Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Is the U.S. Isolated mid-(Asia) Pivot? Network Showing Countries' TPP Negotiation Positions



"Political scientists often talk about dyads, by which we simply mean groups of two. In this case, a dyad refers to a pair of TPP countries. If we count up every instance that the United States appears in the same marker as, say, Australia, we can say that the U.S.-Australia dyad occurs with a certain frequency. If we did this for every possible dyad, we could compare the frequency of dyads and get a sense of how often countries’ negotiating positions overlap. The following chart displays the frequency of every possible dyad among the 12 TPP countries. For example, the U.S.-Australia dyad (AU-US) appears 83 times in the leaked text, and is the 43rd most frequent dyad. Note that the order doesn’t matter: a U.S.-Australia dyad is the same as an Australia-U.S. dyad."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2013/11/18/the-united-states-is-isolated-in-the-trans-pacific-partnership-negotiations/

Friday, November 15, 2013

Social Networks as a predictor for criminal behavior in Chicago

Chicago PD using SNA for murder forecasting

While Yale sociologists find social networks in victims of fatal shootings, the Chicago PD takes SNA in order to predict a "heat list"of likely shooters to reach out to. Fascinating and a bit troubling.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Social Networks Critical to Understanding the Spread of Obesity

Health professionals in this study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, conducted a social network analysis to see how person-to-person networks contribute to the obesity epidemic. Their conclusion was not very surprising: network phenomena is quite relevant to this epidemic and its spread depends on the social ties. 

http://humannaturelab.net/wp-content/themes/human-nature-lab/media/pdf/publications/articles/078.pdf