Complexity and Social Networks Blog

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15 May 2008

Networks in Political Science (NIPS) program

Just realized that I had not posted that the program for the Networks in Political Science (NIPS) conference at Harvard is up. This has turned out to be a rather larger affair than we originally envisioned: between the presentations and posters, there will be over 100 papers, plus two days of methods workshops before. Online registration, etc, information is available through the website.

Posted by David Lazer at 9:14 PM | Comments (0)

13 May 2008

Let's Get Rid of the Word "Social" in "Social Network"

Okay everyone, we do NETWORK SCIENCE ..... not SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS.

I am beginning to despise the word "social" in "social networks", "social networking", "social software", and so forth ......

Saul Hansell, in the piece "Steering Between Unsocial Networks and Social Spam" from today's (5/13/08) New York Times, sort of agrees with me.

Posted by Stan Wasserman at 3:24 PM | Comments (0)

8 May 2008

Videos from computational social science conference

As I have argued previously on this blog, social science is undergoing a paradigm shift, based on the availability (and purposeful creation) of large scale, high granularity, data sets on human behavior. Let me point now to the videos now available from the Conference on Computational Social Science that was hosted by IQSS that Sandy Pentland and I co-chaired last December. To recapitulate, this conference brought together a wide array of folks from the academy to talk about emerging areas of research at the intersection of computer and social sciences. This was a terrific event, and one I hope that I hope in coming years will be pointed to as having helped crystallize discussion about this area. Lots of great moments here, from Roy’s examination of the video records of the first two years of his son’s life, to Christakis’ presentation on the spread of obesity, to Contractor’s examination of virtual worlds. We also had a panel on the tough privacy and human subjects issues that this research poses (perhaps the key hurdle this area wrestle with at this stage), with presentations by the heads of the IRBs at Harvard and MIT, and discussions by Van Alstyne on handling e-mail data, and by Gutmann on handling geocoded data.

Posted by David Lazer at 8:16 AM | Comments (0)

7 May 2008

World of Social Networks

While not perfectly accurate (e.g. Mixi is missing for Japan) I stumbled upon an attempt to map the social networks that dominate in each country around the world. May be this motivates someone else to setup a page where people can collaboratively update/work on the map.

Posted by Alexander Schellong at 8:18 AM | Comments (2)

5 May 2008

Violence is Contagious!!! Just like Obesity!!!

Did you see this (yesterday's --- May 4 --- NYT Sunday Magazine).

Is this ridiculous, or what?
Sure, it's a nice story line, but are we to believe that if you hang out with violent people you will become violent?

Posted by Stan Wasserman at 12:03 PM | Comments (0)