The assignment was done in collaboration with Vladimir using Thinglink and Google Maps

From Reuters: Saudi troops clashed with Yemeni Houthi fighters on Tuesday in the heaviest exchange of cross-border fire since the start of a Saudi-led air offensive last week, while Yemen’s foreign minister called for a rapid Arab intervention on the ground.

Saudi Arabia has been leading a coalition of Arab states since last Thursday in an air campaign against the Shi’ite Houthis, who emerged as the most powerful force in the Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country when they seized Yemen’s capital last year.

The Saudis say their aim is to restore President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who left the country last week. The Houthis are allied with Saudi Arabia’s regional foe Iran, and backed by army units loyal to longtime ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was pushed out three years ago after “Arab Spring” demonstrations.

Who’s fighting inside the country

Who’s joining in from the outside and why

Putin says he is against “external interference”

Russian president Vladimir Putin has prompted an angry response from Saudi Arabia after sending a letter to the Arab League commenting on Saudi-led air strikes against Yemen’s Houthi fighters. The letter was read out at a summit of Arab leaders in Egypt on Sunday.

“We support the Arabs’ aspirations for a prosperous future and for the resolution of all the problems the Arab world faces through peaceful means, without any external interference,” Putin’s letter read, going on to condemn extremist groups such as ISIS.

Yemen has been a battling ground between East and West for decades

From Wikipedia: In less than a year, after the Egyptian–Syrian unification in 1958, Egypt’s pro-Soviet strategy had returned to power. Saud had once again joined their alliance, which declined the US-Saudi relationship to a fairly low point especially after he announced in 1961 that he changed his mind on renewing the U.S. base.^[11] In 1962, however, Egypt attacked Saudi Arabia from bases in Yemen during the 1962 Yemeni revolution because of Saudi Arabia’s Anti-revolution propaganda, which made Saud seek the U.S. support. President John F. Kennedy immediately responded to Saud’s request by sending U.S. war planes in July 1963 to the war zone to stop the attack which was putting U.S. interests in risk.

British colonialism as possible root cause

From Foreign Policy Journal: Arab nationalism reached unprecedented heights as a result of Western interference in the Middle Eastern affairs, especially after the Suez Canal debacle in 1956. Rebels in Yemen supported by then Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser began guerrilla attacks on British forces stationed in Aden to force their withdrawal from the region.

Egyptian incursion into Yemen in the 1960’s is remembered as “Egyptian Vietnam”

From the Washington Post: In the 1960s, Egypt entered into a long, costly quagmire in Yemen. The Egyptian president at the time, Gamal Abdel Nasser, a secular autocrat and a champion of pan-Arabism, chose to intervene in Yemen in support of a republican coup led by military officers seeking to oust the country’s monarchy in 1962. Nasser himself came to power the decade prior on the back of an officers’ coup which overthrew Egypt’s fusty constitutional monarchy. Now, he wanted to help a neighboring Arab nation follow in Egypt’s mold.

But Saudi Arabia was set against this state of affairs and sought to return Yemen’s ruling Imam to the throne, and pumped in arms and money to royalist militias. Ironically, these included many tribesmen from the Shiite Zaydi sect, which now forms the backbone of the Houthi rebellion the Saudis are so desperate to quash.

The tens of thousands of soldiers Egypt sent in as an expeditionary force into Yemen soon found themselves on the front line of a civil war, taking the lead in the defense of Yemeni republicanism. What followed was a long, difficult conflict that ground on for nearly a decade.

More than 10,000 Egyptian soldiers died, prompting some historians to call the war the “Egyptian Vietnam”.

U.S. forces leaving Yemen

From AP, March 21st: The U.S. troops, including Special Forces commandos, were leaving the al-Annad air base near the southern city of al-Houta, Yemeni military and security officials said.

U.S. staying nearby

U.S. military has a base in Djibouti, just across the sea from Yemen. This base serves as a launch pad for drone strikes in the region.

US military Camp Lemonnier even has a Facebook page. Feel free to ask them a question.

Recently in the tech world, the term deep learning is almost as big a buzzword as “big data” or “machine learning”. In spite to the hype in this emerging research area, a lot of tech news articles seem to be quite overly optimistic about the technology, so this explainer hopes to explain deep learning, its whereabout, recent trends, and what deep learning is not.

This presentation seeks to use graphical navigation, where each node presents a chunk of information. The node color denotes a related semantic topic group and connections suggest similarity between chunks of information. Upon hovering the nodes, the highlighted nodes are the suggested next chunks to read. Due to the time constraint, this explainer is done in a very crude-proof-of-concept way, but hopefully it should show the gist of design philosophy.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~pernghwa/slide.html

I was deep into a longish story about pot potency last week when I was surprised to see an unchallenged assertion that today’s marijuana is GMO, or a genetically modified organism.

I thought that question was settled by the Pulitzer-winning truth-checkers at Politifact. Last year Politifact took on Patrick Kennedy, a spokesman for Smart Approaches to Marijuana (SAM), a national group opposed to legalizing weed. Kennedy came under scrutiny for saying modern marijuana is genetically modified and much stronger than what Barack Obama smoked as a teenager. Politifact agreed that pot potency had increased, but said Kennedy’s claim about genetic modification didn’t hold up.

“The most off-base part of Kennedy’s claim is that the rise in THC levels comes from ‘genetic modification,” said Politifact. “It’s actually from genetic selection, a very old process of producing desired traits from crops.”

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Debunking Assignment – Big Shampoo

I took this assignment to mean “use persuasive media techniques” more than to factually challenge something.

I shot this with my Iphone while getting my hair done because I like these guys.  And I’ve always wondered what’s the real difference between salon shampoo and the CVS stuff.

I could have read ingredient labels and compared them, scientifically,  for some insight into what these products do.  But I was pressed for time and these salon owners really charmed me, so they made a better story – if not better actual science.

Also – I usually find my hair salons by word of mouth – as I think many people do.

I also thought a video would capture attention – it’s  easy to click through, and done with a little humor would keep me watching.  It was also a way to use a new technique, which I’m trying to do with each assignment.

The logical power of the argument here isn’t very strong; the fun was in making it with these guys.  Go give some business to Salon Continentale in Belmont.  They’ll make you look good.

(Tell a story that makes truth claims about a disputed subject
Using techniques from the Debunking Handbook,
and using what you know about motivated reasoning,
leading with values, persuade a broad audience
– including those hostile to your claims – of the truth of your assertions)

For our assignment, Bianca Datta and I created a simple web page that demonstrates a possible tool for journalists in understanding a lot of social media data. We took the idea of creating a story via social media and attempted to automate it a bit more.

On the left is a feed of tweets based on the topic ‘St. Patrick’s Day’. The search terms we used were ‘StPatty’, ‘StPaddy’, and ‘StPatrick’ . Once we had these tweets in our database, we processed them to get topics using LDA via a Node.js package. The top ranking topics were then displaying on the right side of the webpage using a very simple web graphic. Based on the term’s use, the topic would be allotted a larger height for more use and smaller height for less use. The left column shows common topic terms in tweets with the word ‘Patty’. The middle column shows topic terms for ‘Paddy’ and the right column shows topic terms for ‘Patrick’.

This is a screenshot of the page:

We also gathered content from Instagram, Vine, and Flickr and processed each of those to get topic rankings.

link : http://web.media.mit.edu/~vdiep/vdiepbdatta/indexy.html

(warning, the data did not play well with me)

Election days in Israel climax at 10pm. In this precise time the three major broadcasting networks announce their polling results. These results tend to be quite accurate and give a good indication on the final results. The moments right before and after 10pm are extremely emotional for the people of Israel.

With these elections, held on March 17th, I decided to take a closer look at these crucial moments and how they are manifested in Twitter. I used the Twitter search API to pull tweets that were created between 9:55pm – 10:05pm and contained the word “Israel”.  I also used a service called Alchemy API to perform automatic sentiment analysis on these tweets.

In the following graph, each dot represents a tweet. the horizontal axis is time relative to 10pm and the vertical axis is sentiment between 1 to -1 where 1 is positive with high probability and -1 is negative with high probability.

It’s pretty to hard to see anything from this chart besides the fact that it seems to be slightly more dense on the right side, suggesting that more tweets were tweeted after 10pm than before.

In an attempt to cleanup the results, I batched tweets in 30 seconds intervals and calculated the average for them. In this chart each dot marks a batch of tweets and the vertical axis is the average sentiment of the entire batch.

Unfortunately, It’s still hard to identify a trend besides the fact that the average sentiment is negative – that’s usually a property of news stories.

As a last resort, I decided to only take a look at the quantities of tweets. These tweets don’t necessarily represent the entire twitter firehose of data but looking at the first chart, they might still provide an insight.

Still no clear trend. However, the peak at 10:00pm which represent tweets between 10:00pm – 10:30pm does make a lot of sense – It’s right after the results.

That’s data science. Sometimes you get inspiring results and sometime you’re just wasting CPU cycles.

Tomer

On Wednesday, March 18th Chris Borland of the San Francisco 49ers retired from professional football, citing fear of future head injuries. This set off a flurry of discussion both on ESPN and Reddit (where it garnered 3000 upvotes, making it one of the most popular threads of the day).

I wanted to investigate how public discussion on the injury and concussions differed from discussion on the Media. To do this, I used a tool I’ve been working on for research inspired by Media Clouds. The tool compares in real time word clouds from Twitter vs AP news sources and tries to highlight differences. The tool is still in BETA so I was unable to give an interactive demo, but here is a screenshot:

On the left hand side is traditional news outlets, on the right is sources from twitter.

News sources seem to be covering Borland’s impressive career, including his college football record at Wisconsin. However, the discussion on Twitter is two-fold, one is expressing shock at the retirement and the second comparing him to Patrick Willis, another linebacker for the 49ers who retired only days earlier due to religious reasons. This aspect of the story is not covered very much in news outlets, but with Willis and Borland gone, 49ers fans have felt like their season has been derailed. Public discussion seems to focus more on the consequences to the 49ers season whereas news outlets are discussing the repercussions to the NFL as a whole.

On March 16, 2015, Tzu Chi Foundation, one of Taiwan’s foremost humanitarian NGO, announced in a press conference to rescind its appeal on development project in one of Taipei’s nature reserve. Since the controversy saw its heated public debate since late-February, Tzu Chi has faced widespread public criticism, and more recently, accusations of financial activities that may violate regulations.

Interestingly, the issue has a long history dating back to 2005.  In a decade of legal controversy, there was never as much public attention gathered previously. The interplay between the new city administration and social media clearly helped the event to develop.

In 1997, Tzu Chi purchased a land in Taipei’s Neihu reserve and planned to change the property name to social benefit property to accommodate recycling factory. However, due to the fear the construction may affect water drainage that create potential hazard, Tzu Chi faced strong opposition from environmental groups. Tzu Chi officially made appeal to Taipei City government in 2005 for environment safety review, and had been under review since.

As soon as Taipei City Mayor Ko was elected in December 2014, he openly expressed that he was against Tzu Chi’s development project appeals. In an interview on February 23, 2015, Mayor Ko criticized Tzu Chi was very “weird”. This immediately triggered a fierce online response.

Nun Shu’s initial response to Mayor Ko’s interview

Nun Tzu-Hui Shu, the spokesperson for Tzu Chi, wrote a post on Facebook denouncing Mayor Ko “returned evil for good” and his actions will ultimately suffer “divine consequences”. This remark went viral in Taiwanese social media. On PTT.cc, a bbs site that functions very similarly to Reddit, the discussions soared to an unprecedented level. Because of Tzu Chi’s religious background (it is founded and led by Buddhist nun), many more posts emerged accusing Tzu Chi acted very cult-like. As one user accused,

The founder recruited doctors not based on merit, but by how much they enact “appreciation” to the founder… once when the founder visited a hospital in Hsin-Chu, when she exited the car, the doctors would kneel as a sign of invitation…

 With the growing discussion on social media, many public figures start to cast other doubts on Tzu Chi’s operation. University of Taipei’s urban planning professor Chung-Hsin Yang posted study on Tzu Chi’s property transaction record showing Tzu Chi would purchase industrial properties and rename for residential uses.

Scholars openly criticized Tzu Chi for violating zoning regulations

Amid the public debate, with Nun Shu trying to convince the public that Tzu Chi is abiding to regulations, rumors on social media became viral that show doubts on Tzu Chi’s organizational structure. One notable example was how Tzu Chi deploys a caste system where only people who have donated a certain amount of money can promote up the rank ladder. Some PTT.cc users started sharing a crystal sculpture of a Buddha sold by Tzu Chi costs more than $11,000 USD with suspected production cost of less than $1000 USD, which spurred an outrage in the PTT.cc community, prompting many users posting photoshoped mockups of the sculpture.

Social Media response to Tzu Chi’s crystal sculpture

With a sustained public attention on Tzu Chi’s controversy, people started to provide more cases indicating a potential scandal may be taking place. On Match 10, one PTT.cc user claiming to be an “insider” posted that another Tzu Chi’s development project in Taichung taking place at a historic site was undergoing construction without proper examination of potential damage to historic remains. Other PTT.cc users cast doubts on Tzu Chi’s money flow.

On March 16, Tzu Chi announced to rescind on the controversial appeal on Taipei’s development project, hoping to end the controversy. However, the hosts at one of the premiere politics talk shows quitted in response to Tzu Chi’s press conference, claiming that “Tzu Chi has controlled the media to show only the good sides”. The public onslaught ensued, with more users on PTT.cc producing accusations, claiming Tzu Chi’s portfolio includes foreign stocks, along with notorious companies such as Monsanto. Tzu Chi’s worry is now only a beginning.

Social Media Feedback Loop

In comparison to the past, the Tzu Chi controversy has gathered a lot more attention. It is interesting to see how there is a symbiotic growth between the discussions on PTT.cc and public figures’ Facebook posts. We can see there is a strong autocorrelation between number of posts and attentions on PTT.cc, and Facebook attentions. In the past, either of the two sources were as heavily used so people only chatted controversial topics locally. The figure demonstrates how social media acts as information amplifier.

A typical PTT.cc interface

Data Visualization: http://web.media.mit.edu/~pernghwa/tzuchiviz.html

Disclaimer: As a designer, I prefer to take on a personal point of view instead of trying to turn myself into a good reporter. There’s also the fact that I am not an extraordinary English speaker (and too perfectionist to think this is ok). So bear with me. 😉

Last week, Miguel and I were talking about the conservative wave that has been sweeping the social networks in Brazil. Our subject, at the time, was the recent implementation of a network of cycle paths in the capital of São Paulo, the largest and most congested city in the country.

São Paulo has way too many cars. For a population of around 12 million, the state capital registered 5.4 million cars – roughly one for every two people, according to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (Detran). The metro network in the city is burdened, overcrowded, and does not reach the entire urban area. Buses are also crowded and subject to traffic conditions.

In June 2013 people marched in the city, protesting against the increase in bus and subway fares. When cases of police violence against demonstrators became public, the popular movement expanded and millions of people took to the streets of the whole country.

After these events, the mayor of São Paulo Fernando Haddad attempted to reduce traffic chaos through unpopular actions such as creating exclusive bus lanes, improving fleets and remodeling public roads, culminating with the implementation of a network of cycle paths in 2014. At this time, a war between the drivers culture and the bike culture drew up very clearly on social networks, and soon transformed into a textual war between individualists and collectivists. The mayor received a barrage of criticism from angry drivers who complained about the reduced space in the streets for their cars. Most pedestrians and cyclists, however, approved, and Haddad’s popularity grew among young people.

The mayor of São Paulo, Fernando Haddad, eventually uses his bike to commute

My own timeline of Facebook, however, seemed almost immune to that criticism against the cycle paths. Messages with very conservative content rarely appear in my Facebook feed, and I was only aware of them because of comments made by outraged friends or articles in magazines and newspapers.

From this fact came the idea to address the ideological bubbles on social networks. Do our private feeds on social networks correspond to general opinion in the real world?

With the recent protests in Brazil against the rule of President Dilma Rousseff, we thought that the war we spoke of would certainly intensify. It would be interesting to compare the Facebook public news feed to the private feeds of specific users, trying to create a visualization of the results.

Using Facebook API, I scanned the public stream for posts in Portuguese containing the name of the president, and stored dozens of files like this one, so that I could analyse the results. Unfortunately, however, I could not code the search in private news feeds in time to follow the course of events in social networks, so there was not enough data for a good comparison.