How We Know Us

How We Know Us

  • Kiva Micro-Lending Offers API

    Incredibly great idea Kiva.org, the distributed micro-lending organization, has recently released a freely available API for accessing their data. I have just started poking at the data available, as I suspect network analysis will be able to help predict rates of return. Good on ‘ya Kiva! Update: hi-res image by request from smoovej

  • Demographics Fail

    We forget, now that our reach is wide, that all purchasing is done by individuals.  Since we don’t know the individuals, and locating and selling to each and every one of them (us) is too expensive, we developed marketing to help us select the people, the individuals, most likely to purchase whatever we are selling. …

  • 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.…

  • Andreas Kluth and the Campfire

    Great podcast interview with the Economist‘s Andreas Kluth contrasting social media and the communication around the campfire. “We were all awkward as teenagers … if I had had already Facebook and such media available to me I would have probably been completely impossible to talk to now. Because of course, there is a certain brain…

  • /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…

  • 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…

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