Politics

Finding Patterns in Corporate Chatter

Chris Jefferies — Thu, 26 May 2005 00:08:00 GMT

Email traffic - showing the patterns of email at Enron (click image)

Email keywords - showing what subjects were discussed at Enron (click image)

My co-worker, Terence, found this article in the New York Times about a statistical analysis of email traffic at Enron during the time the company was collapsing. One shows who was talking to whom and another shows, via common key words, what subjects were being discussed.

For example, the first chart shows the linkages between employees based on their email traffic. In this chart it shows how a new person pops up, who is a focus of a high number of emails, who's email address has changed. Investigators can use this kind of analysis to find relationships among employees.

In the HR world, the business I'm involved in, there have been discussions of using this kind of email analysis to understand the relationships among employees. While employees are normally organized around formal, hierarchical departments, it may be possible to understand the informal relationships within an organization and find ways to support naturally occurring collaborative groups.

With this kind of data, it would be interesting to combine this analytical approach with the TouchGraph interactive charts. See other references on this blog at:

Touch Graph Browser - http://jumano.com/blogs/chris/archive/2003/09/20/196.aspx
Mark Lombardi: Global Networks - http://jumano.com/blogs/chris/archive/2004/01/23/580.aspx
Mark Lombardi - Cartographies of Capital - http://jumano.com/blogs/chris/archive/2004/03/05/750.aspx

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/22/weekinreview/22kola.html?pagewanted=2

Local copy: http://jumano.com/blogs/chris/articles/1923.aspx

Joni Mitchell

Chris Jefferies — Sat, 23 Apr 2005 12:36:00 GMT

Last night Aurora and I went to see Joni Mitchell. She’s was speaking at the Commonwealth Club a few blocks from where I work. The event was scheduled to coincide with the anniversary of Earth Day. We were surprised to see our friend, Nancy Carroll, atending with a friend of hers.

Instead of being a straight interview, it started out with Joni talking about her world view and how she thinks we, as humans, have gone wrong. At first, she seemed to be a little overwhelmed with the 'big ideas' and with the depth of the subject, but she had some notes to keep her on track and had apparently given considerable thought about what she wanted to say. Her first statement:

“To love nature in this time is to be in terrible pain.“

She described a poignant display of our world condition as seen on the side of the Hard Rock Cafe in Los Angeles where there is a ticker or continuous counter that shows the growing world population juxtaposed with the number of trees being cut down.

She thinks it all went wrong with Plato and western 'logic' or intellect and the focus on western justice which lacks sense. On a poster board, she drew a diagram with a large circle marking North, South, East, and West. These points represented:

North as intellect
South as feeling
East as clarity
West as sense

She thinks that we, in the west, have focused too much on intellect and clarity and have lost our ability to feel and sense. Because we seem to focus too much on intellect and clarity we are, as a result, working with 'half a deck'. What was needed, she said, is a balance and called this balance the “Apple mind“.

She draws her world view from various philosophies including Buddhism, Jungian theory, Nietzsche, and Native American culture.

Her talk was interlaced with anecdotes about her recording career, Larry Klein, and "Iron Eyes" Cody (who is known as the Tear Indian in the famous Earth Day ad from 1971). She was asked to read a letter, purported to be from Chief Seattle, which is included in the liner notes of her most recent album, The Beginning Of Survival.

Some other interesting things we learned about Joni:

She thinks of herself primarily as a painter
She started smoking when she was nine years old and would ride her bicycle out into the country and spend quite time, enjoying nature and her little bag of tobacco.
She was asked who she was interested in musically and she said responded without hesitation, “No one!“
She doesn't listen to music very much and has very esoteric tastes; needs a high level of originality... There was a term she used that I can't recall now. (Update 04.25.2005: Nancy Carroll has reminded me; Joni said she needed a “high degree of divinity and originality“ in the music she listens to.)

Some other interesting links:

Interview by Elvis Costello from the November 2005 Vanity Fair magazine:
http://www.jmdl.com/library/print.cfm?id=1182

Discussion, from ’97 about one of my favorite songs, Sweet Bird:
http://www.jmdl.com/th-sweetbird.cfm

They recorded the talk and I think you might be able to catch it at this location:
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/broadcast/index.html

Parsing the State of the Union

Chris Jefferies — Wed, 16 Feb 2005 21:08:00 GMT

Here's a site found by my friend, David Anderson, that lets you search for words within various State Of The Union speeches.

http://www.style.org/stateoftheunion

There Is No Crisis: Protecting the Integrity of Social Security

Chris Jefferies — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:24:00 GMT

The RNC is re-uniting the BC04 team for their assault on Social Security. Right-wing groups are raising an estimated $100 million dollars for the campaign. There has been a war declared upon Social Security.

Let's stop this fraud. BlogPAC is joining the battle -- and we hope that all of you join us. BlogPAC is a collection of Democratic bloggers and blog readers.

Chat and Rant liberally...

Chris Jefferies — Mon, 22 Nov 2004 18:27:00 GMT

Lefty liberal chat... Don't get him started. Try it, it feels guuuuud!

From Sean Gleeson ...

The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines

Chris Jefferies — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 18:42:00 GMT

Working Paper: The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections
by Michael Hout, Laura Mangels, Jennifer Carlson, and Rachel Best

http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/

Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results

Chris Jefferies — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 21:32:00 GMT

The way our country looks politically when you resize based on population...

Voter Fraud

Chris Jefferies — Thu, 11 Nov 2004 22:50:00 GMT

I've added a couple of videos that you can download from the Jumano server that duscuss voter fraud. I had difficulty accessing the files so I downloaded them onto the Jumano server to make it a little easier to upload.

Expose about Diebold
http://www.jumano.com/media/VoterGateTheMovie_256kb.mov (90mb) - from www.votergate.tv

MSNBC Program
http://www.jumano.com/media/MSNBCVoteFraudVideo_300k.mov (40mb) - from Truthout Multimedia

I recommend that you right click on the links and select 'Save Target As...' option to save the media files onto your hard disk. Then you can double click on them to watch. You'll probably need Apple's Quicktime to watch them (available here).

2004 Election by IQ

Chris Jefferies — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 19:08:00 GMT

Here's a link to an image that shows IQ by state and how they voted... (from Derek but data source unknown)

http://jumano.com/blogs/ImageS/jumano_com/chris/93/o_2004election_by_IQ.jpg

Alien Face Hugger sneaking up George's back

Chris Jefferies — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 16:30:00 GMT

What is that thing?

Looks like an Alien Face Hugger sneaking up his back... or maybe he got a fly swatter stuck in his jacket before he came out to the debate floor?

From debate 1, 2004.