Archive - 2010
November 19th
Unfollow Friday @TwitCleaner http://who.unfollowed.me
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/19/2010 - 18:56Typically, people post Follow Friday messages of people that they are following and suggesting that other people follow them back. Today, I’m turning it on its head and posting Unfollow Friday. What’s this about?
Well, currently, I’m following around 2900 people on Twitter. That’s a lot of people. With that, I may not read as many tweets as closely as I should. If I pare down my list a little, I may get more useful information.
Looking a little more closely, when I started working on this blog post, I was following 2911 people. According to who.unfollowed.me, 958 of them are not following me. That leaves 1953 mutual follows. At the same time, there are 3184 people following me. Taking out the mutual followers, that leaves 1231 that I’m not following.
Many of the people that I follow that are not following me back make sense. Using The Twit Cleaner can help give a better understanding. Curiously enough, it reported 958 people that I follow are ‘potentially garbage’. These are not the same 958 people that I follow who are not following me, but there is some overlap.
Two followers were listed as very often having multiple at signs in their messages. 255 followers post nothing but links. 53 repeat the same URLs. 13 repeat the same message. 125 have other ‘dodgy behavior’ and haven’t posted recently. 222 haven’t posted anything in over a month. 48 Don’t interact much with others. 43 Don’t interact at all with others. 128 hardly follow anyone. 17 talk all the time. 52 post mostly retweets and 1 post mostly just quotes.
I don’t find people who post nothing but links all that annoying. I post a lot of links. Many of my posts come from Foursquare and Twitterfeed which both include links. Repeating same URL and the same message is also somewhat understandable. People who haven’t posted in a long time don’t take up space in my twitter stream and I don’t worry about it.
The biggest overlap between people that I follow who do not follow me back and one of the Twitclean categories is followers that hardly follow anyone. None of them follow me. Most are news sources, corporate publicity sites and celebrities.
So, I’ve slowly been cleaning out unfollowers and others who are less interesting. Hopefully, this will mean I catch more interesting tweets going forward.
Story.lab Homework
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 11/19/2010 - 11:09I am frustrated. My computers are running slowly this morning at I have lots to do. While they are crucial to my work, the computers that I have are pretty old. I’ve managed to keep them running well past their expected lifespan.
One of the things on my todo list, actually for yesterday, but it got bumped to this morning, and I really need to get it done, is this blog post about story.lab. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been heading down to The Grove to join in a discussion about living the mission of our lives as stories. What are those stories? What is the object of desire in the story? What is the controlling idea? What is the over arching value of my controlling idea? The cause for my overarching idea? How must my character transform if I am able to live my story?
In other discussions, there have been questions about what prevents us from living our stories? What are the antagonists? For home work, we are supposed to think through some of these questions and be prepared to share them. So, here is my first take.
The controlling idea is about engagement. With that, I guess the object of desire is for people to become more engaged in their communities. This is an open ended object of desire. Ideally, it is obtained every day and at the same time becomes the new object of desire. No matter how involved people come, there is always that desire to become more involved.
As people become more involved in their communities, their lives and the lives of their communities become transformed. With that, I need to constantly be finding new ways of helping people become more involved in their communities as I need to constantly better understand and become more involved in the communities I’m part of.
Yet this comes to the antagonists. It is easy to become burnt out. When there is a setback, it is easy to become disillusioned. Through all of this, there is a struggle to make a living, to help get bread on the table. Unfortunately, promoting community involvement often doesn’t pay all that well. It means juggling resources and keeping old computers running and the frustration that comes with it. It means juggling time commitments.
With that, this blog post is written quickly and not edited. I need to juggle some of my time commitments. So, what is the story line for the mission of your life?
November 18th
Competitive Redistricting
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/18/2010 - 15:15They say that a fish rots from the head and that results that people get from using a system are shaped by what went into designing the system. This came home to me last night as I watched the new documentary film, Gerrymandering at a gathering sponsored by Common Cause CT, the American Constitution Society, and the Yale Law School Democrats. The film highlighted various problems with redistricting and touched on possible ways of improving the process.
One popular idea is to take redistricting out of the hands of legislators and set up independent commissions. The film documented the efforts to get that done in California. Yet some questioned whether an independent commission would be that much better. Whatever ideas come forward, perhaps the best involve making the process more transparent.
This reflected some of what I was hearing at the National Conference of State Legislature's (NCSL) National Redistricting Seminar I attended in Rhode Island in September.
The major redistricting software vendors were there and they all talked about ways of making redistricting more open to the public. Staffers for the Florida State Senate and the Florida House of Representatives were both there demonstrating early versions of their redistricting tools.
A good place to start with the Florida redistricting effort is at www.floridaredistricting.org. For those interested in digging deeper into the Florida House of Representatives toolkit, take a look at floridaredistricting.cloudapp.net. While it is great to see a movement towards a more open redistricting process, this application is based on Microsoft’s Silverlight and won’t run on my computer, so I can’t provide further details.
Going much more open source is the Public Mapping Project. This will allow any group with sufficiently technical people to set up their own public mapping server. Various advocacy groups are looking at this as a tool facilitate public involvement in the redistricting process.
Competition to make public mapping systems where the public can compete to create better districts may be an important step these districts being more competitive.
Another aspect of this is transparency about what the goals are in redistricting. The Voting Rights Act makes places an emphasis on creating districts that do not discriminate against minorities. Other goals may include recognizing geographic boundaries or existing political boundaries. In Connecticut, for example, county boundaries are not as important as they are in other states. Some states have a bigger emphasis on nesting districts within districts. For example, having a State Senate district that crosses Congressional district lines would be considered a very bad thing in some states. Whatever the goals, they should also be made public and widely discussed ahead of redistricting.
The tools are being built for more competitive redistricting. Will people start using the tools and demand better districts this time around? We can only hope.
A Glimpse of Burning Dust
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 11/18/2010 - 10:28Overhead, the sky was clear. I looked towards the east south east. The edge of the big dipper pointed up north towards Polaris, and southerly towards Leo and New Haven. Towards the north, some neighbors had outdoor lights on and New Haven has plenty of city lights. Yet from where I was standing, it was fairly dark. Picking out stars, I figured I could see anything magnitude 5.0 or greater. It wouldn’t be the best viewing for shooting stars, but if there was much to see, I’d have some sort of a chance.
I had stumbled out of bed at 3 AM, half an hour after moonset. Without turning on lights, I found my way outside, taking the dog with me. He seemed excited to be going out at this strange hour, but some of the noises in the woods spooked him. I had walked around trying to find the best nearby vantage point. My eyes were well accustomed to the dark, but I didn’t see any shooting stars.
I came back inside. Was anyone else having better luck? I checked on Twitter, but only saw constant retweets of a link to an article in National Geographic. Half an hour later, I headed outside again. Again, I saw no shooting starts. Some of the articles suggested that 5 AM would be a better viewing time. I went back to my computer and tried to get a little work done. Around 4:20 I went back outside one more time. After a few minutes, I saw a shooting star. It was fairly bright, heading due south out of Leo. I waited a few minutes longer but didn’t see any more shooting stars, so I figured I’d let the rest of the family sleep.
How strange it seemed, to be standing on this large rock hurtling through space, looking up to see if I could catch glimpses of pieces of dust burning up as they entered our atmosphere. Yet those little pieces of dust can be truly beautiful, just like the gigantic balls of gas glowing as the atoms fused together.
And the waiting. If you want to see shooting stars, you need to wait. You need to find the right time and the right place to wait, but you still need to wait. It seemed like so much of life. Trying to be at the right place at the right time to wait for something important to come along. Sometimes it comes. Sometimes it doesn’t. Often what does come is different than the expectations.
So, I wished on the one shooting star that I did see and then headed off to bed. I will wait. I will wait for my wish on the shooting star and I will wait for the Geminids in December for another chance to stand outside in the cold waiting to catch a glimpse of burning dust.
November 17th
