How We Know Us

Category: Research

  • I Hear Twitter

    Friendship, it seems, is more accurately demonstrated than described.  We usually don’t do a good job accurately reporting our friendships when questioned.  So, here’s a look at a slightly higher measurement of friendship: conversations. If you squint (or click to enlarge the image) you can find a little yellow dot.  That’s me.  The connections between…

  • NY Political Contributions

    Digging around the “archives” I found this image I created of the interrelations of NY residents contributing in the 2007-2008 election cycle.

  • Graphing Wall Street with LittleSis.org

    With a goal of transparency, LittleSis.Org has started collecting peer-membership information for public figures of many sorts.  Just the stuff made for social graphs! This is image represents the social networks of the CEOs of the American Wall Street companies, from the info at LittleSis.  Red nodes are the CEOs (Thain is included), and green…

  • Complete(?) Kiva Network

    I wanted to offer up an image of the complete(?) network after all of the kind interest in the preliminary network map I put together yesterday. From the feedback yesterday, I learned my lesson and have linked to a high-res version of the image.

  • Why is an influence metric hard to decide on?

    Why is coming to common metric for measuring influence so hard? Short answer: because measuring influence is not only nuanced, but it’s also really hard.  Maybe we’re asking the wrong question, maybe we should be asking how susceptible to influence are we? First, a matter of semantics: authority is power bestowed by an outside source.…

  • 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…

  • Code Blue: Swift Trust and Team Dynamics of a Crash Cart Response

    Swift Trust, much like it sounds, is the concept of rapidly coming to intra-team trust.  A doctor friend of mine who introduced me to the term, explained it with the context of the ad hoc team of MDs and nurses responding to a cardiac arrest, a code blue. I have been thinking about this throughout…

  • What we can learn about social networks from contract law

    I am big fan of looking to outside fields for ideas and expertise. Case-in-point: I recently came across a reference to a great study about contract law – when people rely on the contract for enforcement during the course of business, and when they don’t. Hint: they usually don’t; they rely on the relationship. Translating…