US Presidential Election 2012 has been a very tight race between the two key candidates. There were intense battle between the two key candidates. The election reflects the sentiment of the electorate towards the achievements of the incumbent President Obama. The campaign lasted several months and the effects can be felt in the internet and twitter. The presidential debates injected new vigor i...

Using a combination of polling data and previous election results, Nate Silver successfully predicted the Electoral College distribution in the presidential election in 2008 with 98% accuracy and in 2012 with 100% accuracy. This study applies a Bayesian analysis of polls, assuming a normal posterior using a conjugate prior. The data were taken from the Huffington Posts Pollster. States were div...

1. Introduction: This study examines the correlation between the Southern Vowel Shift in the Middle Tennessee area and different social characteristics, such as education level, age, and political views. To this end, field recordings were conducted, and the results were analyzed in terms of age, gender, occupation, education, political views, and other factors. The hypothesis is that people who...

In this essay we address the puzzle that exists in American politics based on the tension of convergence to the electoral mean because of the MVT (mean voter theorem) and the studies showing divergence in candidate positioning.We provide amodel in which voters and states are not treated equally because of vast regional differences. In contrast with the MVT, candidates who campaign in each state...

One way to measure the a priori voting power of the states in the U.S. Electoral College is to view it as a weighted voting system and calculate power indices of the states. However this does not take into account the fact that in a given presidential election some states are almost certain to vote for a particular candidates, nor does it allow for states to split their electoral votes between ...

This paper reports on a preliminary exploration into two web archives created from the US Federal government web during the 2008 and 2012 presidential election. These web archives were created as part of a collaborative effort by institutions from across the United States to document the transition of the executive branch of government and changes that might occur as policies and initiatives sh...

This study addresses dynamics of viral information in the blogosphere, and is interested in empirically understanding how blogs play a role in the virality process. More specifically, we develop a new methodology that creates a map of the ‘life cycle’ of blogs posting links to viral information. Our dataset focuses on the linking practices of blogs to the most significant viral videos of the 20...

The rise of the internet has transformed information acquisition from a top-down process originating from media elites to a process of self-selection and searching. This raises a fundamental question about the relationship between information acquisition and opinion formation: do the processes occur in parallel or as part of a self-directed feedback loop? That is, do we look for information to ...