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I’d like to enlist your help in a project we have been creating at the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab . We have built an analytics tool to track sentiment around the two candidates using Twitter as the data feed. So we take in every tweet about the candidates and our language-ware reads the tweets and creates a score from 1-100, positive or negative. In the Presidential Debate this Wednesday we will probably be reading and analyzing up to 1000 tweets per second. Ideally our real time sentiment analysis will act like a million person focus group on the debate.This work is similar to the analyses we’ve done over the past 18 months on pop culture events like the Oscars, Summer Blockbusters, Fashion Week trends, and sporting events such as the World Series and Super Bowl.

So here is where we need help. Computers, as you might imagine, are not great at detecting sarcasm. Though advances in software and cognitive computing are helping us make great progress.When we first started this project I remember a tweet, “I’m so happy Michelle Bachmann has thrown her tin foil hat in the ring”. The computer thought that was a positive sentiment towards Bachmann, until a human student corrected it. We have built a human annotation page into the dashboard where you can correct any tweet you think has been mis-scored. From the main page of the site, click “Go to Tweets/annotation page”. There you will see a sampling of the latest tweets and their score. Click on any given tweet and you will be taken to an annotation page where you can manually correct the computer. Obviously the more people who do this, the better the outcome.

One last note. Obviously as you read some of the most negative tweets you will be appalled at what passes for political dialogue in the age of Twitter. We surmise that because many people tweet anonymously, they feel free to speak in the most hateful language. As you will see, most people tweet against a candidate rather than for a candidate. It says something about the psychology of Twitter, but I’m not sure just what it means for an digital democracy.

We’re learning quite a bit through this project and others about how analytics technologies can be applied to Big Data to understand and predict trends. Thanks in advance for your help.

Nate Silver is the most reliable assessor of political polling in our country. His latest column seems to indicate that President Obama is in pretty good shape. Here are some highlights

This is probably about the last week, for instance, in which Mitt Romney can reasonably hope that President Obama’s numbers will deteriorate organically because of a convention bounce…

First, the polling by this time in the cycle has been reasonably good, especially when it comes to calling the winners and losers in the race. Of the 19 candidates who led in the polls at this stage since 1936, 18 won the popular vote (Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 is the exception), and 17 won the Electoral College (Al Gore lost it in 2000, along with Mr. Dewey).

There has not been any tendency, at least at this stage of the race, for the contest to break toward the challenging candidate.

Instead, it’s actually the incumbent-party candidate who has gained ground on average since 1936. On average, the incumbent candidate added 4.6 percentage points between the late September polls and his actual Election Day result, whereas the challenger gained 2.5 percentage points.

The last point seems the most salient. Political races often become self-fulfilling prophecies in the last few weeks. The stench that Romney is a loser grows and so contributions slow down.

But Mr. Romney’s grass-roots fund-raising is not nearly so robust as Mr. Obama’s. In order to match Mr. Obama dollar for dollar, as he intends to, Mr. Romney must therefore spend more time than the president at big donor events, at a time when challengers might traditionally spend more time on the road campaigning.

The conventional wisdom was that Romney would not need to raise as much money as Obama because he had the mighty Super-Pacs behind him. In a little noted article, the Wall Street Journal reported that Karl Rove and company are not have the influence they thought they would.

But signs are few that super PACs have had the major impact that both supporters and critics predicted. The flood of spending doesn’t appear to have significantly influenced voter opinion in key states in the presidential contest or in top congressional races.

On the presidential front, conservative outside groups backing Republican candidates say they already have played their most significant role, and that their influence will fade as the candidates themselves present their closing arguments to voters.

I believe this is because at a certain point there are diminishing returns to carpet bombing ads, especially for a product that people don’t want to buy like Mitt Romney. So now the remaining danger for the Democrats is overconfidence. If Obama can use what Nate Silver calls the “tendency of the contest to break towards the incumbent” and run a “throw the bums out” campaign (chart above) against a “do nothing congress” in the last month, then we really might have a choice election.

Something really sad is happening in America. White women who never graduated high school are seeing their life expectancy shrink dramatically.

The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.

The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study, published last month in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.

The unmentioned problem is Methamphetamine which is a plague in the heart of Red State America.

NBC News has reported that the usage among pregnant women in the midwest is so bad that a new kind of Meth Baby is being born way too frequently.

What is going on in the heartland?

It has been the contention of this writer that the philosophical underpinnings of the Romney Ryan campaign are the writings of Ayn Rand, most specifically Atlas Shrugged. “Rand’s heroes must continually fight against “parasites”, “looters”, and “moochers” who demand the benefits of the heroes’ labor”, and Romney clearly sees himself as a Randian hero and 47% of Americans as “parasites”. I believe that the video that came out yesterday of Romney speaking to his wealthy donors from his heart will be the fatal blow to his presidential hopes. Here is the critical quote from the fundraiser.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.My job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

This could have been taken straight from Atlas Shrugged. But let’s look at the facts of the 47%. To begin with, a majority of them don’t pay income taxes because the payroll taxes taken from their pay checks satisfy their tax obligations, because they don’t have additional income from stock dividends or capital gains.

Of the remaining “parasites”, more than half are elderly and no longer earning an income and the remainder are the really poor, a family living on less than $20,000 per year. Just as interesting is to see where the “moochers” live. Mostly in Red States that vote Republican.

The task now for the Democrats is to wake up the 47%, half of which vote Republican in the delusion that Mitt Romney cares for their interests because he talks about God and is against abortion. They must spend every day of the last 49 days of this campaign making it clear to the working class of America that the whole Republican plan is a shadow play, in which the true beneficiaries are the people in the Romney video who can afford the $50,000 ticket to the fundraiser. The real losers are the people who put their cultural passions above their economic interests.Romney and Ryan don’t give a damn about the middle class, but see themselves and their millionaire friends as a persecuted minority. Here is how the Atlas Society portrays the world.

Atlas Shrugged is an extended cry against the oppression of creators, most particularly businessmen: the Atlases who bear this world on their shoulders. Uniquely, Rand’s work portrays the exploited entrepreneurs of the mixed economy as the true successors of Socrates, Galileo, and the countless other truth-seekers who, over the centuries, have been silenced, punished, crushed, and killed—not for their vices but for their virtues.

In their view criminals like Mike Milken or rapacious capitalists like John Paulson or Sheldon Adelson are the “exploited entrepreneurs”, that need to be rescued from Obama and his “schemes” to raise their taxes. It is a warped view of humanity and of society. Here’s hoping the 99% will wake up and vote the Republican Rascals out of the government.

The conventional wisdom is that Republican Super Pac money will overwhelm Democrats in the last six weeks of the fall election. This week Bernstein Research put out some data that lead me to believe that the returns to scale on TV advertising may actually be diminishing.

We believe it is not implausible that at some point, consumers will get so annoyed at having seen a commercial over-and-over again that there could actually be a negative impact. The logic being, consumers would attach negative feelings toward the brand (e.g. presidential candidate), instead of positive ones.

Here is how Bernstein charts it.

Bernstein calculates that in the battleground states 95% of the viewing public will see between 75 and 100 ads for Romney per week. Although classic marketing theory suggests that seeing more than three spots per week on a product produces diminishing results, we have never seen such “ultra-high frequency” in advertising.

Only time will tell if we have hit a wall on political TV advertising and Karl Rove’s grand scheme for buying the election fails.

I know I’m going to catch hell for this post because no one is allowed to criticize Israel, but I’m really tired of our foreign policy being driven by Right Wing Israeli politics. Two cases in point this morning. First is Netanyahu lecturing President Obama on how we should go to war against Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel inserted himself into the most contentious foreign policy issue of the American presidential campaign on Tuesday, criticizing the Obama administration for refusing to set clear “red lines” on Iran’s nuclear progress that would prompt the United States to undertake a military strike. As a result, he said, the administration has no “moral right” to restrain Israel from taking military action of its own.

I hate to clue Bibi in, but the American public is sick of fighting wars in the Mideast and we have no desire to start another one. As the Chicago Council Poll shows, two in three Americans believe the Afghanistan war was not worth fighting.

It may be that Mitt Romney is in the minority that wants more war, but as the New York Times shows, Mitt has always been a chickenhawk, way back to Vietnam. I knew people like Mitt Romney at Princeton in 1967. They were really pro war, but they wouldn’t have been caught dead in a uniform.

The second and more troubling aspect of Israeli Right Wing Politics driving events in the Mid East is the killing of the American Ambassador to Libya. As the Wall Street Journal reports this morning, the crude and vicious anti-Muslim film that has been driving Anti-American outrage in Egypt and Libya over the past 48 hours is a product of an Israeli “filmmaker” named Sam Bacile, who is living in California.

Speaking by phone Tuesday from an undisclosed location, writer and director Sam Bacile remained defiant, saying Islam is a cancer and that the 56-year-old intended his film to be a provocative political statement condemning the religion.

Protesters angered over Mr. Bacile’s film opened fire on and burned down the U.S. consulate in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi. Libyan officials said Wednesday that Ambassador Chris Stevens was killed Tuesday night when he and a group of embassy employees went to the consulate to try to evacuate staff as the building came under attack by a mob firing machine guns and rocket propelled grenades.

In Egypt, protesters scaled the walls of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and replaced an American flag with an Islamic banner.

“This is a political movie,” Mr. Bacile said. “The U.S. lost a lot of money and a lot of people in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we’re fighting with ideas.”

Mr. Bacile, a California real-estate developer who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew, said he believes the movie will help his native land by exposing Islam’s flaws to the world.

The two-hour movie, “Innocence of Muslims,” cost $5 million to make and was financed with the help of more than 100 Jewish donors, said Mr. Bacile, who wrote and directed it.

The film claims Prophet Muhammad was a fraud. The 14-minute trailer of the movie that reportedly set off the protests, posted on the website YouTube in an original English version and another dubbed into Egyptian Arabic, shows an amateur cast performing a wooden dialogue of insults disguised as revelations about Prophet Muhammad, whose obedient followers are presented as a cadre of goons.

It depicts Prophet Muhammad as a feckless philanderer who approved of child sexual abuse, among other overtly insulting claims that have caused outrage

So who are the hundred donors who paid for this piece of shit, which has no other purpose than to stir up trouble for America in Arab lands? Was Sheldon Adelson one of them? Will Romney condemn this film? Will he show he is not a shill for his good friend Bibi Netanyahu?

Don’t bet on it.

The apparent Obama post convention bump does not surprise me. Much of my life has been spent evaluating cultural projects as a producer or manager, from the early records of The Band, to Mean Streets or The Last Waltz, I was always pretty sure when the production made an emotional impact on the audience. Mitt Romney’s convention, with the exception of the Clint Eastwood/Samuel Beckett Moment, was as dull as dishwater. It felt like a Lions Club convention and all the faces of color seemed planted by a casting director for diversity on a reality show. In contrast the Democratic Convention had an air of authenticity that felt like the real America of 2012, not the fantasy America of Romney and Paul’s Back to the Fifties movement. The Republicans want to re-litigate issues like birth control, voting rights, and abortion that most of us thought were settled by 1964 when the voting rights act was passed or 1973 when Roe vs. Wade was settled by the Supreme Court.

So the Obama slogan of “Forward” worked. It would not only be back to the fifties socially with Romney/Ryan, but back to the freewheeling days pre 2008 crash on Wall Street. All it takes is a head of the SEC in the bag for Wall Street (like Chris Cox), for the Masters of the Universe to be unleashed again. John Paulson’s million dollar donations to Romney’s super pac will be a bargain. But I don’t think Paulson’s bet will pay off. Willard is a loser.

But more important than all of Republican convention failings was for the Democrats to give a series of really fine political speeches from Deval Patrick, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Every one of them had passion, ideas, poetry and hope. For the Democrats the staging was perfect (at least showbiz support counts for something) as when Barack arrived on stage at the end of Bill Clinton’s speech. For the Republicans it was amateur hour in Dixie to allow Clint to ramble on unscripted for the first 13 minutes of your prime time final night. Once you’ve screwed up the opening (as any film, TV or stage director will tell you), it’s almost impossible to get the audience back emotionally. Mitt didn’t. And so he left Tampa soggy and with a negative bounce down even before the Democrats started.

There have been times in the last four weeks when I have wondered if the Republican’s overwhelming money advantage and their very effective voter suppression operation might overwhelm Barack Obama in November. But listening to Michelle Obama’s inspired speech tonight has done what political conventions are supposed to do. It has given me the encouragement to get to work helping to re-elect the President. What I liked so much about the speech was that it felt so damned authentic. Yes I know there were speechwriters involved, but it felt like Michelle’s voice from the first word to the last. I loved this section.

And I didn’t think it was possible, but today, I love my husband even more than I did four years ago…even more than I did 23 years ago, when we first met.

I love that he’s never forgotten how he started.

I love that we can trust Barack to do what he says he’s going to do, even when it’s hard – especially when it’s hard.

I love that for Barack, there is no such thing as “us” and “them” – he doesn’t care whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or none of the above…he knows that we all love our country…and he’s always ready to listen to good ideas…he’s always looking for the very best in everyone he meets.

And I love that even in the toughest moments, when we’re all sweating it – when we’re worried that the bill won’t pass, and it seems like all is lost – Barack never lets himself get distracted by the chatter and the noise.

Just like his grandmother, he just keeps getting up and moving forward…with patience and wisdom, and courage and grace.

And he reminds me that we are playing a long game here…and that change is hard, and change is slow, and it never happens all at once.

But eventually we get there, we always do.

And as she was speaking these words the camera was on shots of the wonderfully rainbow colored audience, drinking it in and basking in the pride that we all feel in Barack and Michelle. My sense is that Barack is now moving into the lead in the race. Nate Silver tells us why.

1. Polls usually overrate the standing of the candidate who just held his convention.
2. Mitt Romney just held his convention. But he seems to have gotten a below-average bounce out of it. The national polls that have come out since the Republican National Convention have shown an almost exact tie in the race.
3. If the polls overrate Mr. Romney, and they show only a tie for him now, then he will eventually lose.

Michelle is right that we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us to defeat the plutocrats. But it is work worth doing.