***** To join INSNA, visit http://www.insna.org *****
Barry Wellman
_______________________________________________________________________
FRSC NetLab Network INSNA Founder
Faculty of Information (iSchool)
University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 3G6
http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman twitter: @barrywellman
NETWORKED:The New Social Operating System. Lee Rainie & Barry Wellman
MIT Press http://amzn.to/zXZg39 Print $15 Kindle $9
Old/NewCyberTimes http://bit.ly/c8N9V8
________________________________________________________________________
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 14:45:28 -0600
From: Complexity Digest Administration <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [comdig] Latest Complexity Digest Posts
Learn about the latest and greatest related to complex systems research. More at http://comdig.unam.mx
The Extraordinary Growing Impact Of The History Of Science
Old scientific papers never die, they just fade away. Or they used to. Now electronic publishing has made old papers as easy to find as new ones, and the effect on science is profound
https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/the-extraordinary-growing-impact-of-the-history-of-science-642022a39d67?__scoop_post=4031703322&__scoop_topic=584038
See it on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers/p/4031703322/2014/11/14/the-extraordinary-growing-impact-of-the-history-of-science) , via Papers (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers)
Lost in the City: Revisiting Milgram's Experiment in the Age of Social Networks
As more and more users access social network services from smart devices with GPS receivers, the available amount of geo-tagged information makes repeating classical experiments possible on global scales and with unprecedented precision. Inspired by the original experiments of Milgram, we simulated message routing within a representative sub-graph of the network of Twitter users with about 6 million geo-located nodes and 122 million edges. We picked pairs of users from two distant metropolitan areas and tried to find a route between them using local geographic information only; our method was to forward messages to a friend living closest to the target. We found that the examined network is navigable on large scales, but navigability breaks down at the city scale and the network becomes unnavigable on intra-city distances. This means that messages usually arrived to the close proximity of the target in only 3˙˙6 steps, but only in about 20% of the cases was it possible to find
a route all the way to the recipient, in spite of the network being connected.
Szüle J, Kondor D, Dobos L, Csabai I, Vattay G (2014) Lost in the City: Revisiting Milgram's Experiment in the Age of Social Networks. PLoS ONE 9(11): e111973. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0111973
See it on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers/p/4031741615/2014/11/14/lost-in-the-city-revisiting-milgram-s-experiment-in-the-age-of-social-networks) , via Papers (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers)
How Baidu Recorded The Largest Migration on Earth Using A Mapping App
During the Chinese New Year, people traditionally return to their families in villages all over China. 30 years ago, this event triggered the migration of about a million people over just a few days.
The rapid growth of the Chinese economy has changed all that. During the latest celebration in January and February 2014, some 3.6 billion people travelled across China making this the largest seasonal migration on Earth.
See it on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers/p/4031644803/2014/11/13/how-baidu-recorded-the-largest-migration-on-earth-using-a-mapping-app) , via Papers (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers)
Social media fingerprints of unemployment
Recent wide-spread adoption of electronic and pervasive technologies has enabled the study of human behavior at an unprecedented level, uncovering universal patterns underlying human activity, mobility, and inter-personal communication. In the present work, we investigate whether deviations from these universal patterns may reveal information about the socio-economical status of geographical regions. We quantify the extent to which deviations in diurnal rhythm, mobility patterns, and communication styles across regions relate to their unemployment incidence. For this we examine a country-scale publicly articulated social media dataset, where we quantify individual behavioral features from over 145 million geo-located messages distributed among more than 340 different Spanish economic regions, inferred by computing communities of cohesive mobility fluxes. We find that regions exhibiting more diverse mobility fluxes, earlier diurnal rhythms, and more correct grammatical styles
display lower unemployment rates. As a result, we provide a simple model able to produce accurate, easily interpretable reconstruction of regional unemployment incidence from their social-media digital fingerprints alone. Our results show that cost-effective economical indicators can be built based on publicly-available social media datasets.
Social media fingerprints of unemployment
Alejandro Llorente, Manuel Garc\'\ia-Herranz, Manuel Cebrian, Esteban Moro
http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.3140
See it on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers/p/4031643770/2014/11/13/social-media-fingerprints-of-unemployment) , via Papers (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers)
Viral Misinformation: The Role of Homophily and Polarization
The spreading of unsubstantiated rumors on online social networks (OSN) either unintentionally or intentionally (e.g., for political reasons or even trolling) can have serious consequences such as in the recent case of rumors about Ebola causing disruption to health-care workers. Here we show that indicators aimed at quantifying information consumption patterns might provide important insights about the virality of false claims. In particular, we address the driving forces behind the popularity of contents by analyzing a sample of 1.2M Facebook Italian users consuming different (and opposite) types of information (science and conspiracy news). We show that users' engagement across different contents correlates with the number of friends having similar consumption patterns (homophily), indicating the area in the social network where certain types of contents are more likely to spread. Then, we test diffusion patterns on an external sample of 4,709 intentional satirical false
claims showing that neither the presence of hubs (structural properties) nor the most active users (influencers) are prevalent in viral phenomena. Instead, we found out that in an environment where misinformation is pervasive, users' aggregation around shared beliefs may make the usual exposure to conspiracy stories (polarization) a determinant for the virality of false information.
Viral Misinformation: The Role of Homophily and Polarization
Aris Anagnostopoulos, Alessandro Bessi, Guido Caldarelli, Michela Del Vicario, Fabio Petroni, Antonio Scala, Fabiana Zollo, Walter Quattrociocchi
http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.2893
See it on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers/p/4031646482/2014/11/13/viral-misinformation-the-role-of-homophily-and-polarization) , via Papers (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers)
Emergence: A unifying theme for 21st century science
When electrons or atoms or individuals or societies interact with one another or their environment, the collective behavior of the whole is different from that of its parts. We call this resulting behavior emergent. Emergence thus refers to collective phenomena or behaviors in complex adaptive systems that are not present in their individual parts.
By David Pines, Co-Founder in Residence, Santa Fe Institute
https://medium.com/sfi-30-foundations-frontiers/emergence-a-unifying-theme-for-21st-century-science-4324ac0f951e
See it on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers/p/4031667978/2014/11/13/emergence-a-unifying-theme-for-21st-century-science) , via Papers (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers)
Ecology 2.0: Coexistence and Domination of Interacting Networks
The overwhelming success of the web 2.0, with online social networks as key actors, has induced a paradigm shift in the nature of human interactions. The user-driven character of these services for the first time has allowed researchers to quantify large-scale social patterns. However, the mechanisms that determine the fate of networks at a system level are still poorly understood. For instance, the simultaneous existence of numerous digital services naturally raises the question under which conditions these services can coexist. In analogy to population dynamics, the digital world is forming a complex ecosystem of interacting networks whose fitnesses depend on their ability to attract and maintain users' attention, which constitutes a limited resource. In this paper, we introduce an ecological theory of the digital world which exhibits a stable coexistence of several networks as well as the domination of a single one, in contrast to the principle of competitive exclusion.
Interestingly, our model also predicts that the most probable outcome is the coexistence of a moderate number of services, in agreement with empirical observations.
Ecology 2.0: Coexistence and Domination among Interacting Networks
Kaj Kolja Kleineberg, Marián Boguńá
http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.8865
See it on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers/p/4031334913/2014/11/12/ecology-2-0-coexistence-and-domination-of-interacting-networks) , via Papers (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers)
Clustering memes in social media streams
The problem of clustering content in social media has pervasive applications, including the identification of discussion topics, event detection, and content recommendation. Here we describe a streaming framework for online detection and clustering of memes in social media, specifically Twitter. A pre-clustering procedure, namely protomeme detection, first isolates atomic tokens of information carried by the tweets. Protomemes are thereafter aggregated, based on multiple similarity measures, to obtain memes as cohesive groups of tweets reflecting actual concepts or topics of discussion. The clustering algorithm takes into account various dimensions of the data and metadata, including natural language, the social network, and the patterns of information diffusion. As a result, our system can build clusters of semantically, structurally, and topically related tweets. The clustering process is based on a variant of Online K-means that incorporates a memory mechanism, used to
"forget" old memes and replace them over time with the new ones. The evaluation of our framework is carried out by using a dataset of Twitter trending topics. Over a one-week period, we systematically determined whether our algorithm was able to recover the trending hashtags. We show that the proposed method outperforms baseline algorithms that only use content features, as well as a state-of-the-art event detection method that assumes full knowledge of the underlying follower network. We finally show that our online learning framework is flexible, due to its independence of the adopted clustering algorithm, and best suited to work in a streaming scenario.
Clustering memes in social media streams
Mohsen JafariAsbagh, Emilio Ferrara, Onur Varol, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Flammini
http://arxiv.org/abs/1411.0652
See it on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers/p/4031336466/2014/11/12/clustering-memes-in-social-media-streams) , via Papers (http://www.scoop.it/t/papers)
Earth's Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters (by Martin J. S. Rudwick)
Earth has been witness to mammoths and dinosaurs, global ice ages, continents colliding or splitting apart, comets and asteroids crashing catastrophically to the surface, as well as the birth of humans who are curious to understand it all. But how was it discovered? How was the evidence for it collected and interpreted? And what kinds of people have sought to reconstruct this past that no human witnessed or recorded? In this sweeping and magisterial book, Martin J. S. Rudwick, the premier historian of the earth sciences, tells the gripping human story of the gradual realization that the Earth˙˙s history has not only been unimaginably long but also astonishingly eventful.
Rudwick begins in the seventeenth century with Archbishop James Ussher, who famously dated the creation of the cosmos to 4004 BC. His narrative then turns to the crucial period of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when inquisitive intellectuals, who came to call themselves ˙˙geologists,˙˙ began to interpret rocks and fossils, mountains and volcanoes, as natural archives of Earth˙˙s history. He then shows how this geological evidence was used˙˙and is still being used˙˙to reconstruct a history of the Earth that is as varied and unpredictable as human history itself. Along the way, Rudwick defies the popular view of this story as a conflict between science and religion and reveals that the modern scientific account of the Earth˙˙s deep history retains strong roots in Judaeo-Christian ideas.
See it on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/cxbooks/p/4031360147/2014/11/12/earth-s-deep-history-how-it-was-discovered-and-why-it-matters-by-martin-j-s-rudwick) , via CxBooks (http://www.scoop.it/t/cxbooks)
2015 Complex System Summer School | Santa Fe Institute
The Complex Systems Summer School offers an intensive four week introduction to complex behavior in mathematical, physical, living, and social systems for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in the sciences and social sciences. The school is for participants who seek background and hands-on experience to help them prepare to conduct interdisciplinary research in areas related to complex systems.
http://santafe.edu/education/schools/complex-systems-summer-schools/2015-program-info/
See it on Scoop.it (http://www.scoop.it/t/cxannouncements/p/4031333523/2014/11/12/2015-complex-system-summer-school-santa-fe-institute) , via CxAnnouncements (http://www.scoop.it/t/cxannouncements)
==============================================
Sponsored by the Complex Systems Society.
Founding Editor: Gottfried Mayer.
Editor-in-Chief: Carlos Gershenson.
To manage subscriptions, please go to http://comdig.unam.mx/subscriptions.php
You can contribute to Complexity Digest selecting one of our topics (http://www.scoop.it/u/complexity-digest ) and using the "Suggest" button.
==============================================
==============================================
_____________________________________________________________________
SOCNET is a service of INSNA, the professional association for social
network researchers (http://www.insna.org). To unsubscribe, send
an email message to [log in to unmask] containing the line
UNSUBSCRIBE SOCNET in the body of the message.
|