election2012

Rep. Paul Ryan, the new Republican pick as vice presidential nominee, has not been a leader on technology topics and has a mixed tech voting record in this area.

This should be no surprise. If you're in the U.S. Congress, you're not likely to focus on technology unless you're a member of the relevant committees. Ryan isn't. Instead, he's the chairman of the House Budget committee and has spent years trying to get entitlements under control.

So far, though, Ryan's voting history indicates that he tends to align himself with the Republicans' party … Read more

Twitter is getting into the candidate sentiment business, parsing the content of 2 million tweets a week to capture what the company calls the "nuances of public opinion" about the presidential hopefuls.

The newly launched Twitter Political Index offers a daily tally of Twitter users' "feelings" about President Obama and his presumptive Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, the company says.

"Each day, the Index evaluates and weighs the sentiment of Tweets mentioning Obama or Romney relative to the more than 400 million Tweets sent on all other topics. For example, a score of 73 for a … Read more

Google has some news. Voters in the U.S. get their information about candidates and issues via the Internet. That's not really news, but Google would like you to know that one third of people nationwide see campaign ads on the company's YouTube video sharing service that they haven't seen on TV. According to a 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, 71 percent of adults have used YouTube and similar sites, and 28 percent visited them daily.

The infographic above is part of Google's "Four Screens to Victory" campaign, … Read more

I am not entirely convinced about life's alleged correlations.

Just as beautiful people can be entirely unsexy, so too those who shop at Ann Taylor can be very, very wonderful indeed.

Yet some highly intuitive brains are insisting that there is a clear and meaningful link between the music you hold on your iPod, iPhone, or Gramophone cabinet and the political views you hold in your head.

A blog post by Brian Whitman at The Echo Nest offers correlations so startling that I am concerned someone might accuse me of being a Republican for listening to Pink Floyd.

Yes, despite the fact that last year the son of Floyd lead David Gilmour was locked up for rioting against the U.K. government, if you listen to Dad's music you are likely a righty.

On the other hand, if Rihanna is your thing, then you are almost certainly of a more Democratic persuasion.

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company and Whitman used the anonymized data built within the Nest's twigs in order to find alignments.… Read more

Why must political seasons always be as fragrant as a raccoon's breath?

Agreeing to disagree seems to have all the popularity of dancing in a graveyard. Who, then, can but offer a snort of resignation that some underhanded nastiness has allegedly wafted over to Facebook?

Allegations are surfacing from the political swamp that supporters of one party are getting those of their rival party suspended from commenting on fan pages.

This alleged ruse was brought to my attention by Jon Kopp, the founder and president of Quality Epoxyin Gilbert, Ariz. He claims he has been banned by Facebook … Read more

Rep. Lamar Smith could pay a steep political price for authoring two bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act and an online surveillance measure, that have become loathed by millions of Internet users.

He's facing an unexpected primary challenge from an ex-lawman who believes Smith has little regard for the U.S. Constitution--and who plans to use those bills as a lever to pry his opponent out of a congressional seat he's occupied since 1987.

Richard Mack, an Arizona sheriff who retired to Fredericksburg, Texas, is a self-described "constitutional conservative" with a long history of supporting causes … Read more

Ever since GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole claimed that Hollywood produced "nightmares of depravity" that coarsened American culture and made "deviancy" mainstream, movie studios and record labels have enjoyed a spectacularly uneasy relationship with the Republican Party.

Copyright has been the exception to that strife: since the late 1990s, Hollywood-backed proposals to expand copyright law--the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Induce Act, the Pro-IP Act--have all been embraced, or at least not opposed, by Republicans.

The controversy over the Protect IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, has finally splintered that alliance. … Read more

All four Republican presidential candidates today denounced a pair of controversial Hollywood-backed copyright bills, lending a sharp partisan edge to yesterday's protest against the legislation by Wikipedia, Google, and thousands of other Web sites.

The bills are "far too intrusive, far too expensive, far too threatening (to) the freedom of speech and movement of information across the Internet," former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said during tonight's CNN debate in South Carolina.

Romney's rivals offered similar criticisms of the Senate measure, Protect IP--scheduled for a floor vote next week--and the House bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act, … Read more