5 February 2010
Commentary
Current Trends
Social Capital
Our Homogeneous Social Networks
This past week I was at a workshop held at GDI on "The Social Data Revolution" with a number of executives from industry as well as entrepreneurs from around the world. The group had been explicitly chosen to gather a unique group of people to discuss and formulate key issues around the explosion of social data from online sources as well as data traces from phones and other sensors.
While the workshop was very engaging and had some interesting discussion, for me what was one of the most fascinating things was actually a discussion I had with a few of the participants over dinner.
I brought up the point that while on the face of it this group of people at the workshop seemed to be fairly diverse, with people from Asia, the US, and various countries around Europe participating, we were actually part of a very closed network and coming at the issues of the workshop from very similar perspectives. Most of us had graduated from top universities and had strong connections to academia (particularly around social media for this group), and most of us were heavily involved in the technology sector. Of the invited speakers, about of half us knew each other, and naturally the executives from the participating companies knew the other executives in their company.
This begs the question exactly how many unique perspectives were actually being brought to the table. We can think about this as sort of a more unconstrained version of groupthink, and one sharpened by the fairly flawed assumption that respected academics and executives are smarter than everyone else.
When bringing up this point at dinner, there was wide agreement that this was an important problem, and many of us have found ways to break out of these closed off communities. For example every week I take a Brazilian Ju Jitsu class where I interact with many people who come from a completely different part of society. There are electricians, construction workers, immigrants, as well as graduate students from local universities and biotech researchers.
Then a German researcher at the table talked about how they actually had a public bus driver's license, and once a month they would actually drive a public bus around their city to get that interaction with other groups of people. This prompted a long stare from a Swiss academic at the table, who murmured "I also drive a public bus a few times a year."
This was so incredible that everyone at the table burst out laughing. We were such a homogeneous group that we even mirror the obscure ways that we try to break out of this group! It's not like in Europe it's common practice for people to have bus driver's licenses on the side. This just really drove home for me the importance of branching out from your core network in many facets of your life, since we're actually so like the people that we know that we will probably attempt to branch out in very similar ways.
Of course now I wonder if all of the bus drivers on my ride to work actually moonlight as academics...
By Ben Waber | 9:03 AM
| Comments (1)
29 January 2010
Army Research Lab Funds Network Science, Big Time.
Army Research Lab invests in network science research
(The complete list of everyone associated with any of the four centers can be found here. Many, many well-known network scientists are part of this immense project. I am flattered to be part of the group. I think amazing things will be done with this funding. What follows is an ARL press release about the project. SW)
Dec 11, 2009
By Sarah Maxwell (Army Research Laboratory)
The Army Research Laboratory will be investing up to $166 million over the next five years to bring government, industry and academic institutions together to advance the Army's network capabilities.
Focusing on the new and growing area of network science, ARL officials announced late September that they are awarding the money to a consortium of institutions to create four centers to execute research in the information, social-cognitive and communications network areas.
"This is the first project looking at the social interaction, information distribution and mobile ad-hoc network as a whole," said Dr. Jay Gowens, Computational and Information Sciences Directorate director.
Bringing these three areas together will allow researchers a much more comprehensive understanding of network science, said Gowens.
The ultimate goal is to develop a scientific foundation for modeling, designing, analyzing and predicting the behavior of very large networks of humans interacting with each other, said Gowens.
BBN Technologies will focus on network integration; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will research information; Pennsylvania State University will explore communications; and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will delve into social-cognitive network research.
Each lead organization will work with additional partners, and the overall focus is expected to substantially enhance the future warfighter's network communication capabilities, according to Gowens.
"The Army is moving rapidly and ever-deeper into a network-centric world. So much now depends on how warfighters and sensors and weapons communicate information through mobile, self-forming, rapidly-changing networks," said Dr. Alexander Kott, ARL's Network Science Division chief, who manages the alliance. "Here, we see the same three intertwined types of networks: social-cognitive (warfighters), battlefield information, and communication nets."
Network science is a burgeoning field that is still very young and requires much more research to understand how to apply it most effectively, said Kott.
"It was only a few years ago that scientists realized that networks of all kinds--biological, social, computer--are in a unique class of creatures, which live their own mysterious lives," said Kott. "They evolve, change, behave in little-known ways and all this is very important to understand and to study."
ARL received eighteen proposals and selected four of them for the award because they provided the best value to the government, said Army Research Office's Patricia Fox, chief contracting officer on the project.
The NS CTA is just a part of ARL's comprehensive network science research that incorporates both new and existing ARL research activities, blending them into a coherent program, said Gowens.
ARL's existing programs include the Mobile Network Modeling Institute and the Network and Information Science International Technology Alliance. Other programs being developed include the Network Science and Technology Research Center, the Cognitive and Neuroergonomics Collaborative Technology Alliance.
By Stan Wasserman | 2:28 PM
| Comments (1)
18 January 2010
Commentary
Technology
The Obama network in 2010
Last year I posed the question about what would come of the Obama network. Would it become a force for policy and political change, for example? This is the great undercovered political story of the last year. Techpresident-- a wonderful blog on technology and politics-- just issued an fascinating report on Organizing for America, the institutionalization of the organization/network/technology side of the Obama campaign. The story it paints is a mixed one-- successful at keeping a nontrivial number of people engaged in an ongoing fashion (although this number is surely tiny relative to the number mobilized in the 2008 election); unsuccessful at mobilizing people toward policy goals (i.e., around health care reform).
Tomorrow, the special election for Senate in Massachusetts offers an interesting test of OFA. Clearly, OFA is all in-- with their e-mails, the use of volunteer phonebanks, etc. Massachusetts must have among the highest density of Obama contributors and volunteers in the country, many battle hardened (from work in NH in 08, not MA, of course).
But the Internet tide has shifted. Republican Scott Brown is the beneficiary of vastly more Internet-based support in the special election than Democrat Martha Coakley, and the question tomorrow (and beyond) is: to what extent did the 2008 election reflect the marriage of the medium and a man with a particular moment? Does the Internet just enable the bottom up mobilization of the passions of the moment, or does it also enable the institutionalization of mobilization?
We won't get the conclusive answer tomorrow, but the tea (party?) leaf I will be reading most closely is the extent of the mobilization of Obama supporters tomorrow. Obama still has reasonably strong support in Massachusetts-- do they turn out? And the less visible story will be-- how many volunteers did OFA mobilize to make calls, to contribute to Coakley, and so on. (On this last point, at least we can look at FEC filings in a few months to see the overlap between 2008 Obama contributors and Coakley contributors January 10 to 18.)
By David Lazer | 7:40 PM
| Comments (0)
Events/Announcements
Sunbelt XXX: final call
A reminder to readers of this blog that Sunbelt, the meeting of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) will take place in early July in Trento Italy. The deadline for abstract submissions is tomorrow (January 19). This is a terrific meeting, perhaps my favorite, in a wonderful location.
(credits for photo)
By David Lazer | 6:23 PM
| Comments (0)
14 January 2010
Events/Announcements
SN in the news
The Colbert Report and James Fowler do Networks!
If you have not watched this, you should. James Fowler on the Colbert Report. It's not every day that your research is cool enough to draw the attention of the big boys on Comedy Central ..... and remember, as Our Hero says: "The interview will consist of 400 invitations to play Mafia Wars!"
By Stan Wasserman | 1:47 PM
| Comments (0)
13 January 2010
Events/Announcements
Call for papers: Political Networks 2010
People may recall the 2008 and 2009 Political Networks conferences at Harvard. This coming year PN will be taking place at Duke. As in the first two years, there are a number of fellowships available for doctoral students and new junior faculty.
2010 Political Networks Conference
Call for Papers
The Third Annual Political Networks Conference will be held May 19-21, 2010 at Duke University. The conference calls for paper proposals on all aspects of political networks. Submissions are encouraged from a wide range of disciplines including, but not limited to, political science, sociology, economics, anthropology, psychology, business, information systems, and complex systems. Methodological approaches may include, but are not limited to, statistical studies, laboratory and field experiments, ethnography, formal models, and computer simulations. Papers report on investigations of individual political behavior; interactions of individuals with traditional and online media; activist participation in interest groups, social movements, and political parties; interest group and corporate relationships with government agencies and officials; relationships within and among local, state, and federal government agencies; legislator communications and alliance formation; the political implications of international trade flows; ethnic cooperation and conflict; international alliances and conflict; and/or a wide range of other political topics.
The first day of the conference will be devoted to didactic sessions on network methodology by Matt Jackson (Economics, Stanford) and Carter Butts (Sociology, UC-Irvine). The second and third days will be organized via panels organized from submissions. The conference will also feature a keynote address by Matt Jackson and a plenary address by James Moody (Sociology, Duke University).
Registration is open. February 15 is the deadline for proposals. Decisions will be announced on or before March 15, 2010. April 1 is the deadline for early registration.
NSF-funded grants are available to support approximately 40 graduate students and recent Ph. D.s to attend the conference, including attendees from outside the United States.
A block of rooms at attractive rates at the Washington Duke Inn is available (until April 18) to conference attendees.
Details, including links to registration, application for aid, and accommodations, are available at
Please submit your ideas for papers and panels, and plan to attend the Duke Conference.
Michael T. Heaney, Program Chair, mheaney@umich.edu
Michael D. Ward, Local Host, mw160@duke.edu
By David Lazer | 3:54 PM
| Comments (0)
10 January 2010
Facebook --- The generator of lots and lots of weird and conflicting science
a piece I pulled off of the Chronicle for Higher Education .....
it's wonderful ...
Facebooking Won't Affect Your Grades, Study Finds. At Least Until Next Month's Study Tells You It Will.
By Marc Parry
It's good for you. No, it's bad for you. It's great! No, it's awful.
It seems like every week there's a new study about whether or not the sky is falling because of Facebook and other Web sites of its ilk. Now the University of New Hampshire offers new research that falls squarely in the sky-is-not-falling category, at least not when it comes to the impact of social media on students' grades.
A survey of 1,127 University of New Hampshire students pursuing various majors found no link between how much time they spend Facebooking, tweeting, and YouTubing and how well they do in college.
The breakdown: 63 percent of heavy social-media users got high grades, compared with 65 percent of light users. The findings held up for academic slouches, too. Thirty-seven percent of heavy users got lower grades, compared with 35 percent of light users.
The university's message: "Parents worried that their college students are spending too much time on Facebook and other social-networking sites and not enough time hitting the books can breathe a sigh of relief."
Or not.
In April, a researcher at Ohio State University found that students who use Facebook reported earning lower grade-point averages than nonusers of the social-networking service. Then again, the researcher said in an interview with The Chronicle that she didn't have enough data to determine whether Facebook use causes students to do poorly.
What research can prove is that when those students get married there's a good chance Facebook might help cause their divorce. At least that's the story until next month, when someone else is bound to tell us how Facebook is saving relationships.
Oh wait, someone already did.
By Stan Wasserman | 1:39 PM
| Comments (0)
27 December 2009
Avatar .... it's all about the network!
Run, don't walk, to see Avatar. Ignore the reviews. The reviewers are not network researchers.
Two morals emerge from the movie:
1. Everything is networked to everything else, live or dead, especially through way cool real neural networks.
2. Don't screw with the network. And especially don't f*ck with the Tree of Life!
By Stan Wasserman | 3:13 PM
| Comments (2)
18 December 2009
Citizen Relationship Management
Commentary
Events/Announcements
Government 20
Web 2.0
eGovernment
5th EU Ministerial Conference on eGovernment 11/28-30 Malmoe, Sweden
I recently attended the 5th EU Ministerial Conference on eGovernment which was taking place in Malmoe, Sweden (very close to the location of the climate summit in Copenhagen) as part of the Swedish EU presidency. The three-day event had participants from all of the 27 Member States and included the 50 finalists of the bin-annual European eGovernment awards. You can find many Government 2.0 type finalists among them. Tweets can be found at #egov2009.
The Malmoe declaration on eGovernment
On the first day, the Ministers met and until you were part of the official government delegation, there was no opportunity to observe the internal discussions. Apparently, they unanimously voted for the declaration on eGovernment policy for the next 5 years. The declaration can be found here. Once again, the Obama administration left its mark on an eGovernment policy. Andrea di Maio offers a critical analysis of the Malmoe declaration. While it includes the focus on flanking activities towards the Lisbon agenda's goals such as the single market or improved interoperability, it puts improved interaction with the citizens and transparency as a priority. In the final session of the conference, delegates were asked what part of the declaration they deemed a priority--the majority raised their hands for transparency and participation.
The Malmoe declaration will be followed by a so called "action plan" which will include the details of what will be/should be done on the EU and Member State level. It will be interesting to see who will be drafting it--may the "usual suspects" you see at any EU-level eGovernment event.
Malmoe Pre-conference and Un-conference
So most of the non-gov inveetes met at the un-conferece or the preconference. The latter was much smaller and included most of the eGov researchers from Europe (e.g. Maria Wimmer, Trond Knudsen), a couple from the U.S. (e.g. Sharon Dawes) and even some EU officials (e.g. Paul Timmers). The preconference was also dominated by the 2.0 issues - C(ollaboration),T(ransparency),P(articipation). As new researchers enter the field from other disciplines--especially those that are mostly looking at social media without the gov perspective--various understandings of the status quo and potential emerge. There where some great discussions and presentations which you might want to check out (see link above). We were also invited by the Mayor of Malmoe to a nice dinner at the ancient building of the mayors office. During dinner, I had an interesting discussion with Kai Rannenberg, a Professor at Goethe- University, Frankfurt am Main who is an expert on mobile commerce and IT security as well as with Gianluca Misuraca, a friend of mine currently with IPTS, the official think tank of the European Commission based in Seville, Spain. They have just published a study on the impact of social compting of public services.
EU Ministerial Conference
Without going into much detail here (check the website for more), the next/first day of the EU Ministerial Conference on eGovernment, started early with many presentations of EC Commissioners, industry representatives and researchers giving talks in the forum and smaller workshops. However, I still find it hard to believe a Commissioner talking about Twittering and Facebooking actually believes in it or practicing social media everyday. May be I am wrong. Mr. Schallbruch, the German deputy CIO of the federal government presented DE-MAIL (a solution for secure and legally compliant interaction between public administration and citizens--the federal CIO websites) and the national electronic Identity Card which will be available late 2010 for all citizens (the ID card includes RFID, electronic signatures, etc.). One of the key-notes was done by Don-Tapscott who gave his speech on "Government as a plattform" which seemed to be "new/mind-opening" to a lot of people present in the auditorium. I talked to his co-author Anthony Williams later on, asking about the solutions for making people truly participate in government on a long-term basis and how he interpreted the rather safe and passive "color your face green" support for Iran with respect to social media and the state/regulatory systems it is part of. He lacked an answer...unfortunately, I have not managed to come to a convincing answer myself. May be you have an idea, please comment.
Open Declaration on Public Services 2.0
The "open declaration on public services 2.0" was also presented(video) on stage. It was quickly picked up by other government officials in their speeches so it can be considered a success. Of course there is also a facebook group to keep the community growing. After reflecting on the effort on this blog in "the complexity of government 2.0" I had joined the so called rowing committee sometime ago to better understand eparticipation and because I believe in the issue. In retrospect, it confirmed my assumptions voiced earlier. It is difficult to participate and provide high-quality input if your time resources are limited by private and professional lives. Moreover, initiatives such as the "open declaration for public services 2.0" are a mix of self-marketing and true participation/bottom-up agenda setting effort. An online based open participation effort still allows individuals or a group of individuals to gain special attention due to its still novel character and in particular for those in power. In the future, this might only be the case if an "open" initiative is able to gain lots of supporters. The open declaration got roughly 2000 endorsements at the time of conference, which leads to an interesting question: How many endorsements does an "open" initiative need to be "democratic" on the European-level (pop. approx. 500 Mio). Should we differentiate on a case-by-case (policy issue) basis? What do you think?
By Alexander Schellong | 9:05 AM
| Comments (1)
15 December 2009
Events/Announcements
Course: Math and Science of Networks
Here is a short course that will be taught over the Intersession, perhaps of interest to some of the local readers of this blog.
Math and Science of Networks
HSPH: BIO 300
To register, go to the HSPH Winter Session course, choose BIO 300 (independent study) and select 'David Wypij' as the instructor to register, since he is the sponsor of the course.
Instructor: Samuel Arbesman (Research Fellow, Health Care Policy, HMS)
1.25 Credits
January 19-22, 2010
1:30-5:30pm in FXB G03
This course is intended as an overview of the mathematics and science of networks. In addition to providing a quantitative introduction to this rapidly growing area, we will examine applications of this field to how HIV can spread, how to best vaccinate a population, and even to understanding how obesity and smoking can be contagious. This course provides a background in the following topics: basic graph theory, small-world networks, and models of network formation; analysis of the structure of networks, from local to global structural properties; dynamics of networks, including cascading behavior on networks, epidemics, and diffusion; and social networks and social contagion.
This course is geared towards graduate students in biostatistics and epidemiology, but other graduate students with a quantitative background are welcome. While there are no formal prerequisites, some comfort with differential equations is preferred, though not essential.
Please contact Sam Arbesman at arbesman@gmail.com for more information or questions.
By David Lazer | 9:52 AM
| Comments (0)
