Last week the House of Representatives passed the DREAM Act — a bill that would give undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as children a path to citizenship through college or military service. The Senate, which was scheduled to hold a parallel vote, tabled the bill instead.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Yesterday’s motion to table in the Senate came for two reasons — first, because the House had made changes to the bill, and second because supporters decided they needed more time to round up votes. The DREAM Act isn’t dead — a new version, matching the one the House passed, can still be introduced before the end of the year.

• The 59-40 tally in that vote to table is pretty much meaningless. The rumors going around that the DREAM Act now has 59 votes in the Senate are false. See my post from yesterday for all the details.

• Yesterday’s announcement that Senator Scott Brown (R-MA) would be voting against the DREAM Act is pretty much meaningless, too. He’s been a known “no” vote for months.

• Chances of passage are still slim — one big DREAM organizer put them at ten percent yesterday — but they may be rising. Check out this fascinating piece in The Hill for the blow-by-blow on how Harry Reid kept the DREAM alive.

• The White House has announced that it wants a vote on the START arms control treaty to be the Senate’s next order of business. The DREAM Act and repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell are likely to come after that.

• Nobody knows for sure when a new Senate vote will be held. All the smart money is saying it won’t be this week, though.

• I’m covering this story on an ongoing basis. Follow @studentactivism on Twitter to find out what I know as soon as I know it.

Over the weekend I’ve heard rumors from both sides of the DREAM Act debate that the bill — which would provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children — is currently just one vote shy of the sixty it needs for passage in the Senate.

I’m skeptical.

The DREAM Act has garnered lots of Republican support in the past, but most of those allies have reversed themselves in recent months, as the political winds in the country — and in the GOP specifically — have shifted. With the rise of the Tea Party, many Republicans now see a vote for the bill as a potential liability in future races.

It’s not impossible that the bill could get to sixty votes during the current lame duck session, but it seems highly unlikely. And there have been no public declarations of support for the DREAM Act in recent days that would lend credence to the “59 votes” story.

So where did the rumor come from? I’m guessing it was the vote last week on tabling the DREAM Act, a vote that pulled the bill from the Senate floor allowing it to be brought back in revised form this week. That vote passed by a 59-40 margin, with supporters of the law mostly voting yes, and opponents mostly voting no.

Pay close attention to that “mostly,” though. The vote on the motion proceeded largely along partisan lines, with only four Democrats voting against and five Republicans voting in favor. And crucially, those defections don’t track with what we know about how the DREAM Act vote itself is likely to shake out — the two declared Republican DREAM Act supporters voted with their party against the motion, for instance.

I don’t know why the vote came out exactly the way it did, but it’s clear that it’s not a proxy for the DREAM Act vote itself.

Sorry.

Update | DREAM Activist Prerna Lal replies to this post on Twitter: “It’s prob not going to be close. It’s either 60 (like 10%) or teetering at 55.”

She’s right, and here’s why. There are more than sixty senators who support the DREAM Act in their heart of hearts. If this vote were held by secret ballot, it’d pass pretty easily. But a significant number of senators — most of them Republicans — are worried that they’ll suffer political consequences if they vote yes.

If you go to one of those senators — let’s call her Shmusan Shmollins, just to pick a name out of a hat — and ask her to be the 57th vote for the DREAM Act, she’ll turn you down. Because if she’s number 57, and there’s no number 58, the bill still fails. She takes a hit, and the bill still fails.

If you ask her to be the 60th vote, on the other hand, she’s got a tougher predicament. Voting yes hurts her, but voting no hurts the DREAMers. If you can get to 59, getting to 60 is easy. And by the same token, if you can’t get to 60, numbers 57, 58, and 59 are likely to flip back to the “no” column.

Students at the University of Puerto Rico are gearing up for a new strike in protest against an $800 tuition hike, as university officials announced that a police deployment on campus, begun last week, could continue indefinitely.

Hundreds of demonstrators marched [Original|Google Translation] in San Juan against the tuition increase and the police occupation of the university yesterday, while student leaders released a new statement on the crisis in Puerto Rican higher education.

A sampling of responses to last weeks massive British student protests, focusing on questions of violence, resistance, tactics, and ethics…

Riots, Fire, Anger at Tuition Fees Protest — And a Defining Political Moment

For years, the young have been dismissed as apathetic. What has happened to make tens of thousands of them pour on to the streets in the bitter cold – not once, but again and again; not just in London, but in Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds? What has sparked the re-emergence of student occupations in lecture theatres across the country? What is it about the coalition government and its policies that has ignited so much anger?

Inside the Parliament Square Kettle

What I saw a month ago at Millbank was a generation of very young, very angry, very disenfranchised people realising that not doing as you’re told, contrary to everything we’ve been informed, is actually a very effective way of making your voice heard when the parliamentary process has let you down.What I saw two weeks ago in the Whitehall kettle was those same young people learning that if you choose to step out of line you will be mercilessly held back and down by officers of the law who are quite prepared to batter kids into a bloody mess if they deem it necessary. What I saw today was something different, something bigger: no less than the democratic apparatus of the state breaking down entirely.

Student Protesters Using Live Tech to Outwit Police In London

What I find interesting with this, with wikileaks, and going right back to older underground video news outlets like undercurrents, is that it does feel a bit as if the tools traditionally only available to the state for things like surveillance, evidence gathering, coordination and dissemination are being democratised.

A New Strategy is Needed for a Brutal New Era

Attempts to portray the protests as “riots” provoked by a frenzied few are a clichéd evasion of the real issues at stake here. Anyone who has participated in these demonstrations knows that each one has been a massive and powerful expression of revulsion for the government’s plans, an uncompromising rejection of the cuts and the neoliberal priorities they represent. It takes some nerve for a government that is destroying our education system (while waging war in Afghanistan, investing in new nuclear weapons and using “anti-terror” laws to persecute large swathes of its own population) to treat the tens of thousands of students and lecturers defending it as if they were guilty of collusion in violence.

The Face of Our Cause Isn’t My Brother Charlie Gilmour, But Alfie Meadows

Most students I have met are not overly enthusiastic about preaching vandalism, though they recognise it was Millbank that escalated this movement. However morally confusing that first day of action was, it found a new way of forcing the government to seriously weigh in potential student activism as a cost of it’s policies. Many feel the peaceful Iraq war demonstration achieved so little in such numbers because of its passive obedience.

On Violence Against the Police

If the direct action we defend has any content at all, it must mean we supported, and support, concrete attempts to stop the law being passed, up to, including, and beyond the invasion of parliament – and we are in support of people trying as hard as possible to do that.   And it is a fiction that the police could have tolerated that, or that preventing it could ever have been done gently.  If it could have been, we wouldn’t have really been trying.  If the police hadn’t been at parliament square last night, and if they hadn’t been prepared to act brutally, parliament would have been stormed, and legislation to triple top-up fees and abolish EMA would not have been passed. The brutality of the police is not incidental to the nature of the state, it is essential to it.

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Over the last few weeks, pointed questions have been raised about the failure of the word “Wikileaks” to appear in Twitter’s trending topics at a time when discussion of the Wikileaks revelations and associated controversies have dominated political discourse around the world. (I wrote three essays on the subject, the first largely dismissive of claims of shenanigans, the second and third much less so.)

On Wednesday Twitter finally released an official statement on the controversy.

In that statement, they answer the question of whether they’ve blocked Wikileaks from the lists with an “absolutely not,” then go on to provide an overview of what trending is and how it works.

What they have to say will be familiar to those who followed my back-and-forth with company representative Josh Elman on my blog last week, but here are the bullet points:

• “Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously.”
• “Put another way, Twitter favors novelty over popularity.”
• “Sometimes a topic doesn’t break into the Trends list because its popularity isn’t as widespread as people believe.”
• “And, sometimes, popular terms don’t make the Trends list because the velocity of conversation isn’t increasing quickly enough, relative to the baseline level of conversation happening on an average day.”

This is all reasonable and plausible, as far as it goes. It’s the simplest explanation, for instance, for why “Lenon” trended on the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder, but “Lennon” didn’t. (More on that in a moment.)

What it doesn’t explain, though — what it doesn’t even begin to try to explain — is the data point that’s single-handedly responsible for more than ten percent of this blog’s total views ever: the weird way that the word “Sundays” trended last weekend.

“Sundays” wasn’t a novel term. Compared to “Wikileaks” it wasn’t a high-traffic term. There’s no indication that it had a particularly high velocity of adoption. And its baseline on an average day was actually quite high. At first glance, it doesn’t appear to fit any of the criteria Twitter lays out.

But there’s a hint there — the word “widespread.” I paraphrased it as “high-traffic” above, but let’s look at something Josh Elman said to me in our exchange the other day:

“Trends isn’t just about volume of a term but also the diversity of people and tweets.”

“Diversity” is a term Josh used several times in that exchange, and it provides a big clue to the “Sundays” trend. Commenter MrTiggr has hypothesized that Twitter conceptualizes its users as existing within “clusters” — groups of people connected by common connections on the service. The popularity of a term across clusters, he suggests, is likely to be much more significant to Twitter’s algorithms than its raw volume.

Both “diversity of people” and “diversity of tweets” metrics serve as ways of keeping people from manipulating the trending topics list. It’s harder to get strangers to tweet on a topic than people you know, and it’s harder to get people to tweet new content than to retweet something. So these rules make sense from that perspective.

But each of them also serves to boost certain kinds of trends at the expense of others.

Let’s look at “Sundays” again. It trended — according to this argument — because lots of people with no connection to each other tweeted lots of different things about it. But if you think about it, that’s just because “Sundays” isn’t a topic at all. A person who tweets “I love lazy Sundays” and one who tweets “are you coming to Sundays [sic] meeting” and one who tweets that a particular store “will be open Sundays in December” aren’t tweeting about a shared experience, or a shared interest, or a shared joke. They’re just using a common word.

And when you combine this bias in favor of diversity of people and tweets with the algorithm’s bias in favor of novelty, you get the Lenon/Lennon anomaly I mentioned above: Because a fair number of people talk about John Lennon on Twitter on any ordinary day, a bump in traffic for that name won’t register much. But since the “Lenon” misspelling is uncommon, when “Lennon” traffic rises — bringing “Lenon” traffic with it — “Lenon” will register as a novel topic and attract the attention of the Trending Topics gremlins.

Two other factors combined to make “Lenon” trendable, I’m guessing. First, there’s the fact that people who are less interested in John Lennon (and so less likely to tweet about him on an ordinary day) are less likely to know much about him (and so more likely to misspell his name when they tweet about him on a special day). Second, there’s the fact that the “Lenon” misspelling is one that Spanish-speakers are more likely to stumble into, which means that a higher proportion of “Lenon” than “Lennon” tweets are going to come from outside the anglophone Twittersphere.

So Lenon trended and Lennon didn’t, for reasons that are perfectly understandable. But it’s important to stop at this point and note that even though the reasons are understandable, they still make absolutely no sense.

When “Lenon” trended — and “Lennon” didn’t — the weakness of Twitter’s trending algorithm was revealed. Millions upon millions of people were tweeting Lennon’s name that day, and the vast majority of them were spelling it right, but because some tens of thousands of them had been interested in John Lennon the day before and the day before that — because John Lennon is a subject that people are actually interested in and care about — his name didn’t trend. Because “Lenon” is a meaningless term that nobody was using intentionally, it did.

The more I think about all this, and the more data I look at, the more convinced I become that Twitter has a weird valley in the middle of its algorithm. If a term is completely novel, it’s got a good shot at trending. If it rises in popularity really quickly, it’s got a good shot at trending. But if it’s a little less novel and rises a little more slowly, then it won’t trend, even if the volume and diversity of the traffic is pretty high. The only way to get over that barrier — as with “Sundays” — is with a trend that isn’t really a trend at all.

And Wikileaks?

Well, I don’t know. That traffic really was insanely high. Just absurdly high. And as I’ve noted before, the term “oil spill” trended for weeks on end earlier this year under quite similar circumstances. It’s very very strange. But if I had to bet, I’d bet that the failure of Wikileaks to trend is not a result of a specific targeting of that particular term. Probably.

Having said that, though, I want to say something else.

This isn’t just a matter of “well, it’s the algorithm.” And it isn’t a matter of the people who run Twitter being idiots, either. When I said above that the algorithm makes no sense, I meant that it makes no sense from the perspective of the interests of the Twitter user, not that it makes no sense from the perspective of Twitter itself.

I think it’s safe to say that Twitter pretty much likes the algorithm the way it is. They’re tweaking it all the time, of course, and they’d be silly not to, but right now it’s presumably producing about the results they’d like it to produce. And what are those results? Lots of memes, for starters — lots of hashtags like #slapyourself and #haveuever and #ifsantawasblack. Also lots of quirky little flash-in-the-pan media stories. And celebrity deaths. Celebrity deaths are a perfect fit for the current algorithm.

What do these trends have in common, other than that they’re not “trends” as the word is most often used? Well, they’re light. They’re casual. They’re here and they’re gone.

It’s safe to say, I think, that Twitter didn’t want Wikileaks to trend. There are many different sensible ways to approach the construction of a trending topics algorithm, and the vast majority of them would have pushed “Wikileaks” to the top of the charts. That didn’t happen, and it didn’t happen on purpose.

But I don’t think, at the end of the day, that it’s all that likely that Wikileaks was targeted specifically. I think it’s just more likely that Twitter isn’t interested in having any topic like Wikileaks — an ongoing discussion of a major social or political issue, going through peaks and lulls and times of broader and narrower resonance — make the list.

Twitter’s trending topics aren’t intended to measure what people are interested in. They aren’t intended to measure what people are passionate about. They aren’t intended to measure what people are committed to. They aren’t even intended to measure what people are fascinated by.

They’re intended to measure “Ooh! Shiny!”

Update | There’s a lot I left out of this essay, as it was unwieldy enough as it stood, but this is worth mentioning, I think — sponsored trending topics are a revenue stream for Twitter, which means the company has a financial interest in drawing eyeballs to the trending topics list. It’s also worth mentioning that Twitter introduced sponsored trending topics in June of this year.