Although I have blogged a lot about my New York experiences in the last two years, I have rarely blogged about what I am really here for: living it up in the party capital of the US .... uh .... no, I mean working like crazy at grad school. But I've done some things which I have found really interesting. So I'm going to post a couple of results from some recent work.
This semester I did a great course on Network Theory, or the study of complex systems represented as theories, under Professor
Dragomir Radev from the University of Michigan. What I liked about this course is how it applies to so many fields: computer science, of course, but also biology (protein-protein interactions), politics (committee structure of the US House of representatives) or linguistics (word networks like
WordNet)
As a final project for the course, I wrote a paper called
Dissent Networks in the US Supreme Court. Based on data from the Rehnquist I court (1986-1995) I linked the Supreme Court justices based on the extent to which they dissented together against the majority opinion in the court rulings. Then I ran a clustering algorithm on the network to cluster it into different blocs. Here is an example of the work, from the year 1989:
The abbreviations for the Justices are Ma=Marshall, Br=Brennan, Wh=White, Bl=Blackmun, Re=Rehnquist, St=Stevens, O'C=O'Connor, Sc=Scalia, Ke=Kennedy. The size of the nodes represents how much the justices dissented altogether, and the strength of the lines shows how much they dissented with each other. The colours represent the dissent blocs as identified by the clustering algorithm. The clustering is what is interesting: based on the dissent links, very clear blocs emerge. For 1986-1989 it was pretty much the same picture as the one shown above: heavily dissenting veteran justices
Thurgood Marshal (the first black justice on the court) and
William Brennan from previous liberal courts joined with their younger colleagues Stevens and Blackmun to form a consistent dissent bloc in a conservative court lead by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan.
Things get really interesting after this, because the older justices retire and are replaced by conservative nominations by first Reagan and then George Bush, the dissent bloc falls apart. Here is the situation in 1992, look at how different it is:
It is only after the nomination of Justices
Ruth Ginsberg and
Stephen Breyer by Bill Clinton in the mid-1990's that the clear dissent bloc re-emerges, although in a weaker form.
My family (parents, sister Val, brother Pete and aunt Jackie) all came to New York to celebrate my graduation ceremony with me. Here I am with my parents in a graduation robe which looks a little like a Hogwarts nightgown, just after the SEAS Class Day. It was great to have them there - and man, is it great to have graduated!
Every year at the end of Spring Columbia spends a huge amount of effort sprucing up their campus for the graduation ceremony. For weeks before hand, flowers are planted, windows washed and hedges clipped. Even the dustbins get swabbed down. Here are workers washing the Lerner facade.
The abbreviations for the Justices are Ma=Marshall, Br=Brennan, Wh=White, Bl=Blackmun, Re=Rehnquist, St=Stevens, O'C=O'Connor, Sc=Scalia, Ke=Kennedy. The size of the nodes represents how much the justices dissented altogether, and the strength of the lines shows how much they dissented with each other. The colours represent the dissent blocs as identified by the clustering algorithm. The clustering is what is interesting: based on the dissent links, very clear blocs emerge. For 1986-1989 it was pretty much the same picture as the one shown above: heavily dissenting veteran justices Thurgood Marshal (the first black justice on the court) and William Brennan from previous liberal courts joined with their younger colleagues Stevens and Blackmun to form a consistent dissent bloc in a conservative court lead by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan.
It is only after the nomination of Justices Ruth Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer by Bill Clinton in the mid-1990's that the clear dissent bloc re-emerges, although in a weaker form.
It was a crazy weekend. Beers on Friday night, a half marathon early Saturday, night in a bar with friends thereafter, and too many cranberry vodkas and not enough sleep later up early again (with a hangover) to do the 43 mile/69 km Five Boroughs Bike Tour, which makes a giant loop through Manhattan, the Bronx (token bit), Queens, Brooklyn and ends at Staten Island. I rode with the weekend's partner in sports craziness, Marie, and Ryan and Mark from Columbia's Asian Studies Institute.
The cyclists took over entire freeways and used bridges otherwise closed to cyclists, like the Verazzano Narrows bridge. For me, a highlight was crossing the amazing (and spectacularly rusting) Queensborough bridge. We did it in about 5 hours, and then I got home, showered ... and went out again to meet friends.
