Why H1N1 spread so fast

I heard a talk last week at the Intelligence and Security Informatics Conference (ISI2009) about the models used for disease spread, and I realized why the WHO (and everyone else) were surprised by the speed with which the H1N1 flu spread. These models have different assumptions about the probability of spread from one person to another, how much time each individual is infectious, ill, recovering, and immune or not. But they tend to have one underlying assumption about spread, and that is that it’s a planar phenomenon. Spread is usually modelled as a differential equation, a kind of model that if 500 people are in a school and the probability of infection is 10% in a day, then 50 people will become infected.

The problem with these models is that they don’t take into account the “six degrees of separation” phenomenon. Although most people mix with only a small number of people who are geographically close, enough others mix with people who are geographically far away. As a result, after 3 transmissions, the infection hasn’t reached half the world’s population — but it has reached half way around the world!! Failing to take into account the connectivity between people makes the models far, far too conservative about spread.

Including the graph structure that connects people shows that quarantine mechanisms cannot possibly work. These long-distance connections apply at all scales, not just between countries. So if there’s an outbreak in a single city block, there will be some people who have travelled a few miles away before the infection is detected; in an outbreak in a city, there will be some people who have been to another city; and so on.

Of course, the work on “six degrees of separation” was based on communication, which does not always imply transmission. So the constants might be a but larger; but it seems clear that the pass-the-parcel (pass-the-virus) graph can’t have much larger diameter.

Structure of social network graphs

Many researchers study social network graphs to try and understand how we as humans interact, especially in information systems and online. However, it has always been difficult to validate results because privacy concerns usually limit access to real datasets. Many results have been validated using artificial graphs, generated in a way that mimics the large-scale properties of real graphs. For example, the artificial graphs look like real graphs in the sense that they obey power laws, have the right kind of degree sequences and so on.

Often, preferential attachment is used as the construction technique. In this algorithm, an edge is attached to a vertex with a probability in proportion to the number of edges already attached to it.  This seems intuitively plausible in many human settings: a person with many friends tends to meet more people and so has a greater chance of making more friends.

There have been hints for a while that these artificial graphs were not quite like real graphs, even though they match according to many large-scale measures. For example, Newman showed that, in human graphs, high-degree nodes tended to be connected to high-degree nodes, while in technical networks this was not the case — even though both looked the same from a power-law perspective.

But now Faloutsos’s group at CMU have shown convincingly that there are substantial differences between artificial and real graphs. They looked at what happens to the diameter of a graph as edges are uniformly randomly deleted. As edges are deleted, the diameter grows slowly but, at some point, there’s a sharp increase. They call this the shatter point.

The important thing is that the shatter point of artificial graphs is substantially higher (i.e. the fraction of edges remaining when this happens) than for real graphs. In other words, graphs generated by humans rather than simply by preferential attachment are somehow tougher. Although humans must be choosing edges to connect based on local criteria, they must somehow do this in a way that makes the global srtucture of the graph more robust. It’s not at all clear (to me at least) how this happens, but it seems plausible.

One of the implications of this difference is that it calls into question much of the conventional wisdom about social networks, whenever this has been derived from, or validated by, artificially generated datasets. Which is quite a lot of the time.

Deccan Mujahideen?

The “Deccan Mujihadeen” have claimed responsibility for the Mumbai attacks today. It doesn’t seem clear who this group is, but there are two good reasons why it’s plausible that such a group might exist and have typical Salafist motivations.

The Deccan is the plateau in central eastern India, roughly contiguous with Andhra Pradesh with its capital, Hyderabad. Andhra is what remains of the domains of the Nizam and is a historically Muslim region. As part of the independence agreement, the NIzam was given considerable independence from the rest of India, an agreement that was quickly violated by the Indian government who ‘invaded’ within a year. There is thus a natural solidarity of feeling with Muslims in Kashmir who found themselves part of India rather than (Muslim) Pakistan because of their rajah who was a Hindu.

The descendants of the Nizams of Hyderabad have the best claim to be Caliph, which provides a second basis for radical Islam to be centred in Andhra. A useful source of background is the book The Last Nizam by John Zubrzycki (MacMillan).

OTOH a group called Indian Mujahideen, with much less geographical locality, threatened attacks on Mumbai after successful attacks they carried out on Jaipur. So there may be some opportunism and specious justification in the choice of the group name to take responsibility for these attacks.

There’s some background here

and, by now, in many other places.

Suspicion of an al Qaeda link arises because of the simultaneous attacks, which has been a favourite tactic. However, the range of attack modalities and the low level of skill required for some of them suggest to me that there were a large number of lightly trained participants. Which doesn’t rule out an al Qaeda supervisor, of course.

See also Times of India on this subject.

Call for Papers: Link Analysis, Counterterrorism and Security

The Call for the LACTS 2009 workshop is now available here.

The workshop takes place at the SIAM Data Mining Conference and brings together academics, practitioners, law enforcement, and intelligence people to talk about leading-edge work in the area of adversarial data analysis.

The workshop is intended primarily for early-stage work. The proceedings are published electronically, but authors may retain copyright.

The deadline for submissions is probably late December, but perhaps a little later (still being decided).

Cell phones for money laundering?

There’s been some recent discussion about the risks of being able to store money on cell phones and so to move it about in a way that’s hard to see using conventional tools. Of course, this isn’t really a new thing — putting money on a credit card before a trip and then using it in a different place is a well-known way of moving money across international borders (and, for a while, getting a decent exchange rate while doing it). You can find some of the discussion, in a counterterrorism setting, here.

This concern seems overblown to me. There are significant disadvantages to a terrorist in carrying and using an electronic device that is able to reveal where he is and, worse still, do so without making it obvious. There are a number of issues that require different amounts of skill to exploit:

1. Cell phones that are turned on tell the nearest tower(s) roughly where they are. The tower can tell the direction in which the phone lies, and can estimate its distance. If multiple towers can see it, they can triangulate to get an even better position estimate. This ability is built in as part of the Extended 911 service that lets emergency services find someone in difficulty easily.
2. Increasingly cell phones know where they are because they have inbuilt GPS sensing. They can be interrogated for this information under certain circumstances (a beloved plot device in TV dramas). This data can be integrated with other s/w on a phone, providing other channels for it to be disseminated.
3. Cell phones are not robust from a security point of view and it is relatively straightforward to install hacks on them. For example, you can find instructions for turning every call into a silent conference call with another phone.
4. SIM cards can be cloned so that another phone in the same cell receives the same packets (although this seems likely to confuse the cell tower).
5. Even without access to the telco system and the encrypted communication, the device is radiating and so all of the standard location technologies will work. (Picking the device of interest may be difficult in urban settings.)

All of which suggest that cell phones are not going to be the terrorists’ friend any time soon. If they don’t want to carry such devices, they are unlikely to want to use them as electronic wallets.

It may help to keep a cell phone turned off, but this assumes that there’s no backdoor that enables the phone to communicate even when powered down. And it has to be on to be used as a wallet.

Of course, there are anonymous cell phones around, but even this does not solve the problem. There are already data-mining services that attempt to predict when multiple phones are owned by the same person based on the pattern of cell towers that they use with what frequency.

The Hogwarts approach to hiding content in the web

There are several reasons why bad guys might want to make information available on the web, but not have it be accessibe to everyone, especially to those who are looking for them. For example, they may want to disseminate propaganda, do recruitment, or provide training.

I’ve written before about ways to do this: passwords, unusual protocols, virtual worlds, and so on.

Another interesting possibility is to exploit the ability to dynamically serve web pages to provide different versions of web pages,both at different times, and to requests arriving from different parts of world (geolocation now being reasonably well established, good enough that e.g. I can’t access Pandora from Canada).

The essence of the idea is that the link target of a hyperlink can change without the anchor text, and so the appearance, changing. So, for example, a link may point to a completely innocuous page for 59 minutes in the hour, but between 13 and 14 minutes past, may point somewhere else. The exact time is now readily available, and connection speeds on the internet in most parts of the world are good enough that it is possible to visit a particular web page within a given minute. So, if you know in which minute the ‘gate’ is open, you can arrange to go through it.

Of course, there’s still the possibility (a 1 in 60 chance) that a random visitor will go through the ‘gate’ so the basic scheme needs some extension. First the concealed target should look exactly like the regular (59 minutes) target, so that it’s not obvious to an accidental visitor that anything unusual has happened. Second, the scheme can be chained so that a secret link from the second page opens up during some other minute, making it much less likely that an accidental visitor will go through two gates. And the chain can be made as long as necessary to reduce the probability of an accidental passage.

It’s important that the url for each of the pages involved is dynamic so that the final destination (or any of the intermediate steps) can’t be bookmarked. Then each visitor must follow the path on each visit.

Of course, the knowledge required is the minutes when the window is open on each page, and not the exact path. Thus it is possible to open other possible paths during other minutes, and so provide red-herring paths for anyone who becomes suspicious and starts reloading a page every minute and seeing whether and how the source changes.

Of course, the pattern of minutes that the gates open can be made data dependent or changing in other ways that are computable by those who are in the know, but hard for others to figure out.

Since the key is a sequence of numbers in the range 1-60, it can be displayed fairly openly as long as its significance is not appreciated, for example, coded in the publication date and time of some otherwise innocuous and public document.

It’s possible that the length of the window can be reduced below a minute with some experience.

Knowledge Discovery for Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement

My new book, Knowledge Discovery for Counterterrorism and Law Enforcement, is out. You can buy a copy from:

The publisher’s website

Amazon.

(Despite what these pages say, the book is available or will be within a day or two.)

As the holiday season approaches, perhaps you have a relative who’s in law enforcement, or intelligence, or security? What could be better than a book! Or maybe you’d like to buy one for yourself.

(A portion of the price of this book goes to support deserving university faculty.)

Spore — a new covert channel

I’ve written before about how virtual worlds present new challenges to the surveillance of bad guys. In systems such as Second Life, it’s hard to see what someone is doing inside such a virtual world (unless you’re Linden).

The situation is even worse in WWW-like virtual worlds, such as the Multiverse. Here each piece of virtual world is owned by someone, and there are teleport mechanisms (like links) to move between them. Not only can an owner provide a safe place for bad guys to meet where it’s hard to surveille them, but they can also prevent someone being followed by crashing the site after it’s been used. (This is also possible for conventional web sites which I’ll talk about in a later post.)

But new online games such as Spore open up new possibilities for communicating in hard to track ways. Spore is not really a multiplayer game, and it isn’t very obvious how much data sharing is going on. The point of the game is to build civilisations based on creating (designing) organisms which then ‘evolve’ through several stages.

Here’s the communication part. The game only works when it’s connected to the internet, and whenever a creature is created or evolves, it is uploaded to a central site, and then redistributed to the worlds of some other users.

This, by itself, would not be a very useful communication mechanism because the chances of a particular creature ending up in a particular user’s world is very small. But there is a mechanism to point to one of your ‘friends’ and get his/her creatures appearing in your world — and this provides the communication channel. Notice that the channel pulls content, which is what is needed in a covert setting. The person generating the content is the one likely to have attracted attention, so systems where that person has to overtly say whom to communicate with are less attractive for bad guys. It’s much harder to work out who might have asked for content from a channel, especially as some people who didn’t ask for it get it as well.

What kind of content can be sent along this channel? It isn’t a trivial process to transmit volumes of content. The simplest approach is to use each organism as a codeword. A more complex alternative is to use properties of organisms as alphabet symbols and send arbitrary content. And the way in which the civilization evolves can send a very simple signal about how much progress has been made on a particular task — and one that is so subtle that it is extremel hard to notice. What could be more innocent than playing a game?

Reagan vs Obama and McCain

I thought it would be interesting to look at the level of spin in Reagan’s speeches. He shares some characteristics with Obama; not in political opinions but in his ability to motivate an audience, and to be resistant to potentially embarrassing factual issues.
Here is the plot from yesterday’s post comparing Obama and McCain since their conventions, with five campaign speeches (all I could find) by Reagan between the convention and the 1980 election.

Comparing the spin of Reagan, Obama, and McCain

The points with red stars are Reagan’s speeches. As you can see, his level of spin is much higher than either of today’s candidates. The ability to use high levels of spin without coming across as phony is, of course, what makes an actor, so this is not entirely surprising. And I’ve argued all along that high levels of spin pay off for a politician, and the ability to give high-spin speeches especially to people who do not already like you is a key asset for a politician. Reagan is a good example of this in action.

Spin scores to the end of October

Here is the analysis of levels of spin in Obama and McCain’s speeches up to a few days ago. Usual labelling (refer to previous posts for background).

Spin scores (red - McCain, blue - Obama)

The most obvious thing to see in this plot is how McCain’s speeches all tend to lie on one side of the deceptiveness axis while Obama’s tend to lie on the other side. This is because McCain has started using motion words at high rates (and Obama does not). This has a small effect on deceptiveness score, but rates of use of motion verbs are not all that important to signalling deception.

The individual levels of spin from the convention to the end of October are here:

McCain

Obama

The last time I posted was during the period where Obama’s level of spin was quite low. As you can see, it has risen sharply again in the past week. This suggests that he is not as confident of winning now as he was then — he has consistently shown a pattern of stepping out from his facade and using lower spin when he feels confident about winning.

Concluding thoughts on spin the U.S. presidential election

When people think about spin and politicians, they usually assume that spin has to do with either presenting widely agreed facts in a way that puts a particular politician in the best light, or altering the facts by exaggerating or misremembering. Media people are always slightly puzzled when they reveal this kind of spin and find that it has little or no resonance with voters. Hillary Clinton’s memory of landing under sniper fire was a one-day wonder, not a deal-breaker. And there have been many other examples of this kind of spin on both sides during the U.S. presidential campaign, and they have had little impact.

This is because voters don’t choose politicians because of how clever their ideas are , whether they agree with these ideas, or even whether they are noticeably competent (history shows). They don’t listen to the candidates’ speeches and parse them for content. They vote for candidates with whom they feel some kind of resonance. And so they look for features of the candidates as people with which they can identify.

A simple way to say this is that voters look for character rather than policy. But this is still a bit misleading — they don’t don’t think about character in moral terms, but in relationship terms. Not “Is this candidate a good person” but “is this candidate a bit like me”. Moral issues do come into play, but only for those voters to whom moral issues are part of their own self image.

The kind of spin I’ve been following through the U.S. election campaign addresses this issue of presentation, that is to what extent do candidates present themselves, as people, in ways that are not congruent with who they really are, as people. In other words, to what extent do they present a persona or facade that is designed to appeal to a wider range of voters than the unadorned person would?

For both John McCain and Hillary Clinton, the short version is that they have, in general, presented something close to the real person. (This may, of course, be because they developed a political persona that they’ve been using so long that it has become the real them.) There have been ups and downs, and it’s been possible to see what might be going through the mind of the candidate and/or the campaign at certain critical moments, but overall they have presented a consistent persona that seems close to their real personality.

Barack Obama, on the other hand, has consistently presented a persona that does not seem to be very close to the real Obama, about whom we can only guess. This is starting to be more widely appreciated. I’ve heard several commentators say how they find him inscrutable because they simply can’t see the real person behind the presentation.

Spin is only one factor in how voters decide who to vote for, so I can’t make a prediction about who will win tomorrow. What I think is predictable is that, if Obama wins, his approval ratings will drop quite quickly when he becomes president — he simply cannot be all of the things that people are projecting on to him, many of them mutually contradictory. And, as president, his actions will speak louder and more clearly than his campaign speeches about who he really is.

Update — Spin in US Presidential Election

I’ve looked at the spin in the speeches in the last few weeks, more or less since the convention. The overall picture has remained very similar to earlier stages: Obama’s levels of spin are relatively high compared to McCain’s.

Here is the overall spin plot:

Spin between the conventions and the last week of October

Here are the plots over time for McCain:

McCain's spin

and Obama:

The most interesting thing here is how much Obama’s level of spin has dropped in the last few speeches. This is very similar to what happened in the weeks (late February) when it became clear that he would get the Democratic nomination. When he feels sure of himself, he steps out from behind his election facade and presents himself much more openly. The extremely low-spin speech is his comedy routine at the Al Smith dinner — presumably the expectation that he should be funny rather than serious made him feel as if he had permission to be himself.

McCain’s high-spin speeches are those when he gives economic history lessons, unlike his typical speech in which he puts more of himself.

Canadian Federal Election – 1 day to go

The results for the three English-speaking party leaders are shown below. I have not tried to track Duceppe because we don’t fully understand how to move the deception model across languages. I think there’s a fair amount of confidence that the same (types of words) are significant in other languages, but the details are difficult. In the case of French, the pronoun “on” sometimes plays the role of “I” and sometimes not, and the differences are hard to pick out, and might perhaps be especially significant as a distancing mechanism.

The Canadian federal party leaders have all tried to run presidential style campaigns (Vote the man, rather than the party, or the local member). But they can’t bring themselves to talk about themselves, so the speeches they all give are extremely abstract blue-skies policy speeches, with hardly an “I” to be seen. Relative to the U.S. election, all of the speeches would rank as high spin. This may be partly a perception (probably accurate IMHO) that Canadians are not ready for prime minister = president and so the leaders are trying to be the face of their party, but not the single leading figure. This middle-ground approach seems to be a bit clunky, and produces some odd speeches. Can you imagine an American politician at any level giving a speech titled “New Support for Apprentices”?

Here is the spin ranking for the speeches available up to today:

Spin rankings over the entire election campaign

The pattern has been reasonable consistent over the campaign. Stephen Harper’s (blue) speeches tend to be high-spin; Stephane Dion’s (red) speeches are more moderate in spin, but much more variable; and Jack Layton’s speeches (such as they are) (magenta) are relatively low spin. This would indicate that Stephen Harper will tend to do better than the other two, but these speeches play such a small role in the campaign that not much should be read into this prediction.

Obama in the rest of the world

There’s a story in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning making the point that three-quarters of Australians want Obama to win. This is consistent with the reaction to Obama in Europe and, I suppose, many other parts of the world.

But how do they know? Part of the answer at least is that they’ve heard snippets of his speeches — and this is exactly what you’d expect of blue-skies policy speeches. Such speeches reach out to those who are far away.

The danger is that increased exposure to blue-skies policy speeches backfires because the lack of connection to the actual person starts to make them seem too artificial. This doesn’t happen in far-away places because there isn’t enough exposure. But it’s a real possibility in the U.S..

Tutorial in Fredericton

I’m giving a tutorial on adversarial knowledge discovery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, tomorrow, Wednesday October 1st at the Privacy, Security, Trust conference. If you’re in that part of the world, it’s not too late to register and come along.

Canadian election — some results

Although the party leaders are trying to run a presidential election (vote for Harper, Dion, Layton, Duceppe rather than vote for a party or (heaven forbid) a local member), they are not doing a very good job of presenting themselves as people. The speeches that are available online are little more than press releases read out loud. The contrast with the speeches of the U.S. contenders couldn’t be more stark.

However, here are the spin values for the available speeches, 12 from Harper in blue, 3 from Dion in red, and one from Layton in magenta.

Party leaders spin to Sep 29

Speech 13 from Dion has such (apparently) low spin on the strength of a few paragraphs near then end in which he becomes slightly personal. The Harper speeches are all blue-skies policy speeches. He does not tend to take credit personally, but rather attributes the policies to the government or to the Conservative Party.

High-spin speeches are usually a good strategy, so Harper is probably doing better than the other two leaders. But this kind of generality seems not to attract anyone very strongly. Maybe that’s all Harper is going for — a safe pair of hands argument. But you can’t help but think that Bill Clinton could give all three of them pointers.

First U.S. Presidential Debate Results

Debates are a great opportunity to examine candidates’ languages because they are less scripted. The candidates prep answers to typical questions, but the actual words used to deliver them are their own.

The problem with most debates is that they are question-driven, and this changes the dynamics of deception. The format of the first debate used questions mainly as hooks to start statements, so this was much less of a problem.

As usual, I’m assuming that people vote for candidates they like, rather than candidates who are most competent. Hence it is always the right strategy for candidates to appear more likable and appealing than they might really be.

Candidates can use four strategies for their debate presentation:

1. Make blue-skies policy statements, with high spin. This reaches out to the maximal number of potential new supporters; but the attraction may not last very long precisely because the content is not connected to the candidate as a person.
2. Make blue-skies policy statements, with low spin. This is a waste of an opportunity.
3. Make track-record policy statements, with high spin. This reaches out to people who are on the boundaries of supporters, typically independents. If it can be made to work, this is probably the best possible strategy option, but it is hard to do. The problem is that the link to the candidate as an individual who has done or is going to do particular things makes it hard to also appear to be more attractive to people who might not like the things done or planned.
4. Make track-record policy statements, with lower spin. This is a good strategy for expanding those who favor a particular candidate (if you can’t do 3) because those who are attracted are attracted more strongly and so more likely to stay attracted.

In the debate on Friday, both candidates made a hash of answering the first two questions (on the financial bailout). They had obviously not prepped questions in this area, and hadn’t even had much of a chance to talk about the issues — so their speech was very choppy and they kept changing their minds about what they were going to say half way through sentences.

On the remaining questions, it is clear that Obama was going for strategy 1, while McCain was going for strategy 4, to the extent that they made conscious or partly-conscious choices about what kinds of answers to give. The levels of spin in response to each of the 8 questions are shown in the figure below.

Comparative spin for 8 questions

As usual, red is McCain and blue is Obama. Obama’s level of spin is high throughout (once he gets going) and his answers tend to be either of the form “we must do something” or “something must be done”. This high-spin strategy worked, and he is generally reckoned to have won the debate. The risk of this strategy, however, is that the attraction doesn’t stick; and I heard at least two commentators complain that Obama was so vague that it was hard to work out where he really stood on any issue. So there is danger here that, as people hear Obama more, they will be less and less impressed.

McCain’s levels of spin vary much more substantially. His two high-spin segments were in response to questions about the lessons of Iraq and the threat from Iran. In the first case, his answer was both short and off-topic; in the second he launched into a conversation about Obama’s statements about meeting with world leaders, interleaved with historical remarks about Nixon and China etc.. It looked like he was trying for his typical track-record policy statements, but he didn’t succeed very well because he kept dropping back into blue-skies policy. Thus there were answers that might have made an impact on independents, but he spent more time competing for those further away from his positions. By doing so less coherently than Obama, he probably didn’t do as well with any group. McCain has developed a partial way to get the effect of strategy 3 – he creates sandwich speeches, with chunks of low-spin, this-is-what-I’m-like content at the beginning and end, and blue-skies policy in the middle.

As debate speakers, both were quite poor. They were like my students who, having prepared an answer to an expected exam question, use it even though it doesn’t quite fit the question they were actually asked. I know that politicians become adept at making statements that appear to be answers to questions, but I thought they did it very transparently in the debate.

Spin — the technical basis

The work on spin that I’ve written about here is based primarily on the work of Pennebaker’s group at the University of Texas, Austin. The primary reference is here. The model is based on empirical studies of deception in settings where the ground truth is known, and has, by now, been validated many times. When someone is being deceptive, there will be characteristic changes in the ways they use certain words. Deception here means, of course, saying things that the speaker does not believe to be (entirely) true, not things that are factually incorrect.

Of course, this is domain dependent, so we can’t judge how deceptive politicians are in comparison to, say, used-car salesmen or nuns.

The use of the word “spin” rather than deception acknowledges the fact that there are differences between explicit intent to deceive and implicit, unconscious desire to present oneself as better (along some set of dimensions) than one actually is. This kind of self-improvement happens in job interviews, dating, and in politics.

And we don’t condemn someone for being deceptive when they make an initial offer in a negotiation, but the same kind of signals will appear in their language use.

The interesting thing is not so much that politicians try to appeal to as many people as possible, at the expense of strict accuracy, but that there are differences in how much this happens — changing over short time scales for a single person, and at longer time scales for a campaign; and that there are systematic differences between campaigns. There is a great deal of evidence that the properties mediated by changes in language patterns are not under conscious control (see e.g. Pennebaker and Chung) so they provide an insight into campaigns that is hard for the campaigns to obscure.

Basic ideas

Because a lot of people are coming here because of the New Scientist article, and perhaps don’t want to have to read through the back issues, I thought it would be worthwhile to review the basics.

Sometimes when people talk about spin they mean attempts to reinterpret generally-agreed facts in a way that makes one or other candidate or party look better. Sometimes this involves mistating facts, but this is usually a risky thing for a politician to do.

When I talk about spin what I mean is the way in which politicians represent themselves as different (nicer) than they are. In a perfect world, politicians might get elected based entirely on their competence, but in our world people seem to prefer to vote for someone that they like, or who seems to be someone like them. Politicians, therefore, have a lot of motivation to assume a persona or facade in which they seem more likeable and attractive than their base personality.

This presentation of an ‘enhanced’ persona has to be subconscious to really work. Only a few of us can do this consciously (people called actors, often paid well if they can do it well). So when it is happening, it can be detected by changes in subconscious behavior, in this case changes in language. Because it is largely subconscious, it provides a window into individuals’ situational view which can often be illuminating, and is often interesting as well.

For a politican, then, spin is a good thing, and a good politician will tend to be good at it. We blame politicians for being hypocritical, but they do it because it works with voters.

The limiting factors, interrelated, are how well a politician can use high spin, and the content of what s/he wants to talk about. A speech about, say, putting elephants on Mars is easy to make high spin because nothing in the speech depends on the person giving it — it’s like an argument at a debating society; there’s nothing personal invested in it. A speech that depends on what a politician has done in the past, or what s/he plans to do because of some individual skill or goal is harder to give with high spin exactly because it relates to the speaker in a tighter way. A politician who can give such a speech in a high-spin way has a huge advantage. A speech that is intended primarily for those who already support a candidate and tries to relate to them in a personal way is even more difficult to give in a high-spin way (part of Bill Clinton’s success might have been because he seems to be able to do this).

Almost all of the speeches in the U.S. election campaign can be understood from this perspective. The convention speeches are especially useful because, as a set, they all try to do more or less the same thing. But the level of spin achieved by the different speakers differs substantially.

The brief history of the campaign is this: Obama uses moderately high levels of spin throughout, varying because of the kind of speeches he gives. McCain did inded start out with straight talk, but his levels of spin quickly matched Obama once it was clear that Obama was the Democratic nominee. Clinton’s level of spin started fairly low, because she loves to get into policy intricacies. When it became clear that Obama was likely to win the nomination, she moved to a much more personal-appeal strategy with even lower levels of spin. This worked well for her with her base, but not so much outside of it, which is what you would expect for this kind of strategy.

At their conventions, Obama gave a fairly typical speech. McCain tried a risky strategy in which he used very (!!) low levels of spin. It’s not clear whether it worked for him, because both speeches were so overshadowed by the choice of Palin as VP nominee.

Election spin results covered by New Scientist

There’s an article on, among other things, my work on spin the US election campaign in this week’s issue of New Scientist. You can find it online here. There are also some interesting results from the people who look at facial expressions (pioneered by Ekman) and so voice analysis.