1. Conservatives would be more comfortable with a browser delivered by a major corporation that has faced antitrust charges over that browser then liberals would.
2. Liberals anecdotally are more prone to counter-cultural choices, and thus would be more likely to seek out an alternative to the default browser.

The Google interviews made me realize one other thing. In testing for this kind of effect, you would need to eliminate people who didn’t know what a browser was. Clearly, a person who doesn’t even know what a browser is is highly unlikely to proactively switch from their system’s default browser. Further, if a person’s political views are correlated at all with their likelihood of understanding what a browser is, not eliminating people who don’t understand could hide real results.

The company I work for, Knewton Inc, is becoming known in certain circles of its clever usage for the vastly underused (IMHO) Amazon Mechanical Turk service. When I mentioned my contention to our guy who’s been pioneering our MTurk usage, Dahn Tamir, he suggested that we build an MTurk task and get some real data to find out whether my hypothesis had any basis in reality. The rest of this post represents my findings.

The Experiment
We posted the following poll to MTurk, allowing users the ability to do the task only once (making it a lot harder to stuff the ballot box, or, at the very least, require a hell of a lot more effort on the part of the users):

The options for political affiliation were:

• Republican
• Independant
• Democrat

The options for political philosophy were:

• Strongly Liberal
• Liberal
• Moderately Liberal
• Moderate
• Moderately Conservative
• Conservative
• Strongly Conservative
• Socialist
• Libertarian

For the web browser, we considered a person to have passed the test if he or she answered Internet Explorer or Firefox, but no others. We considered them to have failed if they answered Yahoo, Google or MSN. It was pointed out that AOL did have a browser that could be reasonably referred to as AOL, so we ignored this field. Finally, we recorded the workers’ User Agent, letting us see what browser/os they were using.

Raw Results
Observations:

• Clearly, MTurkers are going to be more likely to know what a browser is, and it shows in the data. Google found that 8% of people in Times Square knew what a browser was, but 86% of respondents here did.
• We appear to have more Democrats/Liberals than Republicans/Conservatives one would expect in the normal population.
• I only added Socialist on a lark, and I was pretty amazed to see that it still got 2.24% in a poll of Americans
• Firefox polled a lot higher here than one would expect in the wild. This should make it a lot easier to see any effects, along with the high pass rate of the test.

Party Affiliation
Total % Republican 244 23.71% Independent 397 38.58% Democrat 388 37.71%

Political Philosophy
Total % Strongly Liberal 92 8.94% Liberal 188 18.27% Moderately Liberal 169 16.42% Moderate 197 19.14% Moderately Conservative 157 15.26% Conservative 105 10.20% Strongly Conservative 34 3.30% Socialist 23 2.24% Libertarian 64 6.22%

Browsers
Total % Firefox 479 46.55% Internet Explorer 439 42.66% Safari 63 6.12% Chrome 41 3.98% Opera 7 0.68%

Browser Test Results
Total % Pass 886 86.10% Fail 143 13.90%

Test Results
Next, after pulling in the raw results, we compared browser, affiliation and philosophy to the test results.

Observations:

• Unsurprisingly, IE fared better amongst people who failed the test. Firefox did substantially better amongst people who passed the test. Safari also did better amongst people who passed the test, which was a little surprising, because we expected all default browsers to do better with people who failed. The sample, however, is small enough that the Safari factor could just be noise. It has been mentioned that this could have been caused by Safari for windows. That supposition can potentially be answered in the data.
• Democrats did worse on the test, while Republicans and Independents did basically the same. We see the likely reason why in the political philosophy section. The further left you go, the worse you tend to do on the browser test, until you hit strongly liberal. Strong Liberals reversed the trend entirely and tested better than any other group.

Test Results by Party Affiliation
Pass % Fail % Republican 87.70% 12.30% Independent 88.16% 11.84% Democrat 82.99% 17.01%

Test Results By Political Philosophy
Pass % Fail % Strongly Liberal 91.30% 8.70% Liberal 81.91% 18.09% Moderately Liberal 84.62% 15.38% Moderate 86.29% 13.71% Moderately Conservative 86.62% 13.38% Conservative 87.62% 12.38% Strongly Conservative 88.24% 11.76% Socialist 86.96% 13.04% Libertarian 89.06% 10.94%

Browser by Test Results
Pass % Fail % Internet Explorer 39.16% 64.34% Firefox 49.89% 25.87% Safari 6.21% 5.59% Chrome 4.06% 3.50% Opera 0.68% 0.70%

Browser choice by political opinion
Here we have the final analysis. Looking at how browser choice changes across the political spectrum.

Observations:

• My initial hypothesis appears to be supported by this data set. IE falls off sharply the further left you go on the spectrum from Moderate. Strong liberals use IE at half the rate of strong conservatives.
• Both Libertarians and Socialists appear to fit in on the left end of the spectrum at least where browser choice is concerned. Libertarians appear to loath IE and are nuts for Firefox. They have the highest Firefox rating of anyone with an astounding 70.18%
• Firefox’s fall as you go to the right is less pronounced as IE’s fall as you go to the left. This is probably caused by the generally higher likelyhood of picking Safari as you go leftward.
• Opera appears to have its ’stronghold’ with Socialists, who were as likely to pick it as Chrome or Safari.
• Libertarians also appear to have an exaggerated preference for Opera, Safari and Chrome. Basically, Libertarians really don’t like IE.

Browser by Party Affiliation
IE % Firefox % Safari % Chrome % Opera % Republican 45.33% 45.79% 5.14% 3.27% 0.47% Independent 36.00% 52.86% 6.57% 3.71% 0.86% Democrat 38.51% 49.38% 6.52% 4.97% 0.62%

Browser By Political Philosophy
IE % Firefox % Safari % Chrome % Opera % Strongly Liberal 25.00% 63.10% 8.33% 3.57% 0.00% Liberal 35.71% 50.65% 9.74% 2.60% 1.30% Moderately Liberal 41.96% 48.25% 4.20% 5.59% 0.00% Moderate 45.88% 44.12% 4.12% 5.88% 0.00% Moderately Conservative 47.06% 43.38% 7.35% 2.21% 0.00% Conservative 44.57% 46.74% 4.35% 3.26% 1.09% Strongly Conservative 50.00% 46.67% 0.00% 3.33% 0.00% Socalist 30.00% 55.00% 5.00% 5.00% 5.00% Libertarian 12.28% 70.18% 8.77% 5.26% 3.51%

Edit
Some have found the graph confusing, so here are two other versions. Both horizontal, showing the data in one by browser, and in the other by political philosophy. Click on them to enlarge

(enlarge)

(enlarge)

Conclusion
There appear to be a few strong correlations in data between a person’s political thinking and his or her browser choice. Still, this data is not representative of the population as a whole. It is, instead, a sample of people who are web savvy enough to use MTurk and who are motivated to take polls like this for small amounts of money. Also, the strong bias of the tech and open source communities toward libertarianism is probably causing the strong bias of libertarianism toward Firefox in this sample. Still, I thought these results were too interesting to keep to myself. Enjoy.

Notes
If you want to toy with the raw data and get access to the source I used for experimenting with the data, as well as my analysis spreadsheets, those are available here. We did this in 3 separate data gatherings, and those samples are still separated into 3 data files the raw data.

Copper Plate Electrolytic Etching of Justice and Athena

And this is the second:

Copper Plate Electrolytic Etching of Justice

The rest of the photos are in my Flickr photostream.

Open source projects are very difficult to lead, because there are so many people that participate, with so many conflicting goals. Add to that: If your project is used by a business, especially if the business makes money doing something related to your project, even if you are unaffiliated with that business, you can expect regular and constant flame wars erupting. (I might add that normally the people who are most opposed to commercial involvement, and a “business stealing from the project” are people who have contributed absolutely nothing, and thus personally have nothing to be “stolen”). So this results in substantial amounts of our resource time going to fighting fires instead of working on the project.

The last big thing that makes releasing a “stable” release on an open source project is that it’s very hard to make a release good enough to go out the door. This particular issue is IMHO one of the strengths of the project. As an engineer it’s very hard to predict what will be important to your users. If you have constant feedback from your community, you can see how things break for others, and it means what you release in the end is far better.

All in all, I have learned a ton in the last year about how to have a leadership role in an open source project, which I’m gonna need this coming year, as the changes we are implementing in pcgen over the next calendar year are going to be very deep, structural and profound for the project. Hopefully the experiences of the last year has taught me and the rest of the team a lot.

Pair of lovers

The process is pretty easy, you need about 3 twist ties of roughly the same length to make a person. One creates the head and body, 1 creates the arms and chest (or breasts in the case of one of the two in the below picture “Pair of Lovers”) and the final one creates the abdomen and the legs.

Climber

Once you have a number of people, you can lay them out doing any number of things. Personally I find ones that unnerve your co-workers such as the below “Ctulhu Worshippers” to be the most enjoyable. But it’s very easy to create scenes that are allegories for political battles at the office, or scenes based on recent events.

Ctulhu Worshipers

After having done this for some time, it’s fairly easy to figure out how to do more unique things, such as dragons, ettins, or really anything your imagination can come up with. Personally I think my next project will be a twist tie darth vader for the upcoming release of revenge of the sith.

Dragon

Suggested tools:

• A pile of twist ties, varrying lengths
• a leatherman, or other needle nosed pliers (good for crimping the joints to make them hold well)
• Paperclips (I don’t show any here, but you can easily turn a paperclip into a number of things such as swords, staves, other handheld objects, even furniture)
• The odd mixture of motivation, creativity and boredom to take on a project like this

Ettin with victim

• Wine crate: These are getting a bit harder to find, but there are still plenty around. Ask your local liquor mart where you can get them, normally you can pick them up for free. They make a nice, organic, modular shelving system that doesn’t look near as bad as milk crates.
• 1-2 Power strips (4 things can generally be charged per strip): I recommend getting one where the plugs are 90 degrees off the line of the strip – you can generally fit 4 chargers on one of these. The thinner the power strips, the better.
• 1 strip of quarter inch wood, 3 1/2″ wide: Get this at home depot. In the first or second wood aisle, there is generally a series of cubbies. In one of the aisles there will be thin strips of wood. To get one 3 1/2″ wide, it’ll be labeled at 4″.
• 1 strip of quarter inch wood, 2 1/2″ wide: Same as above, but it’ll be labeled as 3″ wide.
• 2-4 screws that fit the back of your power strip (2 per strip used)
• Wood Glue
• Cable ties (optional)
• Screw driver that fits above screws.
• Jigsaw
• Drill

Fig 1: Materials

First off, you are going to want to drill some holes at the back of the crate, at what will be the bottom. You should drill these large, as this is what you will use to fit the jigsaw into, to cut a hole large enough for the power strip’s plug to pass through. Next, line up the power strip to figure out where you will need to hang it from the screws. You will want the bottom edge of the power strip to be 1 1/2″ or so above the groove that is in the wine crate. If you are doing 2 power strips, do the same with the upper groove. (See Fig 2)

Fig 2: Cut hole & add screws for power strip

After cutting the hole and screwing in the mounts, hang the power strip. If you are doing 2, I would recommend the second one be directly above the lower one. Run the power cable(s) through the hole in the bottom. (See Fig 3)

Fig 3: Mount power strip

Now, plug in all the gear that you intend to charge in the charging station. I recommend using cable ties to shorten the length of the power cable so that it’s not as hard to stuff under the shelf we’ll add in a minute. Make sure that if you do use cable ties, that there is enough length of cable between the plug and the loop that the loop can set on the bottom of the box (or above the top groove in the case of an upper power strip. Also ensure that there is enough length of Cable after the loop so that you can set the charger on a shelf that slides into the bottom groove. (See Fig 4)

Fig 4: Plug in gear

Mark and cut the 3 1/2″ wood strip so that it will fit in the grooves. If you are doing 2 chargers, cut 2 of them (there should be more then enough length on the strip of wood). Slide in the shelves, so that it is about a quarter inch back from the front of the crate. Then, set your chargeable items on the lower of the two shelves. You will want to tuck the extra length of cable under the lower shelf, and over the upper shelf. At this point, you can also optionally choose to mount some of your chargers on the side of crate, or on the clear space in the back of the crate. (See Fig 5)

Fig 5: Add shelf

Now, take your second strip of wood, the 2 1/2″ piece, and set it along the bottom, marking it so it will fit in the quarter inch of space you left between the shelves and the front of the crate. Cut 1-2 strips depending on if you are adding the upper shelf. Now, run wood glue along the edge of the shelf *but not on the crate, this shelf is to be removable*, and attach the strip so that it covers the wire den. If you are doing 2 shelves, you will probably want to remove all the chargeables from the box so that you can flip it over to glue the other strip in place. It’s much easier then trying to get it to stay put with no support. (See Fig 6)

Fig 6: Cover wire den

And there you go. A compact place with built in power to charge all your gizmos. Fig 7 shows mine in place at my house. You may decide you want to stain the front strip, or even the whole box. I still need to get around to that on mine.

Note: If you happen to have cradles for mp3 players/pdas/phones, the hole in the back is also great for running USB cables to your computer.

Enjoy!

Fig 7: Charging station in place