How We Know Us

Month: December 2008

  • /Message: Authority Is A Highly Charged Particle

    I’ve discussed my thoughts on authority before and I think follower count is a poor measure; but Stowe Boyd as has a great post (where the name for this post came from) summing up much of the controversy. Two things I particularly like about the post: his spelling out why follower count is not without…

  • Beautiful, Beautiful Data

    Flip over at InfoChimps has put together a massive scrape of twitter.  While trying to figure out how to process it all, I’ve drawn one day’s scrape* (20-Dec-08).  Many thanks to Flip and InfoChimps for the wow work, and doubly so for making publicly available.

  • Random Graph Generation in Perl

    If you ever find yourself needing to generate random graphs in Perl (quite the ice breaker, I can tell you), I recommend checking out Matt Spear’s Graph::Maker, which has generators for everything from Erdos-Renyi and Watts-Strogatz to Lollipop graphs. The only downside is the use of Graph which is s-l-o-w for graphs of even moderate…

  • Happiness is Contagious in Social Networks

    Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself, the study found. A happy friend of a friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.8%, and even your neighbor’s sister’s friend can give you a 5.6% boost. “Your emotional state depends not just on actions and choices that you make,…

  • Game Theory + Network Analysis = ?; An Example

    During one Saturday in the beginning of November, I took part in a multi-party negotiation, which had some surprising results. Out of curiosity, I mapped who wanted what from whom, and ran a basic network analysis.  The second surprise of the day was the analysis was really close to the observed results. I hope this…