It is widely reported that partisanship in the United States Congress is at an historic high. Given that individuals are persuaded to follow party lines while having the opportunity and incentives to collaborate with members of the opposite party, our goal is to measure the extent to which legislators tend to form ideological relationships with members of the opposite party. We quantify the level of cooperation, or lack thereof, between Democrat and Republican Party members in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1949–2012. We define a network of over 5 million pairs of representatives, and compare the mutual agreement rates on legislative decisions between two distinct types of pairs: those from the same party and those formed of members from different parties. We find that despite short-term fluctuations, partisanship or non-cooperation in the U.S. Congress has been increasing exponentially for over 60 years with no sign of abating or reversing. Yet, a group of representatives continue to cooperate across party lines despite growing partisanship.

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Environmental sustainability and energy management are increasingly critical issues in people's lives and their livelihood. New and rapidly evolving tracking technologies are major tools for addressing these challenges because they provide visibility to the otherwise hidden processes of everyday infrastructures such as those involving waste removal. By revealing these processes and patterns, the technologies can help influence personal behavior with respect to environmental consciousness. Pervasive monitoring and analysis can also improve environmental sustainability by revealing inefficiencies in the waste-removal chain to municipalities and waste service providers, as well as monitoring compliance with environmental regulations. We present a tracking system for trash that demonstrates how pervasive monitoring can help to better reveal, understand, and improve the waste-management system. Custom-developed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Btrash tags[ use the Global System for Mobile communication technology to provide both coarse localization and active return communications. We discuss methods for calculating and visualizing movement of trash and present preliminary results from the Trash Track project, including information about tag performance and discussion of some acquired traces. With the Trash Track project, the MIT SENSEable City Laboratory is exploring how new pervasive sensor technologies can be used to transform and understand cities.

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