Publications by Michael J Bommarito II
Visual Summary of #jan25 Twitter Activity
Last year, I covered a number of the so-called “Twitter protests” in China (#cn220), Iran (#25bahman), and Algeria (#fev12). Since these protests began in January 2011, the Arab Spring has claimed many members of both ruling and revolting groups – Mubarak in Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, Ben Ali in Tunisia, Saleh in Yemen, and countless civ...
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Statistics on the length and linguistic complexity of bills
Where would you go to find out what the longest bill of the 112th Congress was by number of sections (H. R. 1473)? How about by number of unique words (H.R. 3671)? What about by Flesh-Kincaid reading level (S. 475)? Head on over to this table of bills, updated daily for the 112th Congress, which contains the following fields:Bill NameP...
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Visualization of Reading Level Frequency by Congressional Bill Stage
Here’s a fun example of how you might use my data on Congressional bill length and complexity. Imagine you want to understand the empirical distribution of Flesch-Kincaid reading level for Congressional bills and how this distribution is related to bill stage. A first step might be to visualize this relationship. Based on this visualiz...
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Charting Twitter time series data with tweet and unique user counts
Let’s say you’ve used my Python script to automate the download of a hashtag or search phrase from Twitter (in a Unicode safe way, unlike within R). Now let’s say you want to visualize the number of tweets over time. Easy enough – I’ve also shared this R/ggplot2 code that accomplishes the task. However, let’s say you now want a...
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Visualizing the #nonato Twitter hashtag – time series and top users
The NATO summit is currently being held in Chicago, and, as is typical for NATO or G# summits, the streets and tweets are full of dissent. In the spirit of my past investigations of online dissent (#jan25, #25bahman, #12fev, #wiunion, #cn220, #march15), I thought I would investigate the #nonato tag, where Twitter users around the world are c...
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Grexit stage left: visualizing the online discussion around Greece’s possible Euro exit
While Tsipras and his Syriza coalition have been busy in Greek parliament, the Internet has been a-buzz with speculation that their platform will result in a Greek exit from the Euro currency. This prospect, affectionately dubbed “Grexit” by Citi in February, has been making the rounds on Twitter under the hashtag #grexit. We think th...
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Summary of community detection algorithms in igraph 0.6
Based on Launchpad traffic and mailing list responses, Gabor and Tamas will soon be releasing igraph 0.6. In celebration, I’ll be publishing a number of helpful lists and tables I’ve put together to organize information about igraph. In this post, we’ll cover the community detection algorithms (~i.e., clustering, partitioning, segme...
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Wordcloud of the Arizona et al. v. United States opinion
Here’s one purely for fun – a wordcloud built from the Supreme Court’s opinion on Arizona et al. v United States. Word clouds, though certainly not the most scientific of visualization techniques, are often engaging and “fun” ways to lead into discussion on NLP or topic modeling. Arizona et al. v United States wordcloud The process to...
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Debugging parameter mismatch across RAC database instances with R, dba_hist, and gv$parameter
Did you find this post useful? Does your organization need Oracle services? We can help. Much of this morning went into investigating strange ADDM reports on a two-node Oracle RAC database. For some reason, there were statistically improbable differences between impact percentages that have persisted over a month; in this case, instance ...
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Retrieving the VIX term structure in R
Much of my time lately has gone into analyzing and trading products in the volatility complex. As a result, I regularly watch the VIX term structure for continuations or deviations from trend. To make analysis simpler, I’ve written some R code that rips the term structure off the CBOE VIX term structure page and parses it into a table wi...
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