Oddhead Blog

Just in time for Election Day Tuesday November 4, 2008, here is an extremely un-useful mapping service to help you find exactly where not to go on election day in order to cast your vote.

For example, here is precisely where I would not go to vote if I lived where I work which I don’t:

Ok, what’s the point of this you ask?

Well, first, there is little point — it’s mostly a joke.

Beyond that, it’s meant as a satirical commentary on the inability of computers to understand satirical commentary.

Search engine algorithms and search advertising algorithms can’t distinguish well between “polling place is” and “polling place is not”.

Enough googlebombing and I’d wager the above link could rise in the ranks for search queries like polling place.

Enough money and a griefer serious about policing the Internet’s un-seriousness could advertise the link to people searching for their polling place in battleground zip codes, keeping the ad text perfectly factual with a few well placed negations, bypassing human editors at least for a few crucial hours.

In a way, it’s a thought experiment into our future as robots replace humans in the workforce, in this case librarians and editors.

The site is not meant to fool people, even foolish people, only computers.

Every election, many voters rationalize their choice as the “lesser of two evils”.¹

However, for me, this year’s election is not about the lesser of evils.

In fact, for the first time I can remember, I actually like both major candidates in the US Presidential election.

I like Obama more and I voted for him² — I think he’s smarter, inspires optimism, and has better policies and people surrounding him. But I like many aspects of McCain including how he denounced Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and the extreme religious right they represent.³

If the party of less government could ever manage to stop legislating morality, I might actually consider voting for them. By the opposite logic, I imagine some evangelicals actually hope that Obama wins, thus strengthening their argument that Republicans can’t win without them.

On a related note, I received an email chain letter from a Snopes-averse source⁴ warning that McCain’s campaign is sending out erroneous absentee ballot applications to Obama supporters in an attempt to disqualify voters. Initially I dismissed it as conspiracy theory. Then, a few days ago, I received an absentee ballot application in the mail myself, even though I had just finished voting! For a moment, I thought I was a target of the scam with the evidence right in my hand. I could feel the blograge composing in my head.

So I investigated. (Read: conducted a few web searches.)

The Wisconsin State Journal (in)concludes that McCain either meddled or messed up, with benefit of the doubt going to the latter. Blackboxvoting.com (not affiliated with Bev Harris’s more cited blackboxvoting.org) paints a picture of more widespread fraud and malicious intent.

And it seems that the application I received was a legitimate and well intentioned mailing from the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, a left-leaning environmental organization. The application’s return address had one line missing and an incorrect zip code by one digit, but the address was “correct” in the sense that it would almost surely end up at the right place, so I believe this was not part of any intentional plot to mislead.⁵ Still, the whole ordeal got me thinking that perhaps all unsolicited applications for absentee ballots should be outlawed — there’s just too much room for error, both malicious and inadvertent.

	1Likely more a testament to the effectiveness of attack ads than anything else, and one of the many maddening features of a duop-racy.
	2If the choice had been between Clinton and McCain, I think I would have had a harder decision.
	3I also like the fact that he defied Bush on torture and held firm on the Iraq surge, a strategy that seems to have helped, despite the political consequences. On the other hand, I cringe at the thought of a President Palin, an outcome with a better than 1 in 7 chance of happening if elected, according to one estimate.
	4My mom!
	5You decide: The return address on the application is: Middlesex County Clerk, PO Box 1110, New Brunswick, NJ 08903-1110. The correct address is County Clerk, Hon. Elaine Flynn, P.O. Box 1110, 75 Bayard Street, 4th Floor, New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1110.

Cross-posted on midasoracle.org

The Yahoo! News Political Dashboard has re-launched for the general election stretch run of the 2008 US Presidential election.

From the main map you can see the status of the election in every state according to either polls or Intrade prediction market odds. Hover your mouse over a state to see current numbers or click on a state to see historical trends. On the side, you can see search trends, blogs, news, and demographic breakdowns at national and state levels.

You can also “create your own scenario” by picking who will win in every state. You can save and share your prediction and compare against markets, polls, history, or celebrities. More on ycorpblog.

In the markets view, states are colored either bright red or bright blue, regardless of how close the race is in that state. To see a visualization that blends colors to reflect the tightness of the race, see electoralmarkets.com.

Yahoo! News also offers a candidate badge that you can display on your blog declaring your choice. The badge features national-level polls, prediction markets, search buzz, and money raised.

If you haven’t played around with Yahoo! Pipes, I highly recommend it. It’s a usable and useful service that brings web mashups to the masses, making this favorite hacker pastime as easy as dragging objects around on the screen.

For example, it took me probably about ten minutes as a first-time user to create a map mashup showing Barack Obama’s upcoming campaign stops. I “piped” the output of Washington Post’s RSS feed to a location-extractor module that identifies and geo-codes place names and renders them on a map. Here’s a screenshot of the output:

The easiest way to get started is to find an existing Pipe, clone it, and modify it as your own. Using this feature, I cloned my Obama map and in about one minute had a McCain map too.

Pipes uses a visual programming interface. The idea of “programming by picture” (I recall playing with one in the 1980s) never took hold as a mainstream tool. However, as a metaphor for mashups, where to goal is to chain together a number of sources and services, the visual approach seems exactly right. The implementation in a browser is a feat of ajaxian magic that I still find remarkable, even as Yahoo! and others are commoditizing the art. I imagine that even non-programmers should have little trouble constructing their own Pipes. Here is a screenshot of the source “code” for my Obama map:

Pipes has dozens of useful modules, including user input, Yahoo! Search, Flickr, and regular expressions.

You can embed the Pipe on your own website with a single line of javascript. I did this with my Obama and McCain campaign travel maps here. Or you can grab the output as an XML feed to use however you wish.

Pipes allows you to create human-readable URLs (e.g., http://pipes.yahoo.com/oddhead/obamatravelmap), a nice touch.

The icing on the cake for me is how Pipes — unlike so many other web sites, including some on Yahoo! — treats me and my Opera browser like adults:

(BTW, Pipes seems to work fine on Opera).

Unfortunately, Daniel Raffel, one of the key founders of Yahoo! Pipes, left Yahoo!. However, the team seems to be strong and continues to innovate, so I’m hopeful this fantastic service will continue to improve and thrive.