What's new with the Political Temperature Index.
Mar 22, 2026
Better Story Descriptions & Topic Merging
- Top story descriptions now show substantive summaries instead of generic placeholders — each driver includes a real explanation of what happened and why it matters
- Related Iran war stories (sanctions, troop deployment, congressional oversight, exit strategy) now merge into a single unified driver instead of fragmenting across multiple entries
Mar 22, 2026
Scoring Accuracy & Detection Improvements
- Sarcasm detection now correctly handles inflammatory political content — previously, genuinely heated rhetoric could be misidentified as sarcastic and have its intensity reduced
- Minor and moderate political events are now properly distinguished, so smaller stories like committee hearings are detected separately from major legislative actions
- The polarization score now transitions smoothly as the number of active political topics changes, eliminating sudden jumps when a new story enters or leaves the news cycle
- Political poll numbers (like "52-48") are no longer confused with sports scores, improving data quality
- Sentiment analysis now correctly tracks which AI model scored each article, ensuring the accuracy metrics reflect real model performance
- Summary generation is faster with reduced redundant database queries
Mar 21, 2026
Scoring Accuracy & Data Quality Hardening
- Top story rankings now properly factor in AI-assessed significance ratings, ensuring the most impactful stories appear first
- Congressional Record floor speeches are now correctly captured and contribute to the temperature calculation
- The crisis detection system now properly activates during high-velocity events, preventing the temperature from being artificially suppressed by low publishing volume
- Lemmy community discussions are now included in the social media analysis alongside Reddit, Bluesky, and other platforms
- Consistent date handling across all scoring components improves calculation accuracy
- The legislative activity tracker now shows the correct day's data regardless of what time you view it
Mar 21, 2026
Smarter Scoring & Better Accuracy Tracking
- Temperature readings on federal holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, July 4th, etc.) are now adjusted so low publishing volume doesn't falsely show a calm political climate
- Social media sentiment now contributes directly to the rhetoric score when enough posts are available, giving the temperature reading a more complete picture of public discourse
- The multi-model sentiment system now activates automatically when multiple AI providers are available, improving scoring accuracy through consensus
- When sentiment models disagree significantly, the system now reduces its confidence in the rhetoric score rather than blindly averaging conflicting signals
- The Track Record page now tracks false positives — days where the temperature spiked but no real political event occurred — alongside the existing event detection metrics
- When a political event is missed, the system now diagnoses exactly why: whether the temperature spike was too small, the absolute level was too low, or data was insufficient
- An automated nightly review now monitors detection accuracy and alerts when the hit rate drops below acceptable levels
- All severity thresholds used across the system are now unified in a single location, eliminating inconsistencies between detection and validation
Mar 20, 2026
Improved Data Quality & Pipeline Reliability
- The scoring system now uses smooth mathematical transitions instead of hard cutoffs when combining sub-indices, eliminating cases where a tiny change in input could cause a disproportionate jump in the final temperature
- Stories discovered through web search are now verified against at least one independent source (trending headlines, breaking events, or gap detection) before being promoted to top drivers
- Event severity is now validated in both directions — stories initially classified as "moderate" are flagged for upgrade review if temperature data shows they had major impact
- Morning temperature readings are more accurate with better safeguards against over-extrapolating when early data is still coming in
- All RSS feeds are now pre-screened for US political relevance before entering the analysis pipeline, reducing noise from international or non-political content
- The system now monitors itself in real-time to catch data inconsistencies, missing scores, and unusual patterns across its three daily runs
- A new pipeline health endpoint tracks job execution status, data freshness, and source reliability in real time
- Event detection now uses time windows tuned to each category — legislative events are expected same-day while economic impacts are tracked over multiple days
Mar 19, 2026
Better Coverage of US Foreign Policy & Judicial Stories
- Stories about US policy toward foreign countries (like the Iran conflict) are no longer accidentally filtered as "foreign" when they clearly involve the White House, Pentagon, or other US institutions
- Headlines about judges, the Supreme Court, and the judiciary are now properly recognized as political content instead of being filtered out
- Prediction market data now excludes sports and entertainment markets (NHL, NBA, Oscar predictions, etc.) that were incorrectly appearing in the political temperature calculation
- Previously missing stories like the DHS confirmation hearing, Illinois Senate primary, and Chief Justice Roberts statements now correctly appear as top drivers
Mar 17, 2026
Social Pulse Discourse Heat Now Shows Real Variance
- The Discourse Heat gauge in Social Pulse now reflects actual day-to-day changes in social media tone instead of showing a flat reading
- Social media posts are now scored using language patterns specific to how people talk on Reddit, Bluesky, YouTube, and other platforms — not generic news headline patterns
- Posts are analyzed by three independent scoring models that run simultaneously, with their results combined for higher accuracy
- The heat display now uses a wider visual range so you can actually see differences between calm and heated days
- Sparkline charts for daily heat now show meaningful movement across the 7-day window
Mar 17, 2026
Driver Accuracy & Story Separation Improvements
- Fixed an issue where unrelated stories sharing common political terms (like "Senate") were incorrectly merged into mega-topics, causing important stories to disappear from the dashboard
- Key stories like the DHS/TSA Shutdown, SAVE America Act debate, and Kristi Noem criminal referral now correctly appear as distinct top drivers
- Topic merging now requires stronger evidence that two stories are actually related before combining them, using both name similarity and shared specific details
- Breaking event descriptions now display readable summaries instead of raw data statistics
- Promoted stories now show properly matched headlines instead of pulling unrelated articles
- Story merging limits tightened to prevent any single topic from absorbing too many other stories
Mar 16, 2026
Self-Adapting Keyword Intelligence
- The system now automatically discovers trending topics, foreign leaders, and related story groups from its own data instead of relying on manually maintained keyword lists
- Related topic detection (e.g., recognizing that two different stories about trade policy are connected) now learns from historical co-occurrence patterns rather than a fixed list
- Foreign story detection adapts as new international figures and events emerge in the news cycle, no manual updates needed
- Topic merging stop words and generic name filters now adjust dynamically based on the current day's story landscape
- Intensity keyword tiers (critical, major, moderate, minor) now auto-expand based on recent significant events
- Synonym detection for topic deduplication now learns from keyword co-occurrence across multiple days
Mar 16, 2026
Smarter Topic Merging & Reliability Improvements
- Real-time story enrichment is now more reliable with automatic retries when the initial search times out
- Top story article counts are now properly differentiated instead of showing identical numbers across multiple drivers
- Iran war coverage is now split into distinct sub-stories (military operations, diplomacy, energy impacts) instead of being lumped together
- Topic merging is now smarter about distinguishing stories involving different government institutions, preventing unrelated stories from being combined
- Stronger safeguards against low-profile stories being incorrectly promoted to top driver positions
Mar 16, 2026
Expanded Coverage: 7 New Data Sources
- Added Polymarket prediction markets as a new cross-validation signal for political uncertainty
- Added Snopes fact-checks alongside PolitiFact for broader misinformation detection
- Added SCOTUSblog for real-time Supreme Court coverage and decisions
- Added GAO reports for government accountability and oversight tracking
- Added Regulations.gov for tracking contentious federal rulemaking activity
- Added Wikipedia pageview tracking as a public attention proxy for political topics
- Added GDELT TV News for television coverage volume tracking
- Total data sources now 30+ across news, social media, legislative, judicial, and cross-validation categories
Mar 16, 2026
Smarter Story Merging & Morning Data Resilience
- Related stories about the same event are now automatically merged when web search confirms they belong together, reducing fragmentation in top drivers
- Story article counts are now more accurate: each pipeline run preserves its own discovery count instead of inflating across runs
- Headlines on promoted stories now go through a relevance check, preventing unrelated articles from appearing under the wrong topic
- Morning temperature readings are more resilient. When only partial data is available, the system carries forward yesterday's volume score as a floor instead of dropping sharply
- Story velocity detection now uses web search severity as a safety net, preventing ongoing crises from showing zero momentum when cluster names change daily
- High-impact stories like wars and crises need less word overlap to match across days, improving continuity tracking
Mar 15, 2026
Legislative Tracker Redesign
- Vote titles are now smarter: bare bill numbers show their full title, and procedural votes display clean tags like CLOTURE or AMENDMENT
- Chamber pills are now clickable filters that let you toggle between All, Senate, and House
- Pass/fail results are now visible at a glance without expanding each row
- Left border on each row is color-coded by partisanship level for quick visual scanning
- Split bars are wider with clearer labels showing exact party counts (e.g. "5D-48R")
- Expanded view now shows a side-by-side Democrats vs Republicans breakdown with total vote tallies
- Independent votes are shown when they exist
Mar 15, 2026
Scoring & Performance Fixes
- Fixed rhetoric scoring: GDELT tone was contributing ~5x less than intended due to incorrect normalization
- Fixed polarization scoring: tone normalization was too aggressive, losing nuance between moderately and very negative articles
- Improved early crisis detection so escalation signals at low article counts register more accurately
- Fixed a circular reference in adaptive score normalization that could produce self-reinforcing values
- Standardized GDELT tone normalization across all scoring files for consistency
- Reduced unnecessary API polling for breaking events (5-minute interval changed to 30 minutes)
- Reduced social data loading from up to 20,000 records to 5,000 for faster page loads
- Coverage distribution in driver details now shows center coverage estimates instead of always zero
- Corrected Left/Right comparison display so color dots now match their category colors
- Added error handling to the breaking events API to prevent crashes from network failures
Mar 15, 2026
Integrated Navigation & Better Story Counts
- Navigation now lives inside the dashboard and page content instead of a separate top bar
- Logo and grouped dropdown menus (Explore, About, Integrate) integrated into the hero card header
- Secondary pages get an inline nav with logo and dropdowns for easy navigation
- Fixed a bug where all top stories showed the same article count instead of differentiated values
- Expanded real-time story discovery to cover 10 topic areas including regulatory actions, press freedom, and state-level politics
- Added tracking to verify which AI provider handles each pipeline run
Mar 14, 2026
Smarter Event Classification
- Improved historical event severity accuracy (was over-classifying 85% as "major")
- Added temperature-based validation to catch misclassified events
- Recurring saga topics now decay appropriately
Mar 11, 2026
Trending Story Detection
- Top stories now cross-validated against Google News, Memeorandum, Reddit, and AP/Reuters
- Stale stories naturally demoted as they lose trending confirmation
- Driver freshness tracking with age-based decay
Feb 9, 2026
Dynamic Keywords & Accuracy Tuning
- Search terms now auto-update from recent coverage instead of static lists
- Fixed temperature smoothing to preserve multi-day memory
- Improved cluster deduplication
- Production timeout fixes
Feb 8, 2026
Data Quality & Foreign Story Filtering
- Tightened international story filtering (dropped from 87% to 48% of coverage)
- Fixed breaking event severity inflation
- AI summary chaining between morning and evening updates
- Expanded to 50+ YouTube channels and 12 Substack feeds
- Added weekly data quality monitoring
Feb 7, 2026
YouTube, Social Pulse & Legislative Tracker
- Added YouTube comment tracking (55 political channels)
- New Social Pulse dashboard section with platform breakdown and toxicity gauge
- New Legislative Tracker showing partisan congressional votes
- Expanded independent media RSS feeds
Feb 6, 2026
Event Detection & Weekly Drivers
- Replaced keyword-based event detection with AI-driven cluster analysis
- Added "This Week" tab for 7-day driver aggregation
- Embeddable widgets (compact and standard sizes)
- Breaking events now appear in top drivers
- Redesigned breaking news cards
Feb 5, 2026
AI Intensity Scoring & Dashboard Polish
- AI-powered story intensity scoring
- Fixed volume signal inflation
- Temperature-based trend chart coloring
- Heat source intensity comparison
Feb 4, 2026
Multi-Source Scoring Engine
- Five sub-index scoring system (Volume, Polarization, Intensity, Rhetoric, Friction)
- Added CourtListener judicial data, LegiScan state legislation, and Google Civic election data
- Expanded source database from 564 to 1,347 outlets
Feb 3, 2026
Initial Launch
- Daily temperature dashboard with gauge, trend chart, and top story drivers
- 20+ data sources across news, social media, and legislative records
- Historical validation against 870+ political events (2015–2026)
- 83% detection accuracy via weight optimization
