The Red Ink book mentioned the online game Budget Hero. If you'd like to try your own hand at balancing the budget. I didn't fill any of my badges but did downsize the government and extend the time to go bust from 34 to 36 years. It gives you a pretty good idea of why it so hard to come to agreement on these issues with almost any change having pros and cons. Interactive web content where you can do something with it, is currently of interest to me. One of my restorations is a updated version of one of the first applets I did in java, a version of the Turing machine mentioned in The Emperor's New Mind. This version allowing you to paste in programs to run on the Turing machine. I have a similar idea for a Game Theory Prisoner's Dilemma applet based on the tournament's mentioned in Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation. You would be able to paste in your own entries into the tournaments. Game Theory based code is also of interest to me one thing I'm currently reading related to that is The Predictioneer's Game.
Neither of these applets is intended to be as fancy as the Budget Hero game mentioned above, or intended to be state of the art web based applications but would be a start at this sort of thing.
Of course the final 2012 version of Election Games is still on the to-do list. I have I think complete county results so would have all the data required to finish it as is. Additional enhancements are still planned though. Getting into prediction would be one of them. That seems to be where a lot of the current interest lies. Inspired largely by Nate Silver's FiveThiryEight blog. One idea I have is based on something mentioned in Silver's book the signal and the noise . That being that certain leads in the polls suggest a certain probability of a win in the election. I found historical data for the Gallup polls that I should be able to determines these probabilities from. I should then be able to come up with some sort of Monte Carlo simulation to get something predictive. I can try to "predict" back results to see how accurate it would be. The other methods for prediction I've been seeing, like dynamic Bayesian, are going to require some figuring out yet on my part before I do anything with them.
Anyhow thats an idea of what I am currently doing and thinking about doing. A fair number of links thrown in. Read all mentioned, there will be a pop quiz tomorrow.
Not long between the program available and the election being over. It went more or less as expected. The Swing state simulation favoring Obama looked like it will probably be off four states. Assuming Obama gets Florida which may never be decided. The simulation gave New Hampshire, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia to Romney and these all went to Obama. Going into this simulation and giving Obama the "Women's rights" scenario and then "Deficit" gives a result 100% matching the election outcome. You have to add "Deficit" to take away North Carolina which I think he was competitive in but didn't carry. I have replaced the pre-election Swing simulation with this, assuming Fl., accurate simulation of the election called "Swing Sweep - exact match".
It is my current plan to definitely come out with a improved post-election version of the application. Thanks for the interest.
On a limited basis ony at this point in time. The OS X dmg includes the new version as a Apple Java 6 JVM application. I planned on going with Java Web Start for all platforms but haven't got that deploying the new databases. A lot of the data is now in Java Derby SQL database tables, there will probably be a separate download for that at some point as the data could be useful standalone outside of the application.
Links A couple directly related to this program as it is for the 2012 version
David Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections 2008 version used data from here, 2012 may use current for the same eventually
Vote Ratings 2011 - NationalJournal.com
Includes some related use of the National Journal data. Demonstrates how the data could be used separately from the program.
Hotelling.dmg
Inspired by the DNC convention I decided to blog Whatever
This is the Presidential election simulation software that the media and the politicians don't want you to know about.
When the puzzles get tough, the tough get the Sunday Sudoku Solver