How We Know Us

Tag: application

  • Network Analysis Application to Game Theory (with Software)

    When will network analysis provide additional insight into game theory? In a word: inequality. There must be some form of quantifiable inequality in the game: access, strength of relationships, goals, etc.  This difference creates opportunities for the individual players to use information (or resource) asymmetries and broker to their benefit. On the left all of…

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Sales Teams need Social Networks

    Effective use of social networks (SN’s) is closer to sales than it is to marketing.  You want to build momentum in the network, and marketing alone will not provide that. There’s a lot more to SN’s than better demographics, and given the abysmal value advertisers are are placing on Facebook (suggested $0.32 CPM vs. $1.15…

  • 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…

  • Lower Limits on Social Network Analysis: Just Ask

    Are there lower limits to the size of Social Networks worth analyzing?  The upper limit seems to be a function of how much time (and compute power) you have, but the lower? When we do analyses, these are certain characteristics we look for as verification that our models hold.  A key characteristic is the shape…

  • Social Networks of the Senate

    I always enjoy analyzing social networks (SN’s) that have had a lot less press than the Goliaths of MySpace and Facebook.  I have done an awful lot of them, but one of my favorites was looking at the co-sponsorship patterns in the US Senate, 110th session (the current one). This analysis was especially enjoyable because…

  • Your network: for or against you?

    Your network can help you or work against you, it all depends on the level alignment between your network and your goals.  If you are trying to get something done with a team, your network should reflect that.  If you are looking for new opportunties, your network should reflect that. I wrote a short piece…