Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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26 April 2006

Who votes for whom? - Voting patterns in the US senate

I would like to draw your attention to an entry by Andrew Bond posted a few weeks ago in his blog "Analytical Visions".

Andy recently published a follow up on US senate voting patterns. One of the Program on Networked Governance research projects called "Connecting to Congress" is collecting a lot of data on how the Internet might transform Congress ways of connecting citizens to elected officials so we are always interested in that type of research. We will also use SNA with some parts of the data during the course of the project. Related to Andy's post is a paper by Wang/Mohanty/McCallum that draws on voting records from the US Senate and UN. Their SNA simultaneously discovers groups of entities and also clusters attributes of their relations, such that clustering in each dimension informs the other. In short, legislators many times cluster around a topic regardless of their party membership.

Finally, if you have ever wondered who supported who's bill in congress you should check out the embedded link.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 12:02 PM | Comments (1)

25 April 2006

Sampling Strategy Online Forum

Hey there,

I am currently pre-testing an online survey, which I would like to launch in a couple of weeks.

However, the issue I am still struggling with is the sampling strategy. Let me briefly give you some background.

± My research objective is to identify information and advice networks in the online community. Besides a set of demographic/control questions, I ask the respondents to identify their three most important online community contacts (e.g., who comes to you to ask for information/advice AND whom do you turn to to ask for information/advice)

± The community has more than 80,000 registered users. However, the percentage of the really active members is assumed to be far below the latter figure (no clear figures exist). Furthermore, users of the community reported multiple identities of single users (several cases are known, where one user utilizes several aliases)

± There is – currently – not technically feasible/easy way of extracting a list of the most active network members, which might define the sample size for the survey (besides going on the website and manually scan through the forums etc).

± I originally planned to announce the survey and post the link to the survey on the homepage of the forum instead of sending the survey link to each member individually.

The question(s) I thus have is/are:

± How have other researchers solved the sampling issue in a similar type of situation?

± Have other studies tried to identify information and advice network with an ego-sampling strategy, where the exact sample size wasn’t known ex-ante? If yes, did they succeed or fail?

± What are the most relevant/important papers to look at with respect to sampling strategy/research methods of online surveys in online communities?

What do you think? Do you have any ideas?

Posted by Thomas Langenberg at 12:32 AM | Comments (3)

21 April 2006

John Casti "Why the Future Happens: Socionomics and the Science of Surprise"

Here is the abstract of John Casti's talk, from today "Why the Future Happens: Socionomics and the Science of Surprise"

Please feel free to comment.

This talk presents the implications of recent work on wave-like patterns in social phenomena for characterizing and predicting the flow of human events and actions, such as the outcome of political elections, trends in films and fashion, the outbreak of war, and the rise and fall of civilizations. The talk will show that all such collective human social events are generated by the changing social mood in a population, and that the changes in this mood follow patterns that are predictable. This fact has led to the emerging field of socionomics, which is nothing less than a "science of surprise". The story of the development of socionomics and its mode of forecasting social trends will be presented through numerous examples and stories, as well as illustrations of how socionomics provides a systematic, coherent tool for predicting changing trends in the overall social mood. The talk shows that these trends exist on all time-scales---minutes to decades---and can be measured by the gyrations of financial market indexes, such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Thus, the talk illustrates how to actually predict "surprises", the turning points in social trends. So in a very real sense socionomics provides what amounts to a telescope for seeing the shape of the future. The "take-home" message from this talk is twofold: The future is predictable in exactly the same probabilistic way that the weather is predictable, and that thoughts cause action and events---not vice-versa! Individual human thoughts are gathered together through the herding instinct hard-wired into every mammalian brain.These individual moods are like "bets" people place about the future. The bets then self-organize into an overall collective social mood, which after an appropriate period of time depending on the nature of the event, gives rise to things like wars, election results and styles in popular culture. This line of argument is exactly the opposite of that usually put forth by academic thinkers, Op-Ed writers, intellectual commentators, and other assorted pundits in their attempts to "explain" the flow of human events. The conventional explanations mostly go from "actions -- moods -- thoughts" instead proceeding in the "socionomic direction", which puts things exactly the other way around.

Posted by David Lazer at 12:43 AM | Comments (2)

18 April 2006

Yochai Benkler on "The Wealth of Networks" at Havard Law School

This just arrived from the folks over at the Berkman Center. Given the topic (networks and governance), I thought Professor Benkler's talk might be of interest to some of the local readers of this blog. Here is the announcement:

Prof. Benkler’s research at Yale Law School focuses on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange on the distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. His particular focus has been the neglected role of commons-based approaches toward management of resources in the digitally networked environment, the increasing importance of nonmarket production in general and collaborative peer production in particular, and the significance of these phenomena in both economic and political terms. “The Wealth of Networks�? is a comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy. In it, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing—and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves.

Prof. Benkler will give a short talk about his new book on Tuesday, April 18 at 5:45 pm in Hauser Hall 102, Harvard Law School. Afterwards, please join us for a celebration at the Berkman Center. For directions and maps, please see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/contact.

Posted by at 11:25 AM | Comments (0)

17 April 2006

Governing Information Flows: States, Private Actors & the Regulation of E-Commerce

by Henry Farrell

International relations scholars have difficulty in understanding the circumstances under which states wish to, and are able to, work through private actors in order to achieve policy goals, rather than using more traditional instruments (self-help; multilateral institutions). This means that they have considerable difficulty in understanding how states regulate outcomes in e-commerce. Professor Farrell draws on insights from both international relations theory and legal scholarship to set out an account of when states will seek to use non-state actors as proxies and when not, as well as a theory of the circumstances under which they will be successful in so doing. He conducts a "plausibility probe" by applying this theory to three important issue areas - taxation of e-commerce, privacy regulation and regulation of Internet gambling.

Listen: Podcast (WMA) - States, Private Actors & the Regulation of E-Commerce

Read: PDF - "Governing Information Flows..."

Henry Farrell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Center for International Science and Technology Policy of the Elliott School of George Washington University. He is a co-founder of the popular academic weblog, which has over 10,000 readers daily.

Part of the “Governance of Information” seminar series, this lecture is con-sponsored by the Program on Networked Governance and is open to everybody. The "Governance of Information" seminar series, chaired by Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, looks – in a broad sense – at how information and its flow is governed, what institutions and actors maintain control, and what processes and mechanisms are employed to govern.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 5:07 PM | Comments (0)

10 April 2006

Clusters and Bridges in Networks of Entrepreneurs

Post comments on "Clusters and Bridges in Networks of Entrepreneurs" in response to this posting. For reference please see his presentation and paper.

The abstract and seminar are based on a draft chapter for the forthcoming book, The Missing Links: Formation and Decay of Economic Networks.

In our model workers leave their former employers to become entrepreneurs, and found new firms by partnering with former colleagues or with workers who left a different employer. The first types of partnerships create clusters and the second types create bridges. Formation of bridge partnerships requires greater effort, and in equilibrium bridge partnerships yield greater profits on average than cluster partnerships. This pattern of network formation is shown to create community border effects in trade. It is also shown that less than the socially optimal amount of effort is devoted to formation of bridge partnerships. Policies to improve this situation are analyzed, including enforcement of restrictive employment contracts that affect the incentive to form cluster partnerships. Extensions of the model to two rounds of partnership formation and to two rounds of production generate additional effects of intra- and inter-firm networks on profits of individual entrepreneurs and on inter-community trade.

James Rauch is a professor economics at the University of California, San Diego. His areas of research include International Trade, Economic Growth and Development, Urban Economics and Labor. His most recent book is Leading Issues in Economic Development, 8th edition (with Gerald M. Meier), New York:Oxford University Press, 2005. He received his BA from Princeton University May and his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:13 PM | Comments (0)