How We Know Us

Category: Research

  • Response: How Does the Web Define Authority?

    The real questions are: whom do we trust, why, and under what conditions is trust transferable? Chris Brogran asks: How does the web define authority? First is an important matter of language.  There is a large difference between authority and an authority.  Authority is power formally granted by a position or role.  An authority is…

  • Implied Social Networks: People In the News with Rankings

    As a follow up to this previous post with an image of the relationship between people mentioned in the news, I’ve been asked to provide more detail. First, why bother at all?  Exploring the implied relationships may tell us about the individuals in question, but certainly provide more context to each of the other topics…

  • Deconstructing Delicious: Merlin Mann

    Merlin Mann has a large set of public delicious tags, and I thought I’d take a stab at their interrelation.  By my measure of centrality, his top 20 are: 43folders domains tumble music sanfrancisco macosx flickr mbwideas gtd movies design tv selflink mac heh email productivity lifehacks the_man cigars Why Merlin Mann you might ask? …

  • 5 Years of Insider Trading

  • Implied Social Networks example: the news

    Social Network derived from relationships in the news.

  • Predict Attention in Social Networks

    People distribute attention according to a power-law distribution. Power-laws have long been associated with distribution of quantity of links individuals in social networks have. My on-going research suggests that power-laws not only describe distributions at the network level, they also describe distribution at the individual level. We communicate in a power-law distribution with our contacts,…

  • The Never Ending Quest for Data

    Finding good data in this field is difficult, even most of the academic literature references relatively small networks of less than 100 or so individuals. I suggest that the academic research is just starting to take off now (although the field is very far from new), because of availability of large real world datasets available…

  • Friendship: #1 factor in whom we spend time with

    Like all good science, analyzing social networks sometimes works out to proving things we always thought were true. Sometimes, we never even had any idea how right we were. For example, we really do spend more time with people we like. A few really bright folks from MIT and the Kennedy School, have a paper…

  • Great Work, Lousy Title

    Good news, from Roland Piquepaille over at ZDNet… According to Nature News, a team of French researchers has used medieval documents to create the oldest detailed social network ever constructed. The mathematicians and computer scientists looked through thousands of records of land transactions dating back as far as 1260 in a Southwest part of France.…

  • Playing with Circos

    Martin Krzywinski at the Genome Sciences Centre of the BC Cancer Agency, created software called Circos designed to help elucidate the interaction of genes, and has used it to create some truly beautiful graphs. The software is pretty complex, and I have only figured out how to use his simple on-line version, which limits the…