RE: The Spatial Migration of Political Support
Wow! This is fantastic @gra. This is truly a post showing the power of visualization when looking for trends across massive datasets! I love how you took this very political topic and didn't at all focus on the politics, but rather on the trends! The power of this sort of visualization is it allows you to pick out "buckets" to study further how things changed, and the correlate those changes to what the underlying cause. In the case of this, why are democratc votes so variable while republican votes so very consistent. It likely speaks to the strategies that the political parties utilize for getting out the message to voters and it also explains in part the high degree of success that the republican party has had (as consistency is a key source of knowing what you have, and allows the politicians to better focus on specific areas). When voting support is more variable you can't "count" on any given place and have to spread yourself out much thinner.
Now imagine if voting was done on a blockchain : )
Well hopefully this is something that IS done in the future. Hard to alter votes when they are indelibly written for all to see and trace. Certainly also easier to track the data for these sort of visualizations as well with the information contained.
Yeah and I hope we will see Clinical Trials on the blockchain as well! With the data from smart sensors like from our smartphones to be sent directly to the blockchain. I know output from
Health KitandResearch KitoniOScannot be tampered with.Regardless of where people stand on whether tampering is truly an issue, the blockchain is a superior mechanism over standard servers for this sort of information. Ensuring honestly of reporting should be a focus for everyone, and I am of the opinion that this is the direction we will go in the near future.
I agree, it would be super cool but you know I'm of course worried about special interests and such. So I wonder, ever thought about starting a startup?
I don't know that I possess the necessary technical knowledge with blockchains to function sufficiently to drive a startup to a successful state.
: ) For that you have a CTO : )
If there was a good opportunity where I could be beneficial to a project like that, I would consider participation. Knowing my own limitations.
I like your assessment of the cause behind the trends @justtryme90, it does seem like the Democratic Party has a more difficult time knowing where to focus their efforts. I also support the idea of getting data of all kinds on a blockchain @nutela, enhancing the transparency and security of the data seems like the only way to move forward.
I just read a paper that kind of pointed to the opposite conclusion: claiming a greater degree of consensus among liberals.
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1948550617729410
The degree in spatial variability among democratic voters is incredibly interesting here. Maybe it's more of a matter of campaign strategy than underlying values. Really interesting analysis.
A difference in campaign strategy was the point I was trying to make.