<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Feb 12, 2009, at 4:41 PM, Raph Frank wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; ">(Found something that might be it: <a href="http://saweis.net/svd/">http://saweis.net/svd/</a><span class="Apple-converted-space"> </span>)</span></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Ah, that's the smart math way to do it with SVD.</div><br><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0; ">Anyway, the basic point is that you can place each member of a<br>legislature on a 2-d plane based solely on their voting records and<br>then use that to predict future votes. You don't need to actually<br>know what the votes are about.</span></blockquote><br></div><div>Another play on it is what I did where I took the difference in voting record between any pair of senators to be a length and put all the pairings into a spring solver that tried to arrange the senators in a lowest energy configuration on a plane. That comes up with things like this:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://bolson.org/gov/us/senate/2008/senate_current.svg">http://bolson.org/gov/us/senate/2008/senate_current.svg</a></div><div><br></div></body></html>