"Time-Dependent Community Structure in Legislation Cosponsorship Networks in the Congress of the Republic of Peru"

One of my papers just came out in final form. (Also, you can download our data.) It has been available for quite a while in the journal, but we finally have our coordinates (page numbers, etc.). Here are the details.

Title: "Time-Dependent Community Structure in Legislation Cosponsorship Networks in the Congress of the Republic of Peru"

Authors: Sang Hoon Lee, José Manuel Magallanes, and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: We study community structure in time-dependent legislation cosponsorship networks in the Peruvian Congress, and we compare them briefly to legislation cosponsorship networks in the US Senate. To study these legislatures, we employ a multilayer representation of temporal networks in which legislators in each layer are connected to each other with a weight that is based on how many bills they cosponsor. We then use multilayer modularity maximization to detect communities in these networks. From our computations, we are able to capture power shifts in the Peruvian Congress during 2006–2011. For example, we observe the emergence of 'opportunists', who switch from one community to another, as well as cohesive legislative communities whose initial component legislators never change communities. Interestingly, many of the opportunists belong to the group that won the majority in Congress.

Save Nonlinearities in North Carolina!

Join the fight to save nonlinearities in North Carolina! [Yes, really.]

Apparently, in an effort to combat the exponential rise in sea levels and the risk of coastal flooding, North Carolina legislators have decided that only linear extrapolation can be used to measure the rise in sea level.

Or, as the new law puts it: "These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of seas-level rise may be extrapolated linearly."

As the writer of the article to which I link puts it, "North Carolina legislators have decided that the way to make exponential increases in sea level rise – caused by those inconvenient feedback loops we keep hearing about from scientists – go away is to make it against the law to extrapolate exponential; we can only extrapolate along a line predicted by previous sea level rises."

Should I laugh to keep from crying now? Hell, I was trained as a nonlinear scientist---am I not allowed in North Carolina anymore?

Next thing you know, some state legislature will try to say that π must be approximated as 3.

(Tip of the cap to Karen Daniels.)