Dogs and Jen: Home Edition

I’d mentioned in many posts this summer that I was crazy busy with work. Thankfully, I’m about to be back to normal-busy. All my pressing deadlines were Thursday and everything got done.

Most of what I do is of interest to other academics in my field. Sometimes I start talking about details to my poor SIL Michelle and I can her her eyes glazing over on the phone even as she struggles to stay interested.

However, of the dozen big projects I had going, one caught the attention of the general public. I did a study of how people in Congress use Twitter (along with a PhD student an undergraduate student). In short, we looked at about 6,000 posts and found that Congresspeople use Twitter for self-promotion and talking about where they are and what they are doing (e.g. “I just had lunch at a great restaurant!”). They generally don’t use it for sharing new or helpful information, or as a way to improve the access people have to them.

I could tell you all about it, but the Washington Post wrote about it and did a nice job explaining the part people care about. You can even find it in the print edition today (Saturday).

It’s been a lot of fun to get something we’ve done mentioned in the press, and the reporter did a great job with the article.

So there you go. The Washington Post talking about what I did on my summer vacation. Maybe some house work will come next.

Mowing the lawn today, I was very sad to discover a dead squirrel in the back yard by the new fence. I don’t know what happened to him. It looked like he had just fallen out of the tree and landed there. It wasn’t from my old rat poison. That was all gone before I found the rat weeks ago. We gave him a proper burial, but it was indeed a sad day for Dogs and Jen’s wildlife.