Complexity and Social Networks Blog

Posted by David Lazer at 2:42 PM | Comments (1)

29 January 2008

How networks are used to fight the overt drug market in High Point, NC

I recently attended a conference of innovations in government co-sponsored by the Ash Institute in The Hague where the following U.S. case was presented. The case was not discussed from a social networks perspective but should be interesting to those with an interest in the matter as well as the law enforcement community.

Overt drug-markets are an issue for many communities. The police usually responds by conducting crackdowns and drug sweeps. Many times drug trafficking in those neighborhoods continued. In addition, the police struggled maintaining a positive relationship with the lawful residents living in those areas. The following paragraphs will describe the actions taken in the city of High Point, NC.
 
Determined to make a difference, the executive staff of the High Point PD met with Prof. Kennedy (formerly Harvard U), to discuss alternative strategies. Kennedy proposed the concept of law enforcement and partnership, which would comprehensively dissuade street level drug dealers from open-air markets. Community networks are a core success factor. Though the strategy acts on multiple levels as a deterrent for those impacting the community, leaving offenders with little choice but to modify their behavior.

The Overt Drug Market Strategy has eleven key elements:

1) mapping, to determine where the most serious offenses are concentrated (which follows the idea of CompStat)
2) mobilizing commitment of community through public meetings to identify and inform community stakeholders (thereby lowering the transaction costs of acquiring information)
3) surveying by police and probation officers to identify those involved in street drug dealing; 
4) formal identification of offenders and their areas of activity; 
5) incident review; 
6) undercover investigation of each location and offender; 
7) contact with the offender’s family to invite them to join law enforcement in asking offenders to quit; 
8) the call‐in, face to face call between offenders, law enforcement and the community 9) a deadline is issued for three days after the call in for offenders to quit dealing; 
10) enforcement; and 
11) follow‐up visits about a month after the call‐in to ensure that former offenders are being given the help to get out of their situation.
  
The strategy identifies or selects neighborhoods for implementation based on an intense analysis of crime data, followed by interviewing patrol officers, street narcotics officers and community members for their list of "persons of interest". This take at least three months. To date, 40 offenders have been called-in or notified for the Overt Drug Market Strategy in three neighborhoods.

The biggest obstacle for the strategy is the lack of employment opportunities for notified offenders. Jobs are scarce across the board, and most street level drug offenders have only minimal qualifications. Working in collaboration with local service providers, agencies are trying to offer personalized support for the former offenders. Furthermore, this strategy only targets the supply side, not the consumption side.
 
The single most important achievment of the strategy has been the collapse of the drug markets in the neighborhoods. Rush hour traffic jams caused by people buying drugs on their way home have disappeared.

The 1998 institution of the violent offender notification process, on which the Overt Drug Market Strategy is based, resulted in consistent reductions in High Point's violent crime rate as it decreased 47% from 1302 in 1997 to 681 in 2005. In the two years following the call-in in the West End neighborhood, the pilot project, crime of all kinds remained more than 25% lower than before the strategy implementation. Citywide, violent crime decreased 20% in that same two years.

This case certainly supports Kasadra's and Janowitz's (1974) notion that ones attachment to a community produces a willingness to its maintenance through individual or collective action. Though, in this case, a public body like law enforcement agencies seem to play an important part in activating (or may be reactivating) the sense of moral responsibility and connectedness of people in those neighborhoods.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 6:00 PM | Comments (0)

23 January 2008

Sunbelt 2008: Day 1

Right now I’m at Sunbelt 2008 in Florida, and there have been some very interesting talks on the first day.

Johannes Putzke (pictured above) presented very interesting work on MMO game social networks. His collaborator, Marius Cramer, built an German MMORPG that developed a large following that enabled them to collect detailed interaction and performance data on players. By examining a random selection of 55 players over a period of 3 months, they found that demographic factors significantly impacted network formation, with women being more desirable partners than men and older individuals accumulating more ties. However, the structure of the network actually had no discernable impact on player performance.

In fact, I saw this trend echoed throughout a few presentations today. These studies were often replications of previous work, yet the results they found were much weaker than others that have been reported. It did appear, however, that when this information was combined with demographic or other job-related data that predictive power increased dramatically. This is in line with some newer results that are emerging in the field as more diverse environments are being studied, namely that you cannot just look at social network structure. You need to dig deeper into the data at the node level to obtain a greater understanding of the individuals embedded in these networks. In fact, the data at this level may be even richer than that at the network level, as well as more easily interpretable.

Posted by Ben Waber at 4:51 PM | Comments (0)

19 January 2008

Information, networks, and markets

It is notable, if not surprising, that the best place, in all of the Internet, to go for a sense of the direction that an election is going is intrade.com. Intrade is a futures market, where you can buy and sell contracts that pay off depending on the outcome of some event in the future. So, what has happened in the primaries is that that the futures market shows substantial shifts through the day of the event. Today is typical, where hours before poll closings, the market for the Republican race South Carolina swung hard toward McCain (who apparently is going to win).

What is interesting is that, as far as I can see, these markets swing before any other information is available on the Internet. That is, the market is being driven by those who presumably have a close connection to inside information—i.e. exit polls. This is not to say that employees of CNN are taking time off during the day to put money into intrade contracts, but that there is an informal leakage of information from those in the know, where that leakage then drives the market. That information can be misleading, of course (cf. Kerry, 2004); but the market allows for that possibility (e.g., even now Huckabee is trading at 2%).

This is an interesting natural experiment of sorts, because there those exit polls are likely by far the most reliable sources of information available regarding election outcomes (especially for primaries) before actual results come in. There are other bits of information that may be independently valuable, like any data on differential turnout across regions, etc, but generally the exit poll data are going to dominate everything else. It would therefore be interesting to calibrate the actual data that exit poll entities have gathered at what points in time (minute by minute) to see how quickly intrade responds. This should provide some sense of the speed of informational leakage from the exit polls. (And if you know of anyone has already done this, please post a comment.)

Btw, this graph shows the shift in the value of the McCain winning SC contract:

Note that the time marked is GMT, so the major shift occurred at around 6pm EST (exit polls were not released publicly until after 8pm).

Posted by David Lazer at 9:12 PM | Comments (1)

17 January 2008

Social Network Feedback in Real Time

The Media Lab had an event for our corporate sponsors in Tokyo, and we thought it would be a good opportunity for us to demonstrate how sensing technologies afford real time feedback on behavior, specifically one’s social network. 70 participants (60 from the sponsor companies, 10 from the Media Lab) wore the Sociometric badges during the event, which lasted all day on January 17. One third of the participants from each company wore the badges, although when only one person from a company came they got a badge.

The badges recorded which badges were recognized over IR (corresponding to a face-to-face interaction) and then transmitted this information over a 2.4 GHz radio through intermediate basestations to a badge attached to a computer through USB. That badge then sent the information over USB to a database, which was read out by a social network visualization program (a modification of the GUESS system developed by Eytan Adar). This visualization program pulled interaction data from the database and then added edges to the social network diagram if a new interaction was detected, while at the same time modifying the layout using popular layout algorithms. The visualization itself was projected onto a large screen in the break/lunch room.

Naturally, all of this was done in real time, with a very small delay from an interaction being detected to it being rendered on the screen. It was really fantastic to see the data rendered that quickly, and crowds of people were gathering around the screen (and in some unfortunate cases blocking the projector) to see where they were on the visualization and how many people they had met. I had many people come to me throughout the day exclaiming how the visualization “Inspired [them] to network more and gave [them] a great appreciation for the value of an event like this.” Unique numbers, not names, were displayed on the visualization, so only the participant could identify themselves. Still, I noticed people pointing each other’s nodes out to colleagues and almost “keeping score.” Participants would check the visualization, go around and meet with some other people, and then check again, comparing themselves with colleagues. It was all great fun.

Initially I had assumed that each company would form its own small cluster, with perhaps a few links interspersed between the groups. You can see a screenshot of the SN diagram before lunch, after lunch, and after the last break (except for these breaks, all of the time was spent listening to lectures from Media Lab students and faculty). I’ll add pictures of the actual projected display and the set up as soon as I get them.

EDIT: Here's a picture of the visualization at the event:

Above: Visualization being discussed by myself and Schlumberger managers

Above: SN Diagram before lunch

Above: SN Diagram after lunch

Above: SN Diagram after the last break

From almost the very beginning there was one giant component with a strong core-periphery structure, although the density of the component increased over the course of the event. It appears that there were two factors that led to this structure:

1. Media Lab participants, who all spoke to each other and spoke with many sponsor companies

2. Research affiliates: members of sponsor companies who had also worked at the Media Lab as visiting researchers. These participants knew other research affiliates who had been at the Media Lab from different companies at the same time as well as the Media Lab participants.

The research affiliates also ended up introducing participants to one another, and I believe demonstrated extremely the kind of social capital that is generated through such an exchange program. In fact, Prof. Hiroshi Ishii, who organized the event, felt that this visualization could be presented to potential and current sponsors as an additional way to show the value of Media Lab sponsorship.

We are also going to analyze the data collected with the Sociometric badges to see if we can predict company affiliation, recognize research affiliates, and so on. We will also incorporate additional information into the visualization. I believe that this visualization was a success because of its simplicity, but if we add information such as accelerometer, speech, and proximity data, then participants may gain an even better understanding of what’s happening in their environment, as well as how they can interact with it.

Posted by Ben Waber at 10:29 PM | Comments (7)

14 January 2008

Huck's network

Interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times that highlights the interplay of old and new ways of organizing, vis a vis the grassroots efforts for Governor Huckabee. A few notable points to highlight: (1) how the Internet facilitates bottom-up collective action in a way that would have been much more difficult a decade ago; (2) the emergent collective action builds on pre-existing evangelical networks; and (3) how the technology, in particular, potentially disintermediates the old guard leadership. That is, the old modality of collective action would have been more top down, reflecting the privileged informational position of the old guard, who had built up mailing lists and the like that enabled them to mobilize their constituencies. With the Internet, their constituencies can now find each other.

Excerpts from:
Huckabee Splits Young Evangelicals and Old Guard

WASHINGTON — Much of the national leadership of the Christian conservative movement has turned a cold shoulder to the Republican presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee, wary of his populist approach to economic issues and his criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy. But that has only fired up Brett and Alex Harris.

The Harris brothers, 19-year-old evangelical authors and speakers who grew up steeped in the conservative Christian movement, are the creators of Huck’s Army, an online network that has connected 12,000 Huckabee campaign volunteers…
…
In Michigan, the Huckabee campaign had spent no money, hired no staff and had no office until last Wednesday, six days before the primary. But Gary Glenn, a conservative Christian advocate based in Midland, Mich., has been leading an informal effort to turn out evangelical voters. Some pollsters expect them to make up as much as 40 percent of the state’s primary voters this year.

Last week, Mr. Glenn lined up 50 local pastors to attend a closed-door breakfast with Mr. Huckabee in Grand Rapids. And he has compiled an e-mail list of more than 600 volunteers — many in Internet groups that Huck’s Army is connecting — who have been using church directories to make phone calls, courting local pastors and leafleting church parking lots .
“Recruit volunteers to stand this Sunday on public sidewalks across the street from the parking lots of the biggest evangelical churches you can find,” Mr. Glenn urged in a recent e-mail message.
….
[In South Carolina]… more than 500 people, many of them young evangelicals, have signed up for online Huckabee meet-up groups, said Christian Hine, 30, the state coordinator of the Huck’s Army effort. Unaided by the campaign, volunteers have borrowed church directories and bought their own phone lists to try to identify likely Huckabee voters, Mr. Hine said, and even paid to print their own Huckabee signs when the campaign ran out.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:18 AM | Comments (1)

10 January 2008

Cary Coglianese: Weak Democracy, Strong Information: The Role of Information Technology in the Rulemaking Process

Below is a guest entry from one of the contributors to Governance and Information Technology: From Electronic Government to Information Government, Cary Coglianese, based on his chapter.

Weak Democracy, Strong Information:
The Role of Information Technology in the Rulemaking Process

Cary Coglianese

Policymakers and scholars predict that information technology will foster a "strong democracy" in the process of creating new government regulations, transforming -- indeed, some say "revolutionizing" -- the rulemaking process. Currently, the way government agencies like OSHA, EPA, and the FDA make new regulations remains relatively obscure, but several so-called e-rulemaking projects in the United States -- such as the creation of Regulations.Gov -- specifically aim to tap into the purported transformational potential of the Internet and increase the role citizens play in the regulatory process. For example, according to Peter Shane, one of the nation's leading scholars of law and information, the federal government’s current e-rulemaking initiative “seems to hold out the potential to enlarge significantly a genuine public sphere in which individual citizens participate directly to help make government decisions that are binding on the entire polity.”

Is this faith in the transformative power of information technology justified? Those who believe it is point to cases in which a large number of citizens have used the Internet to submit comments on proposed regulations. For example, hundreds of thousands of comments from the public came in on a U.S. Department of Agriculture rulemaking on organic foods, a Federal Communications Commission decision on the concentration of ownership of media outlets, and a U.S. Forest Service proceeding to ban roads in wilderness areas.

Yet despite the large absolute number of comments filed in a few highly controversial rulemakings, it is far from clear that information technology will, as a general matter, transform rulemaking into anything close to the ideals of strong democracy. For one thing, those rulemakings that generate comments in the hundreds of thousands still constitute only a minute fraction (even a fraction of a fraction) of the several thousands of new federal rules issued each year. By far, most rulemakings continue to elicit little attention from the public. Furthermore, for the exceedingly rare rule that may generate a half million or more comments, even this level of participation still represents only less than 5 percent of the total voting-age population in the United States. We know that participation by citizens in presidential elections — the most salient avenue for public participation in government — is quite low relative to other wealthy nations, so it would be surprising if the mere existence of information technology led to a consequential increase in participation over rulemaking in the U.S.

Major barriers to citizen participation in rulemaking will remain even with advances in information technology. One of these barriers is the specialized knowledge needed to participate meaningfully in the often highly technical decisions raised by rulemaking. Improving the accessibility of regulatory information on the Internet provides no guarantee that a significantly greater number of citizens will actually be able to process that information well. To imagine that information technology will dramatically increase citizens' involvement in rulemaking is a bit like imagining that making it possible to download technical automobile manuals or order car parts on-line will turn a great number of car owners into do-it-yourself mechanics. A small subset of people like engineers and car buffs will surely find it easier to fix their own cars, but most of us will be none the wiser. As long as most citizens lack more than the most rudimentary knowledge of how government works and of the technical issues underlying most rulemakings, information technology will not effectuate any but the most trivial change in ordinary citizens’ engagement in regulatory policymaking. Rather than inspiring members of the public to participate in the arcane or technical discussions surrounding government regulations, technology is instead being used by citizens to communicate with friends and family, follow sports and games, or engage in other forms of entertainment.

If information technology is not sufficient to engage a broad segment of the public in meaningful deliberation about regulatory policy issues, should e-rulemaking efforts be abandoned? Only if e-rulemaking’s sole or main purpose is to advance strong democracy. But notwithstanding the arguments made by its proponents, strong democracy is not the most realistic and compelling justification for e-rulemaking. A much more pragmatic objective is to expand and solidify the information base underlying regulatory decision-making. Regulators are undoubtedly better informed when they receive input from outside experts and interested parties. These outsiders bring distinct perspectives on regulatory problems based both on their differences in interests and differences in the scale or level at which they interact with a regulatory issue. The local sanitation engineer for the City of Milwaukee, for instance, will probably have useful insights about how new EPA drinking water standards should be implemented that might not be apparent to the American Water Works Association lobbyists in Washington, D.C. If e-rulemaking makes it more feasible for that local sanitation engineer, or other knowledgeable and motivated experts and affected interests across the country, to become aware of and submit comments on relevant regulations, then e-rulemaking can meaningfully expand the information base for regulators’ decisions.

As such, even though e-rulemaking is unlikely to achieve the goals of strong democracy, it is reasonable to expect regulators' decision making can be improved by allowing at least a somewhat broader set of well-organized and sophisticated actors to mobilize their resources, monitor government decision-making, and share potentially valuable information and insights with government officials. Rather than advancing "strong democracy," e-rulemaking seems more likely to achieve a more modest "weak democracy" -- but with the promise of delivering additional "strong information."

Posted by David Lazer at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)

3 January 2008

More on Iowa networks...

Let me make a few observations about the results tonight, based in part on the CNN entrance polls. First, the evangelical network beat the machine on the Republican side, with evangelical turnout making up about 60% of Republican voters, with Huckabee winning evangelicals decisively, and Romney winning non-evangelicals. Second, on the Democratic side (especially), turnout was the story, with a close to doubling of turnout from 2004. Particularly remarkable was the strong turnout of young voters—22% of those who turned out on the Democratic side were 17-29 (compare to 11% in Republican caucuses)—the same percentage as those 65 and over. Clinton decisively won those 45 and over (who still made up 60% of voters), but Obama just overwhelmed Clinton among those 45 and under.

In any case, the point here I make (casually) is that the individual decisions how to vote and whether to vote are not independent observations—that there is a pre-existing social organization (evangelicals in church, students in college)—which serves as the vessel for political action. I don’t claim this as a novel observation about politics, just one that is highlighted in these numbers.

Posted by David Lazer at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)

Call for Papers: Conference at Harvard on Networks in Political Science, June 13-14

The study of networks has exploded over the last decade, both in the social and hard sciences. From sociology to biology, there has been a paradigm shift from a focus on the units of the system to the relationships among those units. Despite a tradition incorporating network ideas dating back at least 70 years, political science has been largely left out of this recent creative surge. This has begun to change, as witnessed, for example, by an exponential increase in network-related research presented at the major disciplinary conferences.

We therefore announce an open call for paper proposals for presentation at a conference on "Networks in Political Science" (NIPS), aimed at _all_ of the subdisciplines of political science. NIPS is supported by the National Science Foundation, and sponsored by the Program on Networked Governance at Harvard University.

The conference will take place June 13-14. Preceding the conference will be a series of workshops introducing existing substantive areas of research, statistical methods (and software packages) for dealing with the distinctive dependencies of network data, and network visualization. There will be a $50 conference fee. Limited funding will be available to defray the costs of attendance for doctoral students and recent (post 2005) PhDs. Funding may be available for graduate students not presenting papers, but preference will be given to students using network analysis in their dissertations. Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply.

The deadline for submitting a paper proposal is March 1, 2008. Proposals should include a title and a one-paragraph abstract. Graduate students and recent Ph.D.’s applying for funding should also include their CV, a letter of support from their advisor, and a brief statement about their intended use of network analysis. Send them to networked_governance@ksg.harvard.edu. The final program will be available at www.ksg.harvard.edu/netgov.

Program Committee: Christopher Ansell (UCBerkeley), James Fowler (UCSD), Michael Heaney (Florida), David Lazer (Harvard), Scott McClurg (Southern Illinois), John Padgett (Chicago), John Scholz (Florida State), Sarah Reckhow (UCBerkeley), Paul Thurner (Mannheim), and Michael Ward (University of Washington).

Posted by David Lazer at 9:54 AM | Comments (0)

Iowa networks...

Happy new year all! And for those political junkies out there, happy Iowa caucuses.

Has there been any work on the Iowa caucuses and social networks? There are a multitude of things one could study, notably around mobilization and caucusing choice. There has been more general work on networks and opinion (e.g., Huckfeldt, Sprague, etc), and networks and political mobilization (e.g., Nickerson).

Particularly interesting in 2008 is the contrast in mobilization strategy on the Republican side between Huckabee and Romney, where Romney has the traditional (well funded) mobilization machine, with phone calls, mass mailing, rides, etc; whereas Huckabee (out of necessity) is relying on informal evangelical networks to mobilize his supporters. Conventional wisdom is that the machine versus network match up will yield a several point edge to Romney.

---------------------
An interesting potential study: to examine the pre-caucus preferences (e.g., as measured by CNN entry poll) and post-caucus vote distribution.

Another potentially interesting study: examining the micro-level interactions within some of the caucuses.

In any case, if you know of relevant papers/research (or news about today's caucuses), please post as comment.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:34 AM | Comments (2)