all day talking, passing resolutions, making clever speeches. It's not going to shift one Roman soldier!
FRANCIS: So, let's just stop gabbing on about it. It's completely pointless and it's getting us nowhere!
COMMANDOS: Right!
LORETTA: I agree. This is a complete waste of time.
[BAM - the door opens]
JUDITH: They've arrested Brian!
REG: What?
COMMANDOS: What?
JUDITH: They've dragged him off! They're going to crucify him!
REG: Right! This calls for immediate discussion!
COMMANDO #1: Yeah.
JUDITH: What?!
COMMANDO #2: Immediate.
COMMANDO #1: Right.
LORETTA: New motion?
REG: Completely new motion, eh, that, ah-- that there be, ah, immediate action--
FRANCIS: Ah, once the vote has been taken.
REG: Well, obviously once the vote's been taken. You can't act another resolution till you've voted on it...
JUDITH: Reg, for God's sake, let's go now!
REG: Yeah. Yeah.
JUDITH: Please!
REG: Right. Right.
FRANCIS: Fine.
REG: In the-- in the light of fresh information from, ahh, sibling Judith--
LORETTA: Ah, not so fast, Reg.
JUDITH: Reg, for God's sake, it's perfectly simple. All you've got to do is to go out of that door now, and try to stop the Romans' nailing him up! It's happening, Reg! Something's actually happening, Reg! Can't you understand?! Ohhh!
[slam]
REG: Hm. Hm.
FRANCIS: Oh, dear.
REG: Hello. Another little ego trip for the feminists.
LORETTA: What?
FRANCIS: [whistling]
REG: Oh, sorry, Loretta. Ahh, oh, read that back, would you?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Have an attention span that is a complex of [all the things needed to get {re-)elected]. If they can support their original ideals/goals/etc. evil, good, demented or whatever, well that's a bonus.
They can't do shit unless they get elected first, and to get elected they have to sell out, so their priotities change with the system that owns them.
That pdf that you link to says something about 90 Democrats ??????
The repeated use of that statement on CSPAN reminds me of the Outland "let me cover my fanny" strip.
which orifice they were talking out of?
Yes, over 16 years of data there are well over 100 different Senators because they get voted in and out of office.
Canada is a Commonwealth country, maybe offshore your parliamentary reporting to them?p
p
http://www.commonwealth-hansard.org/chea_index.as
The other option would be for a group to privately transcribe all or part of the actual proceedings and see what happens:
http://www.commonwealth-hansard.org/chea_story.as
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Congress members do not have what they actually said recorded in the Congressional Record. They submit written speeches that may or may not have occurred for inclusion each night. Much of what is in the Record is wildly inaccurate as a representation of what they are actually saying. It would be better to do analysis on C-SPAN recordings.
C-SPAN is the greatest tool ever for historians of Congress because it shows what they really are saying and doing. Members can have anything stricken from the record at any time before publication. So, is this project time well-spent? Nope.