Spring workshop on computational social science @ IQSS
SPRING WORKSHOP ON COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE
May 30- June 1, 2012
The Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University
Contact m.lee@neu.edu to register (note registration fee $50/day)
Space is limited!
Sponsored by:
The Northeastern Centers for Computational Social Science and Digital Humanities
The Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard
The Human Dynamics Lab, MIT
May 30
8:30am-9am: Registration
9-10am: Opportunities and challenges in the study of digital traces
David Lazer, welcome and introductory remarks
10am-6pm (with breaks)
Workshop 1: From Tweets to Results: How to obtain, mine, and analyze Twitter data
Derek Ruths (McGill University)
Since Twitter's creation in 2006, it has become one of the most popular microblogging platforms in the world. By virtue of its popularity, the relative structural simplicity of Twitter posts, and a tendency towards relaxed privacy settings, Twitter has also become a popular data source for research on a range of topics in sociology, psychology, political science, and anthropology. Nonetheless, despite its widespread use in the research community, there are many pitfalls when working with Twitter data.
In this day-long workshop, we will lead participants through the entire Twitter-based research pipeline: from obtaining Twitter data all the way through performing some of the sophisticated analyses that have been featured in recent high-profile publications. In the morning, we will cover the nuts and bolts of obtaining and working with a Twitter dataset including: using the Twitter API, the firehose, and rate limits; strategies for storing and filtering Twitter data; and how to publish your dataset for other researchers to use. In the afternoon, we will delve into techniques for analyzing Twitter content including constructing retweet, mention, and follower networks; measuring the sentiment of tweets; and inferring the gender of users from their profiles and unstructured text.
We assume that participants will have little to no prior experience with mining Twitter or other social network datasets. As the workshop will be interactive, participants are encouraged to bring a laptop. Code examples and exercises will be given in Python, thus participants should have some familiarity with the language. However, all concepts and techniques covered will be language-independent, so any individual with some background in scripting or programming will benefit from the workshop.
May 31
9am-5pm (with breaks): Workshop 2: Network Visualization
Yu-Ru Lin (Northeastern/Harvard Universities)
The recent availability of new cutting edge datasets such as open government data, cell phone call records and social media communication streams offers unprecedented opportunities to study human behaviors and their relationship to the social system. Relationships between various types of entities arise naturally in the study of social networks as well as many applications such as information retrieval and business intelligence. The interrelated information can be effectively represented as networks, where nodes are various types of entities and edges are relationships. Network visualization serves as a powerful tool to build intuitions, to systematically explore the structures or peculiar patterns of the data, and to communicate findings.
This tutorial aims to provide practical knowledge on network visualization, using the open source tool Gephi. The tutorial will cover three components:
(1) Understand the visual complexity and an effective way of communicating networked data.
(2) Convey network properties and structure through Gephi's functionality.
(3) Use Gephi's advanced features to explore the networks of political contributions, political texts, etc. The tutorial is intended for scholars and researchers who wish to learn how to incorporate network visualization to speed up the data exploration and to communicate the data insights.
Requirements: Familiarity with basic network concepts is preferred but not essential. Participants should come with their own laptop with Gephi installed (The installation instructions will be given to the participants prior to the tutorial).
June 1
10am-12pm: Self-organized discussions
This will be an opportunity for workshop participants to organize into groups to discuss particular opportunities and challenges in specific substantive domains.
1pm-5pm: Workshop 3: Studying the dynamics of human proximity
Human Dynamics Lab, MIT/ Prof. Alex Pentland, Director.
During the last decade we have developed measurement toolkits based on electronic badges, smart phones, and signal processing that allow us to accurately quantify human behavior in everyday situations on a continuous basis over long time periods. In this tutorial we will describe the sociometric badges and Android platform sociometric software that we have developed, covering their function, capability, and typical use. These tools will be made available to interested participants. We will also cover the mathematical toolkit we have developed, describing the theory, capability, and typical use. These tools will also be made available to participants.
Finally, we will illustrate the use of our sociometric measurement tools together with our mathematical analysis tools on a variety of problems, including individual (e.g., passive screening for health problems), small group (e.g., providing a real-time performance meter for groups), organizations (e.g., reengineering communication patterns for greater productivity), and large-scale sociocultural outcomes (e.g., diabetes risk, crime risk). For additional information see http://hd.media.mit.edu
Gutmann of NSF on computational social science and advanced computing infrastructure
Myron Gutmann, of the National Science Foundation, will be speaking on:
"Computational Social Science and Advanced Computing Infrastructure: Challenges and Opportunities"
11:30am to 1:00pm, March 2, 2012
Tsai Auditorium, 1730 Cambridge St. (IQSS/Harvard)
A light lunch will be served.
Please RSVP to http://www.iq.harvard.edu/events/node/2836
______________________________________
Myron P. Gutmann is Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation, with responsibility for NSF's Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Directorate. He is also Professor of History and Information and Research Professor in the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining NSF, he was Director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Gutmann has broad interests in interdisciplinary historical research, especially health, population, economy, and the environment. As Director of ICPSR, he was a leader in the archiving and dissemination of electronic research materials related to society, population, and health, with a special interest in the protection of respondent confidentiality. He has written or edited five books and more than eighty articles and chapters. Gutmann has served on a number of national and international advisory committees and editorial
boards.
Call for Papers:
Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks -- 3rd Leonardo satellite symposium at NetSci2012
Tuesday, June 19, 2012 at Northwestern University in Evanston/IL, near Chicago/IL on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Abstract:
We are pleased to announce the third Leonardo satellite symposium at NetSci2012 on Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks. The aim of the symposium is to foster cross-disciplinary research on complex systems within or with the help of arts and humanities.
The symposium will highlight arts and humanities as an interesting source of data, where the combined experience of arts, humanities research, and natural science makes a huge difference in overcoming the limitations of artificially segregated communities of practice. Furthermore, the symposium will focus on striking examples, where artists and humanities researchers make an impact within the natural sciences. By bringing together network scientists and specialists from the arts and humanities we strive for a better understanding of networks and their visualizations in general.
The overall mission is to bring together pioneer work, leveraging previously unused potential by developing the right questions, methods, and tools, as well as dealing with problems of information accuracy and incompleteness. Running parallel to the NetSci2012 conference, the symposium will also provide a unique opportunity to mingle with leading researchers and practitioners of complex network science, potentially sparking fruitful collaborations.
In addition to keynotes and interdisciplinary discussion, we are looking for a number of contributed talks. Selected papers will be published in print in a Special Section of Leonardo Journal (MIT Press), as well as online in Leonardo Transactions.
For previous edition papers and video presentations please visit the following URLs:
* 2010 URL: http://artshumanities.netsci2010.net
* 2011 URL: http://artshumanities.netsci2011.net
Confirmed keynote speakers:
* Burak Arikan, Artist based in New York and Istanbul:
http://burak-arikan.com/
* Pedro Cano, Chief Technology Officer, bmat.com:
http://bmat.com/
* Miriah Meyer, Assistant Professor, University of Utah:
http://www.cs.utah.edu/~miriah/
Organizing committee:
* Maximilian Schich, DFG Visiting Research Scientist, CCNR, Northeastern University, USA
* Roger Malina, Executive Editor at Leonardo Publications, France/USA
* Isabel Meirelles, Associate Professor, Dept. of Art + Design, Northeastern University, USA
* Cristián Huepe, Visiting Scholar, Applied Math Department, Northwestern University, USA
Possible subjects include:
* Contemporary art and network science;
* Cultural analytics, culturomics, and high throughput approaches;
* Cultural exchange and trade networks (from the Neolithic to modern supply chains);
* Emergence and evolution of canon in art, music, literature and film;
* Evolution of communities of practice in art and science;
* History and theory of network visualization;
* Networks in architecture and urban planning (from Ekistics to Reality Mining);
* Network structure and dynamics in art, music, literature, and film;
* Taxonomy and evolutionary models in art and science.
Submissions:
We are looking for eight 15 minute contributions covering a large territory around arts, humanities and complex networks. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words and include one relevant URL. You are also requested to upload your most awesome figure in jpg format. You have the opportunity to post your submission using the EasyChair system at https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ahcnnetsci2012
Important dates:
The deadline for applications is March 16, 2012.
Decisions for acceptance will be sent out by March 30, 2012.
The symposium will take place at Northwestern University near Chicago, IL on the shores of Lake Michigan on June 19, 2012.
Attendance:
Attendance to our symposium is free of charge. As space is limited, we require registration. We encourage everyone to also register for the main NetSci2012 conference. NetSci2012 attendees can register directly during main conference registration. For the NetSci2012 registration fee and deadline please see: http://www.netsci2012.net.
In addition we will give out a limited number of free tickets via Eventbrite. Tickets will be given out in a first come, first serve basis as soon as possible. Free Eventbrite tickets will become available at http://ahcn2012.eventbrite.com. The Evenbrite waitlist is open.
In case of questions, please drop us a mail at artshumanities.netsci@gmail.com.
About NetSci:
The International School and Conference on Network Science (NetSci 2012) will bring together leading researchers and practitioners in network science -- analysts, modeling experts, and visualization specialists with graduate students from many different research areas for interdisciplinary communication and collaboration. The conference focuses on novel directions in networks research within the biological and environmental sciences, computer and information sciences, social sciences, finance and business.
NetSci 2012 will take place in June 18-22, 2012 at Northwestern University near Chicago, IL on the shores of Lake Michigan and hosted by NICO, the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems.
Links:
Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks at NetSci2012: http://artshumanities.netsci2012.net
NetSci2012: http://www.netsci2012.net
The 2010 abstracts, papers and videos: http://artshumanities.netsci2010.net
The 2011 abstracts, papers and videos: http://artshumanities.netsci2011.net
BarabásiLab, Northeastern University, Boston: http://www.barabasilab.com
Dept. Art+Design, Northeastern University, Boston: http://www.art.neu.edu
Leonardo/ISAST: http://www.leonardo.info
Leonardo/OLATS: http://www.olats.org
NICO: http://www.northwestern.edu/nico/
Contact:
If you would like to be added to the list of interested people, please drop us an e-mail with the subject Please add me to the Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks list at artshumanities.netsci@gmail.com. Alternatively you can follow us on Twitter.
Monetizing and understanding Facebook Fanpages - An entrepreneurial perspective
Years ago I shared cubicles with Thomas Langenberg at the Kennedy School. Given the fact that he recently turned from researcher of social networks and innovation to social network entrepreneur for Facebook, the biggest social networking site around the globe, I thought its time to ask him for some insights.
Thomas, how has life changed and what are you doing?
In 2010, I founded Halalati, a self-service for Facebook promotion apps, together with two co-founders. With our service, companies can quickly and at low cost create their own Facebook promotion apps - without computer programming. Our vision is to help companies gain reach within social networks and monetize it. I really like this entrepreneurial work, as the daily business works at a much faster pace than research. To me, it feels really good to implement ideas and see in real life what works and what doesn't.
Has your PhD research provided direct value for your entrepreneurial activities?
Indeed, there are strong parallels between research and entrepreneurial activities. Research is much about building hypotheses and testing them. Entrepreneurial work as well. On a high level, you come up with a business idea and then you test it. This cascades down to operational work. For example, you create the hypotheses "if I invest x € in online marketing, revenues should increase by y€ ". Then you test it, always being aware that the decision has a direct impact on the fate of your business. Depending on your result you move on. Having been a researcher helps to structure work and progress that way.
What were the biggest challenges of starting your business and what are your challenges today?
Well, there were a lot of challenges. Initially, the biggest challenge was to take the risk to give up my job and start something completely new without knowing what this would result in. Another big challenge is on the one hand follow our course, but also stay open-minded enough, to see new opportunities when they appear. As we are growing, currently, our biggest challenge is to manage this growth properly.
Would you be interested in U.S. based investors?
We are definitely interested in U.S. investors. U.S. investors have gained significant experience with startups centered around social networks, in particular Facebook, already. Their expertise, their "personal network" in the industry could be really valuable for us
German laws and politics pay particular attention to data protection. Some politicians are frequently criticizing FB for its data collection and utilization. Users have also showed concerns (Europe vs. Facebook). Does this affect the development of your business? What's your general position?
Halalati provides apps that are conform to German data protection laws. Customers that choose to work with us can thus be sure to act according to these laws. This gives us an advantage in the German market compared competitors from the U.S.
How big is the market for supported by your Apps in Germany compared to the U.S.? How mature are these markets, in particular in Germany, Europe's biggest economy?
In general, every business can technically have a fan page. In Germany, we have around three million companies. But the market is much less mature than in the U.S. We saw a strong rise in demand in the beginning of 2011. Even today, many companies just launch their Facebook fan pages and use Apps such as those offered by Halalati and others as their first steps in Social Media Marketing. Many require initial guidance on the caveats and potential.
What kind of organizations use or need fan pages? Are there organizations which shouldn't have a fan page?
Organizations that benefit most from fan pages most are businesses that target the end customer with a very emotional product. Examples from Germany are the Magnum ice cream brand from Unilever, the global consumer good company, or Haribo, a German make of candy. These are extreme examples. But also companies with less emotional products can significantly benefit from Facebook. As soon as customers share their experiences with a product or brand, the brand benefits. Organizations with target audiences that do not use Facebook don't benefit from the platform. Companies with products for the elderly are an example.
What's the general value of a fan page for an organization?
In Facebook, organizations can meet their customers. The fan page is the presentation of an organization within Facebook. Fans of an organizations act as multipliers. If a company posts a message and a fan likes it, all his friends can see the message of the organization. As the average Facebook fanpage has 130 fans, Facebook is a great platform for viral marketing. This is the mechanism that our apps use to help companies gain reach within Facebook.
Is it possible to calculate the monetary value of fans?
It is definitely possible to determine the value of a fan. From a business point of view, there are only two levers that determine the value of a fan:
1. Sales/profit that a fan generates directly
2. Number of new customers that a fan generates and the sales/profit of these new customers
The following driver tree shows how an organization can quickly determine the value of a fan. The values in yellow boxes have to be determined by the organization, the values in the grey boxes can be calculated accordingly.
1. In short, the sales/profit that a fan generates directly can be calculated by the probability that a fan turns into a paying customer and the average sales/profit a customer generates. In addition, some people argue, that a fan generates more revenue than a non-fan. If this is a case, this difference in sales/profit can be added.
2. A fan is not only worth the direct revenue/profit. In addition, every fan has the potential to attract new fans via his/her friends, for example via comments he/she posts. The number derived in 1 should thus be multiplied by the number of newly generated fans (by this fan) plus 1 (original fan)
In the figure, I did the calculation for a driving school. Taking some basic assumptions, the driving school comes up with a rough value of 600 € per fan. Such rough calculations can give an indication of the value of a fan - and help companies decide on the value of Facebook marketing.
Isn't the value of Facebook fan pages in danger due to their sheer mass and an increasing number of offers to buy fans/likes?
I don't think that Facebook fan pages are in danger. Rather, companies will understand more and more that not all fans are equally valuable. This is why we believe contests and promotions work well to generate fans: If a price for a sweepstake, for example, is a product of an organization, participants of the contest are likely to enjoy the product - otherwise they would not enter the contest. Such fans are thus likely to be "loyal" fans. If fans are simply bought, this is not the case.
Are you sharing your data or lessons with researchers? Where would you like to see more research?
Being a social network researcher myself, I would love to see much more quantitative and generalizable research on the question "How being involved in social media affects firm performance". So what are the key do's and don'ts for firms on for instance Facebook or Twitter and what propositions can be made that truly helps firms. For instance, if you are a small brand in a big city, using Facebook Places does not make sense, but offering a flourishing Foursquare Place can boost your business by XYZ percent. I know this is hard to show, but right now the whole industry, especially in Europe, is really fascinated by social media, but only very little is known on the cause effect relationship between "activities in social media" and "business success".
If you could influence the future plans of Facebook and have an hour with Mark Zuckerberg, what would you tell him?
I would first congratulate him for staying on top of a business and a development that is truly changing the way we read, chat and exchange "stuff" online. Only 2 years ago I was not really convinced by the Facebook network, because I had a couple alternatives. But now, I think it is just a great new "ecosystem" that is going to develop. Especially from a business point of view.
Moreover. I would like to bounce ideas with him how he and his mangers plan to really get the open graph and timeline going in Europe. I think especially the open graph is on the one hand super powerful for firms to profit from it, but it is at the same time a great threat for the acceptance rate of Facebook among endusers. Even in our today "open and connected" world, there are some things in your life that you don't want to share with anybody. Hence, assuming all the classic websites and services are now picking up social apps or open graph apps, "senseless" browsing on the Internet would become a "nightmare".
In short, I would try to make it as clear as possible that continuous success of Facebook in Europe is a function of Facebook's ability to get aligned with European legislations on data privacy concerns. So I would wish they spend a lot of money on getting arranged with these dicussions.
Thank you for your time and insights. All the best for Halalati.
It is widely recognized in government, business, military and scientific circles that there is a growing interconnectedness of physical and virtual infrastructure through information and communication technology (ICT). Many refer to it as Cyberspace. A domain, pervasive and ubiquitous, now considered strategically equal to land, air, sea, and space. Yet from a security perspective, cyberspace is different to the four other domains. It has emergent properties and eludes state control. Beyond its impact on leadership, management or institutions, there is a common fear that the growing interconnectedness offers more and more avenues for disruptions in the digital supply chain and thus increases the vulnerability of the information society, military power and the global economy to system failure.
The causes of disruptions to cyberspace and critical infrastructure - e.g. utilities, transport, telecoms, defense contractors, government institutions - in general can be divided into three categories: natural disasters, accidents and intentional attacks . Cyber threats are risks arising from cyberspace and its technologies (e.g. hacking, denial of service attacks, viruses, malware). The impact of malicious cyber activities can be without direct consequences (e.g. installing spyware) but may as well lead to physical consequences (e.g. loss of business or failure of control systems). Cybercrime is a common threat image in the business community while cyber terrorism, cyber war and information warfare dominate defense community's framing of the issue . The worst case scenario frequently mentioned but highly contested is an "electronic Pearl Harbor" type disruption.
Images of threats typically involve a broad range of adversaries and targets, including both state and non-state actors, dissolving the boundaries between the domestic and the international. Along these lines, non-state actors may be a challenge to as well as providers of security. Most observers focus on the transnational and network-based character of cyber threats. Adversaries are typically seen as operating in loosely organized networks consisting of relatively independent nodes of individuals. Research and media coverage of recent cyber attacks underline that beyond the hype concerns are real as attempts to exploit or defeat existing cyber infrastructures are happening ever second.
IT-security researchers showed that an unprotected computer connected to the Internet to collect intelligence on attack techniques and behaviors ("honeypot") was hacked and utilized for a botnet within 15 minutes of connecting it to the Internet. The sophistication of attacks and their consequences have reached a new level since 2010. Unlike distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks to disrupt the Internet in Estonia or Georgia, the "Stuxnet Worm", likely developed by a state actor, targeted industrial control systems that use Siemens software and infected over 30,000 computers in Iran, including computers involved in running nuclear facilities in Iran. The latter raises even greater concerns about not only the threat to industrial control systems, but to all components of our information and communications technologies, generally. Early in 2011, RSA, a provider of SecurID two-factor authentication products which can be considered one of the core Internet security technologies experienced a similar APT breach to its infrastructure as Google did in 2010. Unlike most intrusions that go after financial and identity data, advanced persistent threat (APT) attacks tend to go after source code and other intellectual property. Intrusions may even sneak into an organization's network, sometimes for years, even after it has taken corrective action.
Much has been written about the challenge of attribution in cyberspace. Who is intruding in a system and who is behind the malicious activity? If we are attacked, will we know who is behind it, so that we can respond, without incurring the wrath of the world community? All too often it remains difficult, if not impossible, to identify the involved parties who hide behind the anonymity and global orientation of the Internet and utilize a catacomb of enablers, consisting of both legitimate and illegitimate providers, to cover their tracks. Policy makers and military planners are only beginning to address these questions.
In fact, cyber security and risk is inherently difficult to comprehend and communicate, due to its socio-technical complexity, and relationships among stakeholders in the international community. There is for example, little agreement as to what the security issue in cyberspace actually is as well as what is critical and the threat level . From a European perspective, the cyber insecurity "hype" is much more prevalent in the U.S. than in Europe. Consequently, it is difficult to come together around a common, collective vision in international bodies such as the UN or NATO by states such as the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany which often lead the adoption of broad based agendas. An additional challenge derives from the existing cyber security institutional eco-system which resembles a broad set of international, national, and private organizations with unclear and overlapping boundaries as well as differing capacities. Finally, the government resources available are tied up with national cyber security efforts such as critical infrastructure protection where state and industry objectives are only partially convergent. Specifically, the private sector fears that sensitive information on past security incidents might not be treated with the necessary degree of confidentiality by state entities and cause damage to their reputation. Furthermore, international approaches would be of much greater interest for transnational businesses. Many believe a comprehensive approach , one that provides for appropriate information sharing and mutual assistance obligations governed by international policies and treaties, is needed. Considering the struggles of the UN, EU or NATO in developing a common comprehensive approach for conflict and crisis management and the illustrated difficulties in the cyber security domain, this will pose a great challenge to the international community.
Nevertheless it requires a public-private collaboration which identifies critical cyber priorities, sets goals and objectives for each, and identifies corresponding milestones and metrics for those objectives so that they can be resourced, tracked, and improved over time. It is also important to systematically collect and share statistically significant malicious cyber activity data on the national and global scale. Moreover, we need to build the capability to quickly connect the dots among disparate databases to get a true picture of which instances of criminality are connected to each other, to which malicious actors, and to which enablers. However, first and foremost none of these and many other points is actively and openly debated among government or private industry organizations, nor is the fact that current means of law enforcement have proven insufficient, specifically because they tend to be reactive instead of proactive; they investigate after the fact instead of preventing the criminal attack. We must recognize that more of the same will not change this reality. The complexity of cyber risk must be addressed strategically and proactively by an alliance of business and government stakeholders, including, but not limited to, law enforcement because no single effort or initiative will eliminate the cyber threat.
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Ottis, R., Lorents, P. (2010) Cyberspace: Definition and Implications. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Information Warfare and Security, Dayton, OH, US, 8-9 April. Reading: Academic Publishing Limited, 267-270.
Van Eten, M.; Bauer, J. M. (2009) "Emerging Threats to Internet Security: Incentives, Externalities and Policy Implications", Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 17, 4, 221-232.
Wilson, C. (2010) "Cyber Crime", 415-436 in: Kramer, F. D.; Starr, S. H.; Wentz, L. K. (Ed.) (2010) "Cyberpower and National Security", NDU Press.
Whitman, M. E. (2003). Enemy at the gate: threats to information security. Communications of the ACM, 46, 8.
A look inside brain tissue to see network connections
From today's New York Times .... a new chemical technique to look inside brain tissue in order to see the neural connections. This is incredibly cool, and should
In case you didn't see this news last week ...... this press release is from The New York Times......
For the first time, half of all adults in the United States said they used a social networking site, according to a survey released on Friday by the Pew Research Center.
That is 50 percent of all Americans, not just those who say they are online. Six years ago, when Pew first conducted a similar survey, only 5 percent of all adults said they used social sites, like Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace.
It is a sign of how deeply and widely social networking companies have penetrated the lives of ordinary people and, in turn, transformed the ways in which people communicate, authorities govern and companies sell things.
Parents use Facebook to vet nannies, carmakers to introduce new models, police to keep tabs on suspects. Federal government authorities are preparing this weekend to use social networking sites for hurricane preparation on the East Coast.
The Pew survey found that among adults who are online, the rates of participation were higher: 65 percent, according to the survey, up slightly from 61 percent last year.
Not surprising, the sites are more popular among younger people: 83 percent of people surveyed in the 18-29 age bracket said they used social networking sites, compared with 51 percent of those in the 50-64 bracket. The young are also twice as likely to use social sites every day.
The survey by the center's Internet and American Life Project described women ages 18 to 29 as "the power users," with 89 percent of them using social networking sites and 69 percent using them every day. Such a stark finding has obvious implications for advertising on sites like Facebook.
Neither income nor education seemed to have any statistically significant bearing on the use of the sites. A separate study published by the Pew Center in June found that black Americans continued to be more likely to be on Twitter than whites. One in four African-American users of the Internet said they used Twitter "occasionally," and 11 percent said they used it daily.
Twitter penetration still trails considerably. Thirteen percent of those online describe themselves as Twitter users and the bulk of them use it on their smartphones.
The Internet is still more commonly used everyday for e-mail and search, with 61 percent reporting that they went online every day to check e-mail, 59 percent for search and 43 percent for social networking.
There are some signs that social networking is reaching its limit. Asked for one word to describe their social networking experience, the most common was "good."
One in five respondents, however, sounded less upbeat. They used words including "boring," "time-consuming" and "overrated."
Note: This is a joint post with Alan Mislove, based on our work with Yong-Yeol Ahn and Chloe Kliman-Silver.
On on August 23, 2011, at 1:51 PM EDT a magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit the Piedmont region of the U.S. state of Virginia. Orders of magnitude smaller than the recent earthquake in Japan, this quake was nonetheless the largest in the U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains in 114 years (according to Wikipedia).
But why are we talking about earthquakes? We should be talking about people talking about earthquakes. And people really did some talking. The official twitter account (@twitter) posted three back-to-back tweets on the subject:
Are Tweets faster than seismic waves? We can't speak to speed of seismic waves, but a Tweet can reach your followers in less than a second. [link]
Within a minute of today's #earthquake, there were more than 40,000 earthquake-related Tweets. [link]
And, we hit about 5,500 Tweets per second (TPS). For context, this TPS is more than Osama Bin Laden's death & on par w/ the Japanese quake. [link]
Now, as I am sure many people have already pointed out (e.g. on twitter), this situation was deftly analyzed and anticipated by Randall Munroe, author of the wonderful webcomic xkcd back in April 2010. Here's the strip:
As Munroe points out, the speed of "damaging" seismic waves is around 3-5 km/second, which is much slower than the speed of information spreading on the internet. This simple fact means that if you're more than 100 km away from the epicenter you can read about the quake on twitter before it hits you.
Now, combine idea from the xkcd strip with data from the tweetquake and it's possible to observe this phenomenon in practice. In the visualization below, we've generated a video of the mentions of the work "earthquake" in tweets from the gardenhose in the 5 minutes immediately following the earthquake. For simplicity, we have assumed a uniform 4 km/s wave and ignored deformations due to map projections, etc (we're not geologists, after all).
The comic strip doesn't factor in the time it takes to actually write a tweet, and since seconds count, it takes more than 100 km before we see tweets posted outside the wavefront (validating the last frame of the comic strip). It is awe inspiring to see a truly real time news medium in action.
Highlights from the 5th International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media took place in Barcelona from July 17th through July 21st. In attendance were hundreds of international researchers representing the social and computational sciences, physics, economics, media studies and the humanities, as well as key figures from industry and even the intelligence community.
Several key themes emerged during the course of the meeting, and they characterize in broad terms the challenges and opportunities facing the discipline. Among them: inference of causality and influence from historical network data; the role of selective perception and homophily in shaping exposure to web-based information resources; the limitations of unipartite models for fundamentally multiplex, multimode networks; the professionalization of journalism in a the modern age; the struggle for balance between qualitative and quantitative treatments of large-scale datasets; and the role of web science in shaping our understanding of human behavior. Here we record a few of the many highlights from the conference's presentations, poster sessions, and distinguished keynotes.
Keynote Talks
Jimmy Lin
Jimmy Lin, a University of Maryland professor on industrial sabbatical with Twitter, took several provocative positions in his morning keynote. Most contentiously, he argued that academics should not engage in research that industry 'can do better'. According to Lin, work of this type encompasses incremental improvements in information retrieval tasks and descriptive analyses of technological systems. Instead, he argues that researchers should focus on fundamental, transformative questions, such as how information spreads, the identification of influential individuals in social networks, and the qualities of a service that give it 'addictive' potential. Whether these are meaningful distinctions, and whether industry actually is better suited to certain types of analyses, are questions open for debate. Regardless, in the sense that goal of the talk was to catalyze this kind of discussion, Dr. Lin succeeded admirably.
Sinan Aral
In a wide-ranging talk addressing the factors underlying social influence and causality, Dr. Aral began by questioning the basic character of the definitions that have traditionally motivated measures of 'influence' in social networks. One of the basic tenets of his argument is that influence is best understood as the ability of an individual to initiate change in a 'system of behaviors'. He proposes that the goal of research in this domain should be the development of models that can capture indirect causal dynamics, and offers as an example a scenario in which A changes his exercise regimen in response to a change in the diet of B. Touching on the problem of distinguishing homophily from contagion, Aral acknowledges that 'most influence is really just observable homphily', but argues that with rigorously constructed statistical models we can begin to place bounds around the extent to which homophily is a driver of behavior in a system.
Prominent sociologist and communications scholar Manuel Castells gave the opening keynote and addressed many issues relating to role of social media in sociopolitical change. Castells contends that the prevalence of social media leads to a 'culture of free communication,' fostering in individuals a sense of self-determination and autonomy often lacking in authoritarian societies. He argues that this precipitates a cultural shift, in which people begin to see themselves as agents of change, a factor he asserts is critical to the revolutionary process. His thoughtful treatment of the subject serves as a welcome and well-reasoned counterpoint to the arguments put forth by Malcolm Gladwell in the controversial article, 'Small Change: Why The Revolution Will Not be Tweeted.' Admittedly a biased audience, the consensus among scholars in the social media community seems to be that the true role of social media in political upheaval is complex and subtle, and Castells' treatment speaks to that directly.
Analyzing Twitter for Public Health
In a standout work, Michael Paul and Mark Dredze show that Twitter data can be used to track the timing and geospatial properties of communication relating to different health conditions throughout the United States. This work departs from other research on the subject (such as Google Flu Trends) in that it does not rely on a pre-specified a set of ailments and keywords a priori, but instead leverages structured topic models to infer classes of tweets relating to different conditions, such as allergies, obesity and insomnia. The authors show that these features are correlated with data from the Centers for Disease Control, and document the spread of allergy symptoms through different regions of the US over the course of the year.
Given the ability to tie this kind of public data to health conditions, one could envision privacy concerns were insurers to integrate a person's social media history into actuarial pricing structures. During the Q&A, however, the authors emphasized that, in its current form, this model cannot be used to make such inferences at the individual level.
References
Michael Paul, Mark Dredze. You Are What You Tweet: Analyzing Twitter for Public Health. [link]
Disaster Response & Situational Awareness
As evidenced most recently by the response to the political violence in Norway, social media represent a rich channel for real-time information and communication relating to emergencies. This point is emphasized with a quote from FEMA director Craig Fugate, in which he claims that tools like Twitter can provide better situational awareness than official sources were able to produce 4-5 years ago. One of the key challenges, however, is separating tactile, actionable information from other content, such as empathetic expressions of support, that provide little leverage in terms of emergency management. In this work, the authors propose a machine learning apparatus that relies on various linguistic features, including those from natural language processing and part of speech annotation tools, to isolate tweets that provide this kind of critical information. Promising though this work is, further challenges relating to generalizability and the extraction of specific units of actionable information still remain.
References
Sudha Verma, Sarah Vieweg, William J. Corvey, Leysia Palen, James H. Martin, Martha Palmer, Aaron Schram, Kenneth M. Anderson. Natural Language Processing to the Rescue? Extracting "Situational Awareness" Tweets during Mass Emergency. [link]
Media Landscape and Heterogeneous Information Sources
The problem of the 'filter bubble', whereby users selectively filter their information sources so as to consume only content that reflects their pre-existing interests and beliefs, was a recurrent theme across many presentations. In this work, An et al. tackle the problem by examining the diversity of information sources to which an individual is exposed as a result of using the Twitter platform. They conclude that while each individual explicitly subscribes to relatively few media outlets (through follower relationships), users are exposed to a much broader range of information sources as a result of diffusion processes operating on the underlying social network. The result is that a user's exposure is limited by the extent to which homophily dominates their social linkages, rather than whether they subscribe to a narrow set of media sources.
References
Jisun An, Meeyoung Cha, Krishna Gummadi, Jon Crowcroft. Media landscape in Twitter: A world of new conventions and political diversity. [link]
Hypergraph Analysis of Clandestine Networks
In an increasing variety of situations we are confronted with the limitations of the traditional unipartite graph models used to represent complex social systems. Motivated by the lossy nature of bipartite projections, the authors develop a set of hypergraph techniques that support the identification of networks of illicit 'gold farmers' in the online roleplaying game 'Everquest 2.' In a particularly creative stroke, the authors supplement traditional descriptive network statistics, such as degree and centrality, with additional pattern-based features. Specifically, after identifying hypergraph motifs in the player and resource interaction network they use market basket analysis to compute measures of support and confidence for each motif. Using this approach they are able to identify a set of network structures commonly associated with illicit activity on the platform. Work like this underscores the range of interactions available to users of digital communication and interaction platforms, and highlights the importance of methodologies that preserve the information encoded in these relationships.
References
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad, Brian Keegan, Dmitri Williams, Jaideep Srivastava, Noshir Contractor. Trust Amongst Rogues? A Hypergraph Approach for Comparing Clandestine Trust Networks in MMOGs. [link]
Social Science Research with Amazon's Mechanical Turk
A growing body of work demonstrates the usefulness of Mechnical Turk as an experimental platform for research in the social and behavioral sciences. In a three-hour tutorial, Yahoo researcher Winter Mason covered several important features of the Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform.
Key Takeaways
The key benefits of the Turk platform relate primarily to the large subject pool size (> 100,000 workers), subject pool demographic diversity, low cost (effective wage of $4.80 / hour), and the speed of the experimental workflow.
The inability of workers to rate requesters creates an asymmetry in the official reputation mechanism. Consequently it's important for researchers to be aware of, and ideally, involved with, the backchannels workers use to discuss jobs and requesters. (Turkopticon, Turker Nation)
The barriers to entry are much lower than most people realize. The slides outline the 'Anatomy of a HIT (Human Intelligence Task)', and the basic research workflow. Amazon provides several templates for creating simple jobs very quickly using CSV data as variable input, and we created and solicited results for a simple task during the course of the tutorial.
Synchronous experiments on network dynamics and contagion-like effects are possible using 'panels' of workers. By collecting contact information and then coordinating a time for the work Mason and colleagues were able to conduct network experiments in settings with more than 30 actors.
Notably, there are no studies that deal with the ways Mechanical Turk fails to reproduce canonical results from traditional lab settings. This may be a result of a tendency towards confirmation bias among Turk researchers, and one could envision a useful discussion resulting from evidence identifying Turk's weaknesses as an experimental platform.
References
Mason, W., Suri, S. A Guide to Behavioral Experiments on Mechanical Turk, Behavior Research Methods. [link]
Hustle and Flow --- Life's Hard at the Top for Baboons
Male baboons get stressed when they are alpha .... much better to be a little less central and enjoy life a little more! I love this research .... social neuroscience in action (at least, in baboons!).
Here's the research from SCIENCE. My buddy, Katie Faust, who knows about baboon networks, tells me that this is only true for male baboons .... the girls have more stable hierarchies and don't get as stressed when their centrality increases!
