In Tokyo elections, Twitter reveals voter preferences in a way surveys do not

… In many elections, voters choose their candidate along party lines. But in the case of the Tokyo governor, issues are believed to be more important than the party. We want to understand which issues are important, and how these issues vary across Tokyo. The Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun has […] Read more »

The Age of ‘Infopolitics’

… What we need is a concept of infopolitics that would help us understand the increasingly dense ties between politics and information. Infopolitics encompasses not only traditional state surveillance and data surveillance, but also “data analytics” (the techniques that enable marketers at companies like Target to detect, for instance, if […] Read more »

A model world

… Computer simulation, only a few decades old, is transforming scientific projects as mind-bending as plotting the evolution of the cosmos, and as mundane as predicting traffic snarl-ups. What should we make of this scientific nouvelle cuisine? While it is related to experiment, all the action is in silico — […] Read more »