Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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20 December 2007

Silicon valley networks

Another article in today’s New York Times evoked social network ideas, on the role of networks in Silicon Valley. (It is a sign of the times that I have blogged about three New York Times articles this week that were somehow about networks). This is a topic, of course that has received ample scholarly attention.

Some excerpts:

Yet a look at the microclusters within Silicon Valley demonstrates the business relationships, the social connections and the seamless communication that animate the region’s economy. It also suggests the human nuance behind the Valley’s success and shows why that success is not easy to copy, export or outsource.

Last year, Mr. Vengurlekar joined Serus, a start-up that makes software for managing offshore manufacturing operations. The cricket pitch, he finds, is a good place to scout recruits or learn of job openings. “People don’t play cricket to get jobs, but it definitely happens,” he said. “Cricket definitely spills over into business.”

I would note that you never play cricket alone.

It is not surprising that identity and background play a key role in silicon valley networks. The statement The shared backgrounds, interests and schools make for frictionless communication that fosters rapid innovation., in particular caught my eye. The potential downside, one would think, is that these homogeneous clusters do not foster the innovation that is the result of different, complementary, backgrounds; of the recombination of existing ways of thinking (cf Reagans and Zuckerman 2001 on the role of diversity on teams).

Ray Reagans, Ezra W. Zuckerman, Networks, Diversity, and Productivity: The Social Capital of Corporate R&D Teams, ORGANIZATION SCIENCE, Vol. 12, No. 4, July-August 2001, pp. 502-517

Posted by David Lazer at 3:41 PM | Comments (0)

baseball networks

Interesting article in New York Times last Sunday on spread of use of performance-enhancing substances. The punchline:

Mitchell’s report contended that the use of performance-enhancing substances was spread not by stars, but by journeymen like Segui.

The report described how as Segui traveled, he put teammates in touch with Radomski, who as a former Mets clubhouse employee was viewed as an insider. Frequently, the referrals to Radomski as depicted in the report were to marginal or injured players trying to keep their jobs.

There was a neat graphic illustrating the role that Segui played in the spreading process. This is reminiscent of studies out there examining the early spread of HIV. In short, journeymen play a key bridging role in the system in disseminating information. It would be interesting to plot average degree of a player (as measured by number of teammates over the years) and probability of being named in Mitchell report, as well as the probability of being a conduit for the spread of usage more generally.

Have there been studies that have looked at player "networks" (based on who has been teammates with whom)? I guess this is formally similar to the work that Uzzi and collaborators have done on Broadway productions; one could easily produce the same kind of graphs for any sport. Not sure there are interesting questions that one could answer with data like these, but perhaps.... I wonder what role such bridges may have played, for example, in the emergence and effectiveness of unions in sports?

Posted by David Lazer at 1:26 PM | Comments (1)

19 December 2007

Datamining facebook

Apropos computational social science, there have been a couple of articles on using facebook for social science research, one on Sunday in the Washington Post, and one on Monday (front page) in the New York Times.

An excerpt from the New York Times article:

To study how personal tastes, habits and values affect the formation of social relationships (and how social relationships affect tastes, habits and values), a team of researchers from Harvard and the University of California, Los Angeles, are monitoring the Facebook profiles of an entire class of students at one college, which they declined to name because it could compromise the integrity of their research.

“We’re on the cusp of a new way of doing social science,” said Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard sociology professor who is also part of the research. “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.” [emphasis mine]

Facebook is an example par excellence of the emergent media that facilitate communication, but also leave a wonderful record for researchers to mine. The interesting question is how to design research so as to pull apart exactly the causal conundrum Kaufman mentions (the coevolution problem I have written about). How does one pull apart shared histories (which may be correlated with the network) from diffusion, for example? Observing, for example, things diffuse through facebook does not tell us, necessarily, that it is the network driving that diffusion, because there may be shared exposure to things like marketing. In any case, the facebook offers new vistas in terms of pulling these things apart.

Posted by David Lazer at 10:43 AM | Comments (1)

12 December 2007

comments on computational social science...

I have been too busy catching up on things to blog about the conference last week on computational social science (scroll down to see the program). David Allen prodded me with a thoughtful e-mail about the event, which I reproduce below. We had a substantial attendance-- filling a large auditorium-- so I invite attendees, if so inclined, to add their comments (small or large).

One presenter at the conference on Computational Social Science (Fri Dec 7) pointed back to a ‘Top 40 list,’ a progressive account of ever-mounting achievements, tallied earlier in the day. The entire thing, this half-day event, was a Super Bowl, a gathering that may not happen again so soon – we were fortunate. Here is just one proposition stimulated by the discussion:

The lesson from Tycho Brahe emphasizes the importance of data, to advance knowledge. Naturally, that highlights a computational science. However, as important as was data to the Copernican revolution, its sea change in worldview turned at least as much on overturning an entrenched ideology. If I remember my history (and I may not …), even the Inquisition threw around its perfidious muscle, trying to prevent humankind falling from the center of cosmology.

Interestingly, ‘stickiness’ in the conduct of human affairs – we might identify defenders of an ideological faith as ‘sticking’ to their guns – was prominently on display in results reported at the conference. First Laszlo Barabasi and then Sandy Pentland took time to detail how their results quickly portrayed habitual behavior (and so, perhaps surprisingly, predictability of their subjects).

It is not a far step from well-worn paths, in those two presentations, to well-worn mental paths. (Of course Thomas Kuhn was the modern expositor on this subject. Earlier, Max Planck made it succinct with, "Science advances one funeral at a time.")

Was there evidence, at the conference?

Across the course of the day, there was evidence of change in some prior views. Particularly, Mark Granovetter’s notion of ‘the strength of weak ties’ came in for inspection. Again it was Laszlo Barabasi who presented results that support strong medium ties, instead. The point may also have been touched in another presentation, but I have lost reference to it if so.

But, we also heard, in comment from the floor, the difficulties finding publications that accept these papers. That belies wider resistance to a ‘new approach.’

Almost ironically, in the concluding session on IRB, what I take to be the underlying tension proved to be crisply on display.

Marshall Van Alstyne offered an elegant construction, a solution that takes advantage of the prevailing notions from the currently accepted worldview, at least in neoclassical economic thinking. In response, Allan Friedman raised questions about their realistic applicability.

Those two will speak for their views. Here, I will suggest where lie the deeper tensions, between the currently predominant paradigm and the social network view busily being developed.

Social network analysis would vary from the neoclassical view particularly in two fateful ways, I suggest: Rather than begin from static equilibria (borrowed of course from physics, earlier), dynamics are ‘natural’ to social network analysis. More, neoclassicism takes off from the individual, or individual firm; there is no place, really, for connections among the atoms. Social network analysis comes at phenomena, of course, from exactly the opposite direction.

The implications boil up all the ideological struggles – quite beyond intellectual quarrels – that roil standard politics, in the US and elsewhere. No wonder there is resistance.

At least there was, in this event, serious effort on display, to move from data to conception and theory. New intellectual lands are colonized only with such landscaping.

David_Allen_AB63@post.harvard.edu
http://davidallen.org/pages/paprindx.html#FutVoicComment

Posted by David Lazer at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)

4 December 2007

Netcentric travel

As I waited for the bus a good chunk of yesterday morning, in the drizzly slush that is Boston's lot in winter, I was contemplating how travel should work in a networked world. In particular, let me propose the idea of "netcentric travel", where service providers push out information so as to allow consumers to assist in the co-production of good outcomes. Example: it should not have been necessary for me to stand outside for the better part of an hour waiting for a wildly out of sync MBTA bus. Instead, one could imagine placing GPS devices on each of the buses, which could be tracked real-time on the Internet. Given such a system I could have seen when the bus was going to arrive and gone out shortly before (or seen that it was not going to come in time and driven in).

Such a system would be fairly cheap to implement, and, I would note, could be plausibly be built through a public-private partnership. You could imagine a private company funding the installation of GPS devices, but gaining revenue through web-based advertising revenue.

The data produced through such a system could also prove a valuable operations management tool for mass transit.

Another example: I have had a series of bad experiences with air travel over the last year (I know: join the club). One particular example was a USAirways flight I was on the day after they merged their database with America West. Needless to say, this merging of databases went rather poorly, putting out of commission all of their check-in kiosks. When I arrived at the airport, there was a 2+ hour line, resulting in many missed flights. One could have imagined, as soon as this problem arose, their communicating to customers (via e-mail and phone) that they should (1) arrive at the airport especially early, and (2) print out their boarding passes at home if at all possible. This would have potentially greatly reduced the impact of this disruption on customers.

In any case, the key insight here is to recognize that in travel (as in many domains) consumers co-produce systemic outcomes, and will adapt in ways that are good for the system given the right informational tools. Such a system exists to some extent-- e.g., one can see if flights are delayed online; some highways have a radio station that transmits information about traffic; you can go to traffic.com to find out real time where there is traffic congestion. But I think that these bottom-up possibilities are underexploited by some of the more top-down parts of our travel infrastructure.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:28 AM | Comments (4)