Borasky Research Journal

Data Journalism Developer Studio 2012LX Blog

Last week, two stories broke about vendors showing off their sentiment analysis tools on social media messages about the 2012 election. The “smaller” story is about Twitter “predicting” the results of the New Hampshire primary. The “larger” story is about Facebook making a deal with Politico to share public and private data about the GOP candidates.

As you can imagine this topic is of extreme interest to me, and I’ve taken two steps in researching this story.

1. I’ve put the CRAN sentiment analysis library packages ‘textir‘ and ‘tm.sentiment‘ into the base Data Journalism Developer Studio 2012 appliance, so you can experiment with this in the comfort and safety of your own home, without having to buy any software.
2. I’ve started curating news and technology articles on the topic at Scoop.it: Sentiment Analysis and the 2012 Election.

I’m not sure how long this is going to be an active news story. The ACLU has weighed in on the Facebook – Politico deal, but in the larger context of SOPA, it may get lost in the shuffle.

Research papers on sentiment analysis:

• Liu, Bing, Sentiment Analysis and Subjectivity
• Taddy, Matthew A., Inverse Regression for Analysis of Sentiment in Text
• Taddy, Matthew A., On Estimation and Selection for Topic Models

Five Best Business Books of 2011 #5: Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness by Dan Zarrella j.mp/s1cwjY

— M. Edward Borasky (@znmeb) December8, 2011

I was on the webinar that introduced this book, along with thousands of others. Over 30,000 registered, and the count of people who attended was 10,899. If you had a Kindle, you could download this book for free. I did. In fact, if you’re an Amazon Prime member, you can still get the Kindle edition for free. Dan Zarrella has been collecting Twitter and Facebook data for some time now, and this book is the result of a careful study of what works, what doesn’t work, and what sometimes works. It’s an easy read and very useful.

Five Best Business Books of 2011 #4: Pulse by Douglas W. Hubbard j.mp/urX9B6

— M. Edward Borasky (@znmeb) December8, 2011

Pulse is along the lines of the previous book, but is much more detailed, and talks about more data sources. Moreover, it’s research-oriented – how to do the sort of thing Dan Zarrella did to define his hierarchy of contagiousness.

Pulse covers Google search trends, Facebook connections, blogs and Twitter in some detail. THe themes are “what we surf, who we friend and what we say.” Chapter 8 describes three “potential pulses” – “where we go, what we buy and how we play”. You should think of this book as an overview – you’ll need to dig deeper if you want to implement any of the research described.

Five Best Business Books of 2011 #3: Venture Deals by Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson j.mp/vxhj4l

— M. Edward Borasky (@znmeb) December8, 2011

One of the recurring themes in the past two years has been the so-called “lean startup”. I have some skepticism about the concept, particularly the way it’s been described in blogs. So it’s refreshing to see a book like Venture Deals come out that’s full of actual meat, not just admonitions to “fail faster.” The authors were here in Portland a few weeks ago for a well-attended lecture on the contents, and I have a signed copy. If you’re starting a business, you need to read this book first.

Five Best Business Books of 2011 #2 Financial Markets and Trading by Anatoly B. Schmidt j.mp/vLIHgG

— M. Edward Borasky (@znmeb) December8, 2011

I’ve covered this book at some length here, so I’ll defer you to the previous review. While it’s very advanced technically, it’s the best book published this year on trading technology. Most of the year’s other trading books are rehashes of decades-old technical analysis methods that may or may not work any more. If you want to be a trader, I highly recommend getting this book.

Five Best Business Books of 2011 #1 Changing Inequality by Rebecca M. Blankj.mp/rqt5ie

— M. Edward Borasky (@znmeb) December8, 2011

We heard a lot about economic inequality this year, and we’ll hear a lot more in 2012. Whether it’s Occupy Wall Street, calls for higher taxes on the wealthy by Warren Buffett, or President Obama’s speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, economic inequality and how to reverse it have become a topic of interest.

Changing Inequality is an easy-to-read book on the subject. It traces the causes of economic inequality over the past three decades, and suggests a few possible ways to reverse the trend. It should be noted, however, that reversing a 30-year trend of rising inequality isn’t easy. For example, as noted in the book,

In the late 1980s, when it first became clear that rapid increases in inequality were more than a short-term or cyclical phenomenon, researchers began to look for causes. It was almost a decade before widespread consensus was reached among economists that these changes were largely driven by skill-biased increases in demand, many of them probably the result of technological changes linked to a growing use of computer technologies.

The challenge for policy-makers is to devise policies that promote both growth and equality. Changing Inequality is a good place to start.