Al Qaeda and Network Models

In a recent article in The Atlantic, the author Armin Rosen questions whether it's time to end our obsession with al Qaeda. At this point in time, "al Qaeda can no longer inflict "catastrophic, globally-oriented terror."  What this really means is that the chances of al Qaeda being able to attack the U.S. again on a 9/11 scale have significantly diminished. 

Most interesting is the analysis that "al Qaeda has shifted from a hierarchy to more of a network model -- in other words, the group has adapted and survived in spite of the setbacks it's faced."  As a debater, Bill Roggio, put it, " "They may be at a low point...but that doesn't mean they're defeated." 

However, while al Qaeda might not be entirely defeated, their abilities are severely limited throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Ansar Dine, a militant, Salafist group in northern Mali, with ties to al Qaeda, is imposing strict shari'a law throughout its controlled territory. Yet there is no history of the type of Islamic fundamentalism being imposed in Mali. Thus, the chances Ansar Dine will be successful in imposing shari'a countrywide are quite slim, especially given international plans for a military intervention in the coming months to stem the group’s expansion. 

Health Benefits of Social Networks

According to an article in the October 2012 edition of Psychology Today, the health benefits of social networks are enormous and it would seem a necessity if we are to be healthy and live a long, fruitful, and happy life. 

The article claims, "Low levels of social interaction have the same effects as smoking 15 cigarettes a day-and worse effects than being obese or not exercising."  While it might be necessary, at times, to have some "me" time, the article and the research it talks about shows that for the most part living a social life has more health benefits than one in isolation. 

But for those who would still prefer a little more solitary life, take comfort in knowing that it isn't just about how many friends you have, but also the depth of those friendships.  Research showed that those who had a close friend to turn to during times of anxiety, exhibited lower blood pressure than those who didn't. 

To read the article, go to the following link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201209/life-lessons/lessons-loving?page=2 and scroll down to the bottom.  It is the section: Lesson #4 Social Networks Matter. 

LinkedIn - More Than Just Jobs

I don't have an article to share here, though I imagine this has been written about somewhere. All of us are likely familiar with LinkedIn and its potential as a great tool while searching for summer internships, looking for post-Fletcher full time jobs, or just trying to figure out what it is you really want to do in life! And many of use are probably aware that companies and headhunters are using LinkedIn a lot these days to find talent and recruit people.

But LinkedIn can also be a valuable source of information to competitors or adversaries. I was talking with a friend in the private sector a few days ago and he was in the middle of a conference on competitive intelligence - essentially information about competitors that businesses use to guide strategic decision and gain a leg up on their rivals. One extremely valuable source of competitive intelligence is via LinkedIn! Since employees are regularly posting their company affiliation and job titles publicly, anyone with a few minutes to spare can come up with a rough sketch of how a particular company (a competitor) is structured, how it operates, and how many people it has (and whether its hiring or firing a lot recently!). This picture will probably be more detailed than what is on their corporate website.

Furthermore, individuals have an incentive to publish more information beyond that - information on projects they completed, who they manage, what functional or regional lines they are responsible for, etc. All this information makes them look better overall so they partly share out of vanity, but it also makes them a more attractive candidate for other employers seeking new talent, or headhunters looking for smart, accomplished people. But by disclosing these details on a public forum, competitors can gather it, assemble it, and start to forecast what strategic changes their competitor is making and which directions it is heading in - very valuable insight in a highly competitive market. For example, Apple just released an iPhone with a new processor that was designed in-house, the first time that they didn't rely on an external vendor. Apple would never broadcast their strategy ahead of time, but its possible that you could have predicted this move by noticing that many computer engineers at processor design companies had recently changed their jobs via LinkedIn, say from Intel to Apple. [Just a hypothetical example - Apple is secretive enough that it probably took steps to make sure no one saw it coming!]

There are limitations of course, since some employees may not share much beyond title and company, or may not be on LinkedIn at all. And companies are starting to realize that seemingly benign information sharing by employees on "professional" social media like LinkedIn could have adverse consequences - and thus they are revamping their social media policies to reflect these concerns. Finally, LinkedIn has started to restrict access to user profiles based on degrees of separation. It does this not out of privacy concerns, but more of monetization - if you pay, you can look at all the 3rd degree connections you want! But a helpful hint - as of now at least, if you can't see a 3rd degree connection's details, just Google them and then view the cached page... all the details will show up in the archived version of the page.

Salesforce Builds its Social Network Toolbox

Salesforce, a marketing database company, has acquired social networking tools to provide its clients with the ability to further analyze their databases and how their marketing connections connect with one another.  This evolution of Salesforce's marketing tools is a demonstration of the increased awareness not of how an organization's internal social network can be engaged to foster success, but of how strategic engagement of that organization's external connections can strengthen it.

-Jane Kaminski

http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/salesforce-marketing-cloud-adds-social-a/240009370

Social media utilized for Presidential Election

Social media seems to have changed US Presidential Election substantially.

Now volunteers for both Obama and Romney campaigns are trying to influence the voting habits very efficiently: they utilize social media such as Facebook to obtain detailed knowledge of voters' lives and thus to decide target voters.

It seems to me the violation of privacy rights. Or is it just one of the strategies to win the election..?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/us/politics/campaigns-mine-personal-lives-to-get-out-vote.html?_r=1&pagewanted=1&hp

Data-Mining Industry Kicks Off a Public Relations Campaign

This article is a follow-up to the NYT article Professor recently uploaded.

Amid a growing concern about privacy and reckless use of consumer information by marketers, this company seems to have taken a bold step in an effort to forestall the regulation of the data-mining industry.

The survey done by a privacy-conscious company shows that about 67 percent of people who answered a recent e-mail questionnaire said they felt it was very important for them to be able to see the information that data brokers collected about them, while about 78 percent said they felt it was very important to be able to opt out of the distribution and sale of information about them.

Are Social Networks too Risky?

An interesting article about the privacy risks associated with the rapid growth of social networks and ways to mitigate these risks.

BBC vs. Wired: Whose news travels on Twitter?

According to a social network analysis conducted by a professor at the University of Arizona, news from BBC, Mashable, and the New York Times has the maximum reach on Twitter, meaning after the news was tweeted, the diffusion and spread were the greatest.

Researchers looked at how many people retweeted the article on their own Twitter feeds, and then how many times it was subsequently retweeted from those accounts and so forth.

“The idea is really to see if we can make some predictions,” Ram says. “What are some attributes of these networks that will help us make predictions? Is it number of followers? Is it engagement of followers?

Is it what time you tweet? Is it who else is tweeting at the same time? Which are the more useful attributes that will help us predict, and therefore will help us give organizations suggestions on how to be more effective in spreading their news?"

The visualization looks like fireworks!

Social Networks in Academia: Mentor Relationships

This poster was made at the University of Rochester to look at relationships between mentors and protegees. The work focuses on underrepresented groups including minorities and women and helps illustrate connections. Analysis was based on co-publication, and data was collected primarily from PubMed. I think it would be very instructive to see a similar analysis done in other institutions and with larger samples, perhaps to examine mentor-protegee relationships within different disciplines and also to see if there is a gender component to mentor selection by students.

The EU vs. Google - An Omen of Privacy Issues for 2025?

The article in the EU Observer is just the latest installment in the long-running battle between the EU and its strict privacy laws (largely driven by Germany), and Google's relentless effort to know everything it possibly can about its customers.  You'll find links to previous articles at the top. The one on Street Data is particularly informative.

Black, White, or Grey Hat?

The UK has blocked the extradition of Gary McKinnon to the US.  Is he an innocent White Hat who's just looking for UFOs, or is he the "biggest military hacker of all time" whose hacking was "intentional and calculated?"

Twitter, News Agencies, and SNAs

For those who are interested in using Twitter for their projects...

This researcher, Sudha Ram at the University of AZ, looked to see how news spread through Twitter for a number of news agencies. Nodes are twitter users, streams are retweets.

One interesting finding is the difference between Reuters and NY Times patterns of info diffusion: people retweeted directly from Reuters' tweets, whereas NY Times tweets were spread far and wide through long chains of retweets. Any thoughts on why this might be?

See title for link, or:

http://www.futurity.org/society-culture/bbc-vs-wired-whose-news-travels-on-twitter/

E-Diplomacy

Would public diplomacy geared by e-diplomacy improve diplomatic preparedness?  Or social network would be just another Trojan horse?  

Could the most famous e-diplomat, President Barack Obama with 20m+ followers on twitter give us the answer?

Here's Economist's coverage on e-diplomacy

Bali Bombers' Social Network Visualized

This interactive social network analysis shows how the 17 co-conspirators were connected to each other.

Look at Imam Samudra's network in particular. He clearly is the most important individual and the most active member. He appears to have had the most access to others, including all operation assistants and bomb makers, and maintained possibly the greatest control over the flow of information.

Commonly Cited Sociology Articles and Books

This social network map is quite impressive. 

Each node is an article or book that was among the 500 most cited articles in US sociology over the last five years. The minimum for inclusion was 23 citations. The size of the node is based on how many times the work was cited. Works that are books have a black circle around them. If you hover over a circle, you can find the author, publication year, book or journal title and the number of times it has been cited. 

Works that are frequently cited together have the same color!

"Do not track" - A Portent of the influence of online networks?

Really thought-provoking piece with arguments on both sides well-stated.  Will online networks, social or not, be "drivers of organizational success" in the years to come?  Click title to read.

Citation and Co-Author links

One of you asked me about these types of networks.  My colleague Loet Leydesdorff from the University of Amsterdam is one of the leading scholars on citation links, and he has also created software and analysis tools to take such links from the SSCI and other easily-available resources.  Click on the title to get to his website (same link as at bottom below.) 

Interactive Overlays on the basis of Aggregated Journal-Journal Citations

2011

The overlays can be made on the basis of any download from the (Social) Science Citation Index at the Web-of-Science in the (so-called) tagged format. The procedure for generating overlay maps on the basis of journals is analogous to the one for 2009 data described in: Loet Leydesdorff & Ismael Rafols, Interactive Overlays: A New Method for Generating Global Journal Maps from Web-of-Science Data, Journal of Informetrics 6(3) (2012), 318-332. The number of journals included in 2011 is 10,675 (JCR 2011 for the Science Edition and Social Science Edition combined, v. 1; July 2012).

The single major difference with the previous maps is clustering on the basis of the decomposition algorithm of Blondel et al. (2008) as default.

Previously, we used clustering as provided by VOSViewer (Waltman et al., 2010). However, the two clustering results are both available, and the user can change this option. Examples and instruction are provided at

http://www.leydesdorff.net/journals11 .

China Tops World in Microbloggers

According to an article published by China's state news agency, the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC) just released a new estimate on how many microblog users China has: 274 million -- just 12% less than the entire population of the United States.

Among those, over 18,000 microblog accounts have been opened by government and Communist Party agencies -- many of them at the local level -- as of last October.

Why do so many branches of the state apparatus feel compelled to use this form of communication?

As we've mentioned in class, there is an active debate about whether microblogs are useful in social network analysis. But China's authorities and citizenry alike have realized the power of these tools to communicate a message.

As the article says, "Governments have realized the influence of social networks and put more effort in working with them."

The History of the Web and the Public Self

According to Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic, we have the history of the Web all wrong.

Madrigal argues against the dominant theory, which espouses a mid-2000 paradigm shift from mostly static, unconnected webpages to a drastically more social Web 2.0 due to webcrawlers and sites like Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia.

I'm not particularly interested in parsing through competing historical narratives, but I was quite taken by his point that, "the sharing you see on sites like Facebook and Twitter is the tip of the 'social' iceberg. We are impressed by its scale because it's easy to measure."


Data on web traffic show that most social traffic is what Madrigal calls "Dark Social":

It shows up variously in programs as "direct" or "typed/bookmarked" traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you. 

The web analytics firm Chartbeat has found a way to quantify this "dark social" (they call it "direct social") data, and it turns out that for media sites, around 69% of social referrals were "dark," followed by Facebook (20%) and Twitter (6%).

So, most sharing of articles online is done in a way that is difficult to measure.

In addition to his conclusions about reevaluating what the true tradeoffs are of our decision to engage with social networking sites (or not), this article expanded my thinking on the concept of the "public self" and how that may impact SNA accuracy. There is a reason people are sharing information privately, or semi-privately, with more frequency than they are Tweeting or posting articles to Facebook.

This is worth bearing in mind when attempting to conduct an analysis using social media data.

Can online social nets help you get healthier? - A virtual round-table on October 18th

(From Tom Valente, one of the leading experts on SN's in Health.  His book is excerpted in the Trunk readings and available on reserve in Ginn.)

Of potential interest to many of you, Nathan Cobb (Legacy Institute), Bernie Hogan (Oxford Internet Institute), and Tom Valente (University of Southern California) will

take part in a GE Healthcare Virtual Roundtable on October 18th, between 16:00-16:45 BST,  asking; “Can online social networks help you get healthier?”, exploring the possible role of social networking in improving health behaviour.

We will discuss issues relating to the possible effect and evaluation of online social media health campaigns. The roundtable will be recorded on an open conference call, with participation available to all.

The Twitter hashtag for questions, comments and views before, during and after this event is #socialhealth

For more information please visit: http://bit.ly/OXMdI6

Or register directly here: http://bit.ly/socialhealthroundtable

I hope that you can join us on October 18th.

Avian Social Networks

Tracking technology has started looking at social interactions between animals. This would be some interesting data to take a look at!

Speaking of SNA of Terrorist Cells...

An interesting social network visualization done by a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology. It illustrates ties within the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist cell which carried out the 2002 Bali bombings. 

Mobile Social Network Analysis Solution

ABIBA Systems launches Mobile Social Network Analysis Solution 

"ChampionTM SNA will help marketers visualize their subscriber community and understand the role of each subscriber within his or her community."

This is an interesting article about how telecommunications companies are utilizing social network analysis to develop marketing strategies tailored more to you based on how you communicate.  I think for all of us who have been working on the Women2Women project and understanding the benefits for good causes like this, it's interesting to see this tool used for commercial purposes.  Do you think cell phone carriers utilizing your information is going to impact your life?

Today (October 17th) is the first International Day of the GIrl

How fitting!  This is a UN effort, described in the blog link.

Shift Happens

This video, entitled "Shift Happens," was shown to my by a friend: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmwwrGV_aiE.  It highlights the incredible advancement of ICT in recent years, as well as forecasts some mind-blowing prospects for the future.  It's a great "shock and awe" supplement to our discussion last Friday.  Enjoy!

Kevin Mitnick: Hacking and social media

Kevin Mitnick is a famous hacker of the 90s, who (in my opinion) is a hacker who just hacked for the sake of hacking. Though once apprehended, FBI officials put him in solitary confinement believing he could set off a nuclear bomb by "whistling into a pay phone."

Rather than using technical hacking skills, Mitnick used "social engineering," which is influencing people who have access to computer systems to tell you information either directly or indirectly. An indirect example is getting a user to click on an attachment in an email (or phishing).

Hackers who utilize social engineering target certain types of employees, like information gatekeepers, new hires or remote employees (http://www.cio.com/article/29825/Kevin_Mitnick_on_Social_Engineering_Hackers). Mitnick mentions that social media makes targeting these employees even easier. LinkedIn, for instance, allows you to painlessly find the new employees at a company or the people with access to the company's information systems.

Here is a clip from an interview with Mitnick on Colbert:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/395003/august-18-2011/kevin-mitnick

Medicine + SNA

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2011-05-genomics-social-network-analysis-team.html

Prof. Tunnard mentioned the benefits of SNA in medicine.  This article exhibits that well, explaining how SNA, along with genome mapping, allowed the researchers to paint a more detailed picture of why people were getting sick. 

But what I really pulled from this article was the possible marriage of two different sectors- medicine and law enforcement.  Taking the information acquired through SNA, law enforcement officials can use it to track any ongoing drug rings- names, locations, links- and bust those rings.  Of course the beauty of doing an SNA in this particular instance is not only do you find out the basic info.  But almost always there is a person who acts as a bridge to several clusters.  If a SNA is done long enough, these clusters will start revealing themselves.  One could look at centrality measures (degree, closeness, betweenness) as well as what cliques exist.  Ego Networks would also be beneficial as one might be able to pinpoint who the head honcho is in a drug ring. 

Thus specifically, what I'm envisioning is when patients with a history of drug abuse come to the hospital, a simple questionnaire that allows the hospital to get the necessary info to do a SNA can be a requirement for the patients to fill out.  Once that is completed, the hospital can do a SNA.  If there is something suspicious, then the hospital could turn the information in to law enforcement officials who can then bust drug rings.  Of course this is in theory and there are other hurdles (primarily legal) that these sectors would have to overcome, but under certain circumstances and with due reason, it could be enough to overcome the hurdles. 

Andrew Blum: "Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet"

That's the title of a fascinating new book that answers the question: "Exactly where is the Internet, anyway?"  I don't know about you, but I've always wondered. Click on the title to see Andrew Blum's TED talk.

Stuxnet: the most menacing malware in history

This is nothing to do with SNA though..

Below are interesting pieces about Stuxnet, which was revealed to be designed by the US and Israel to contain Iran's nuclear capability.

Stuxnet was believed to have destroyed nearly 1,000 of Iran's 6,000 centrifuges.
We understand US's longstanding efforts and willingness to withdraw nuclear facilities from Iran, however, could this means be justified either by the benign intention or by the effects?

Here's a WP's report: Stuxnet was their work, officials confirmed

Another interesting read.
Here is how Digital detectives deciphered the Stuxnet

Boston-Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks

Here is the schedule for fall semester seminars on SNA at Northeastern:
(Note: a light lunch will be served at noon events)

October 17, 5-6pm
Ken Frank (MSU)
The Embeddedness of Adolescent Friendship: New Friends from Emergent Network Structures
Location: The Center for Complex Network Research (CCNR), Northeastern University

October 22, 12-1pm
Edoardo M. Airoldi (Harvard)
Graphlets analysis of weighted networks
Location: Lazer Lab (132 Nightingale Hall, 105 Forsyth St), Northeastern University

October 23, 12-1pm
Damon Centola (MIT)
Health and Social Influence: Homophily and Contagion, Redux
Location: CCNR, Northeastern University

November 16, 12-1pm + workshop after
Lars-Erik Cederman (ETH-Zurich) and Nils Weidmann (Peace Research Institute Oslo)
Who inherits the state? Colonial rule and post-colonial conflict + workshop on GIS and conflict
Location: TBD

November 29, 12-1pm
Bruce Desmarais (UMass)
Communities in Congressional Campaign Finance Networks and the
Emergence of the Establishment Challenger
Location: CCNR, Northeastern University

December 5, 12-1:30pm
Kris Carpenter Negulescu (Internet Archive), Matthew Weber (Rutgers)
Social Science Research & Web Archives: Building a Research Agenda
Location: CCNR, Northeastern University


The Center for Complex Network Research Dana Research Center Northeastern University
110 Forsyth Building, 5th Floor (Large Elevator)
100 Forsyth Street, Boston, MA 02115

PARKING
Renaissance Garage #62
835 Columbus Ave., Boston, MA 02120

For questions and/or directions, email m.lee@neu.edu.

Crime-busting SNA

The Huffington Post reports that police are using social network analysis to track down criminals as well as deter future attacks. Entrepreneurial private technology firms like SAS Institute Inc. of North Carolina are teaching officers how to scrape and analyze tetrabytes of data point into "patterns of interest". SAS software can also help investigators visualize a suspects connections and locate data to more quickly and efficiently locate suspects. Other creative private firms are pushing the limits of using social media for intelligence purposes. A college campus police investigator for example, friends his targets with fake profiles in order to monitor their activities closely. Now that's a creepy thought. Read more here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/04/web-surveillance-social-media_n_1854750.html Jing Liu

Application of Social Network Analysis in Public Policy

It is interesting to find out how Social Network Analysis could be used to understand public policy decisions.This study, which was conducted in Nigeria, to understand the decision making process for the introduction of a new vaccine, provides valuable insights on the application of SNA in the public policy domain.
Read More>>

Follow the food: Safety laws shape global trade

SNA of global trade patterns of corn shows that countries are more likely to trade with other countries which have similar food safety regulations. 

The report looked at import/export data for 217 countries from 2000 - 2009 and examined each nation's aflatoxin level regulations. As the largest exporter of corn worldwide, the US was at the center of one cluster. European nations tended to trade with each other due to Europe's more stringent aflatoxin regulations. 

As the network graph shows, US is at the center of a large cluster of North and Latin American nations, which themselves are hardly connected with each other or with other nations in the network, then this portion of the network of maize trade would become extremely vulnerable to reduced food supply and increased prices if anything should affect the quality or quantity of US maize available for export.

The networked-way-of-life and SNA

As Facebook is increasingly being referred to as the “Third nation” and Obama officially met with Zuckerberg, I would like to think about the impact of social media on our behavior, and a way of analyzing the changes it has instaured in our lives from a social network analysis perspective.

How does the use of social network impact real-life relationships? How many “friends” have we never met IRL? How many happy-married couples met through a friend’s friend… on Facebook? 

Another question sprung to my mind as a wind of panic blew on Facebook (last week, “private messages” were posted on our “walls” due to, supposedly, a bug in the system): Are technology-averse people condemned to become isolates, outliers in a virtually-connected world, or will they on the contrary become the crucial nodes in linking people in real life?  It would be interesting to find someone that has never been on Facebook and analyze their ego network, and the way they are related to their friends... if such a person exists. 

Social Networks for Leadership in Humanitarian Action

I spent the past week attending the GLOBE Leadership Seminar in Tallories, France. The seminar was focused on leadership in humanitarian action. I simply could not resist thinking about how what we were discussing applies to this course. Although every organization that enters a humanitarian situation has its own leader, the landscape in humanitarian zones is certainly anything but hierarchical. The government must first request aid, but after that, the area is bombarded by many, many organizations--all with their internal hierarchies. Increasingly, humanitarian actors have used cluster coordination, whereby a leader is selected to lead a cluster of participants in key areas--shelter, water, food, etc. But again, the success of the clusters is dependent on the leadership of the coordinator and the relationships that actors build within the cluster!

It could be interesting to complete a historical SNA of the Haiti earthquake, for example, to understand the relationships that were built on the ground...if it has not already been done, I am sure it would bring up at least a few points humanitarian leaders don't know already.

Application of Social Network Analysis to the sports industry

This interesting study talks about the application of social network analysis to the sports industry. It is amazing to find out that social network analysis can be applied to explain why athletes accept the risk of pain and suffering in sports.
Read More>>

The Friendship Paradox

The Friendship Paradox as examined through social network analysis, particularly ego networks. Conclusion not surprising: our friends are on average more popular than us!

Interesting how they use this analysis to examine epidemics, particularly the experiment at Harvard of students infected with H1N1.

Twitter App Tracks Illness Outbreaks

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that it would make Web-based application, "MappyHealth" to track and analyze health related comments on Twitter.  The app will help local public health agencies identify emerging health issues and public health emergencies earlier than traditional surveillance methods do. 

Actually, studies of the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic and the Haiti cholera outbreak show that social media could detect disease outbreaks about 2 weeks earlier than conventional surveillance methods.

If the public health agencies not only in the U.S but also in other countries can utilize MappyHealth, it will contribute a lot to improve global public health!

http://www.informationweek.com/healthcare/clinical-systems/twitter-app-tracks-illness-outbreaks/240007513

Where do you consume news?

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/189776/one-third-of-adults-under-30-get-news-on-social-networks-now/

The study has found 33 percent of those young adults got news from social networks the day before, while 34 percent watched TV news and just 13 percent read print or digital newspaper content.

It's notable that Twitter functions more as an 'interest network' rather than a 'social network.'  That is, people's news consumption is highly dependent on who they are connected.

So I am wondering if we could gauge the level of shared interest within a certain network by SNA?

Geography and Social Network Analysis

In poking around to try and find a convincing argument to compel you all to check out the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting I found some really interesting examples of how researchers  have begun to marry the methods of spatial and social network analysis.

The graphic above is from a study entitled "Spatializing Social Networks: Using Social Network Analysis to Investigate Geographies of Gang Rivalry, Territoriality, and Violence in Los Angeles" (If anyone wants the full paper I have member access to it and will try to upload it to Prof. Tunnard's Google Drive) It is basically a social network given spatiality, and visualizing the data on a map adds another dimension to the possibilities for analysis. 

Ironically the AAG Annual Meeting is in L.A. this year! You should all consider this great opportunity to share your work for this or any other course with an enthusiastic and appreciative community of academics and practitioners of geography and related disciplines (if you haven't figured this out yet just put a spatial spin on any field and your in). 

This year's themes include: 

• Emerging Asias
• Beyond the Los Angeles School: Global Urbanization
• Climate Change, Variability, Adaptation and Justice
• Geography, GIScience, and Health: Spatial Frontiers of Health Research and Practice
• Activist Geographies: Struggles for Social and Environmental Justice
• Borders

Abstracts are due by October 24th.

Great Posts--and Suggestions

Class,

There are already some really interesting posts up here.  From SNs of animals, to political resistance, to job advertisements for big-bucks positions.  I will try to comment on all of them but may not have time this week.  Keep 'em coming, please.

Suggestions:

• Be sure to put a title on your post
• Make your title clickable to the main link you want people to see.  Don't just paste the URL in the text
• Put labels in to help Search work faster (on right when you create/edit a  post)

Collective Action Theory and Nonviolent Social Movements

One of my main drivers for taking this course is to learn how to effectively analyze social networks in nonviolent movements. I am particularly interested in how leadership and authority emerge from these networks. Who are the catalyzers? What are the issues? How are people organizing themselves in transnational social movements and mobilizing other communities both online and on the ground? And even more importantly, how are we re-defining community with the advent of social media?

“Collective Action Theory Meets the Blogosphere” addresses cyber-collective action and social networks. One particular online campaign it analyzes is the Al-Huwaider Campaign. A Saudi female writer and journalist Waheja Al-Huwaider posted a YouTube video that quickly went viral, of her driving around the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by herself, which is forbidden. Her actions, combined with her online writings, have been inspirational for other collective action movements promoting women’s rights in the Middle East. The paper does an issue analysis of Al-Huwaider’s writings on other blogs, and how they were transmitted across national borders to influence the issue discussion.

While the paper falls short of providing more concrete examples of what types of collective action Al-Huwaider’s writings and online campaign actually influenced on the ground, it offers an important perspective in mapping the interactions and influence of issue-based discussions and the rapidly emerging field of how people are exercising leadership and authority in the blogosphere.

Animal Social Network Analysis

http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112698486/social-network-birds-encounternet-tracking-092112/

These electronic tags are an amazing discovery:

While social network analysis has been extensively developed and used for studying human societies and behavior, animals are also social creatures. One of the problematic aspects of studying an animal’s social network, prior to the unveiling of this technology, was that animals tend not to share with you where they have been and with whom they have interacted. This information is vital to the study of a social network. Encounternet makes the continuous study of a population possible.
redOrbit (http://s.tt/1nZhD)

I wonder if you can still use these tags as surveillance devices on people you're trying to spy on...

Yay for new technologies that spread the benefits of social network analysis to the animal world!

SNA Positions in the Real World

www.clearancejobs.com/jobs/1518263/social-network-analysis-instructor-sme

Thought some of you might find it interesting to see the type of work one could possibly do using the knowledge and skills learned in this class as well as how much that would pay. 

SNA and Intelligence Analysts

http://www.dvidshub.net/news/94686/nps-core-lab-rethinks-traditional-intelligence-analysis

This article talks about the CORE lab at the Naval Postgraduate School and some of the applications undergoing development and even mentions some successful past application of SNA.  The most interesting to me is the Dynamic Twitter Network Analysis (DTNA) which could potentially help US policy makers decide which groups to aid, if the US desired to take action in Syria.  The potential is limitless for SNA.

Mike Jones

Using SNA to shed light on the organizational structure of political movements

With under two months left until Election Day, “Partisan Webs: Information Exchange and Party Networks” – an article by Gregory Koger, Seth Masket, and Hans Noel – is highly relevant to current discourse regarding the direction of democracy in the US.

Much has been made of the landmark 2010 Citizens United decision, which eliminated campaign finance limits for individuals, corporations and interest groups, heralding the rise of “Super PACs.” To date, the Center for Responsive Politics estimates that Super PACs have contributed over $250 million to the current campaign cycle. Similarly, many have become concerned that significant corporate influence in the media sector has contributed to an increase in partisan reporting, minimizing average citizens’ access to objective analysis of events. Despite discussion of these developments in the abstract, political parties, media organizations, and interest groups continue to publicly insist on organizational independence.  Yet it is clear they at least influence one another, if more formalized cooperation does not exist behind closed doors.

Koger et al.’s research uses social network analysis to elucidate the extent of formalized, behind the scenes cooperation between media organizations, interest groups, and formal political parties during the 2004-2005 election cycle. They accomplished this by relying on the metric of shared mailing lists to signify organizational cooperation between two publicly unassociated entities. Acting as a political donor, the authors mapped the social network of the Republican and Democratic Parties by measuring the paper trail of responses that their initial set of contributions generated. Their findings confirmed that US politics are shaped by “extended party networks” that consist of the aforementioned actors cooperating in both formal and informal contexts.  They also found that, at least during the period studied, the Democratic network was much larger and integrated than that of the Republicans.

While there are clear methodological challenges to this type of analysis, it nonetheless holds significant potential beyond the US context. What if we could employ similar techniques to better understand the popular bases and or donor networks of political parties in emerging democracies? Even though the article is several years old, I think it’s well worth posting.

Social networks to reduce package delivery emissions

Goods purchased online are typically delivered individually to customers’ homes. Carried mostly by fuel-inefficient delivery trucks, “last mile” local delivery systems represent the single largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) by online purchases. 

Progress has been made reducing the impact in urban area by employing centralized pick-up locations where customers can claim their packages –  kiosks, grocery stores, public transport locations, etc.. But suburban areas have proven more vexing. Centralized pick-ups make actually increase emissions, as customers are more likely to drive and to make separate trips for each package.

Researchers from the University of Minnesota and Seoul National University think social networks might be part of the solution. If consumers can enlist their social networks to claim packages when they are closer to the pick-up locations, their actions can reduce the total number of miles driven and emissions released. And because people tend to see others in their local network regularly, the package can be returned to the customer without requiring a separate trip solely for the delivery. Look here for more information. 

Suu Kyi and twitter

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/18/the_lady_and_the_tweet

Upon Aung San Suu Kyi's visit to the US,
the foreign policy magazine reilluminated social network's impacts on social change.
Given the diminishing political and economic leverage of Western governments for human rights, media does not focus as much as it should on these issues.  Instead, dynamic grassroots inspired, motivated by their online neighbors through social media are standing for human rights.  It's true that some criticize the effects of social media calling 'clicktivism' or 'slacktivism,' however, we are witnessing its power in many cases regardless of the ultimate success in achieving goals(Chinese blind lawyer vs. Russia's Pussy Riot)
It might require more time to judge social media's definitive effects on social changes though, it seems pretty clear social media is playing a role as a stepping stone to make people become more engaged, readily interested in social changes.

BTW,
Will President 'Putin'(not Medvedev as seemingly mistakenly written in the article) ever listen to those critiques?  Is this a matter of national(or one leader's) characteristics or anything else?
 

Networking a Murder...of Crows

http://www.thisisbath.co.uk/Sophisticated-social-network-crow/story-16935299-detail/story.html

A short article, but a good read nonetheless that describes the application of SNA to fields we wouldn't initially consider applying SNA to.  Through SNA application, not only are we able to better understand organizations and human interaction, but with the development of technology and its utilization, we can also better understand animal interaction and consequently our world.  Most animals are embedded into some social network, even if only loosely, for survival.  The implications of better understanding animal social networks can have huge ramifications on not only gaining an understanding of our world, but also in gaining new knowledge of interactions, which based on the knowledge, could be applied to managing organizations.

SNA of Russian Protest in Twitter

The slides get more interesting I promise...

http://www.slideshare.net/AlexanderSemeonov/social-network-analysis-of-hashtag-usage-during-protest-meetings

The conclusions are always the most interesting imo. No spoiler alerts.

Except 1:

Twitter is not a place for discussion.

But how did he reach that conclusion?

Are we going to be doing SNA on sites like Twitter and Facebook I wonder... If so, I'm stoked!

«Al Qaeda hasn’t achieved what an insane video has »

http://www.firstpost.com/world/arab-spring-to-autumn-rage-the-dark-power-of-social-media-455286.html

At the risk of sounding pseudo-intellectual, I shall start my first blog post quoting Socrates: “all I know is that I know nothing”. And for sure, I for the moment know nothing about social networks analysis. I’m not good at maths and have humble quantitative skills. However, the crucial role communication, networks and connectedness have come to play in past years’ geopolitical developments in the Arab Region made me reconsider my natural preferences towards the all-qualitative.

As classes begin, the Arab Region is again under the media’s spotlight. This time, an insulting film has triggered massive popular reactions in the region, resulting in the death of – but not only – US ambassador to Libya. Many of those protests, it seems, have been organized through Facebook groups, reaching as far as Paris where 150 people where arrested after an unauthorized demonstration in front of the US Embassy had taken place on Saturday. Former French Prime Minister François Fillon was wondering in Le Monde this morning how such a demonstration could have happened without any official authorization. The response lies, again, in social media: calls for mobilization have been spread through instant messaging, Facebook and Twitter, under the Htag “Touche pas à mon prophète”. Connectedness, reactivity: in a few hours, decisions concerning time, date and place where made, as well as the initiative of going without the prefecture’s authorization. Yes, François, that’s how things are done now. But a crucial question remains: who will be sued for this collective (more than 4000 people had signed up in the Facebook group) action?

The horizontal, polycephalic nature of these movements/demonstrations makes it difficult to determine who plays which role in their organization. In my masters thesis I would (tentatively) like to explore the role of new media in the Arab Spring: how have they facilitated the penetration of human rights discourse in the civil society? In such movements, which actors play a crucial role? Is it the “tech savvies”, whose blog posts fueled the collective action, or the indiscriminate mass of people anonymously gathered in public spaces? How do we explore that?

These are the questions that brought me to this class, and that’s how I end up actually enjoying reading about sums, derivatives, nodes, alters and other egos. 

Facebook's influence on elections

A study of millions of Facebook users on Election Day 2010 has found that online social networks can have a measurable if limited effect on voter turnout. 

Social Network Analysis for Marketing

Hello all,

Through this course, I am planning on focusing on how marketers and/or fundraisers can use social network analysis to inform marketing and outreach efforts. It seems sensible to focus on how social network analysis could particularly inform social media-related marketing. I also think it could be interesting to discuss how fundraisers could use social network analysis to plan face-to-face meetings and engagement with large donors!

At first glance, it seems many digital marketing firms are trying to, well, market the fact that they offer social network analysis as part of their service package. Interesting.

http://www.digitaltonto.com/2011/3-ways-to-use-social-network-analysis-for-marketing/: This article discusses how social network analysis might inform marketing efforts in the context of some of the other applications of social network analysis that have already been discussed in class.

http://predictive-marketing.com/index.php/tag/social-network-analysis/: This is very interesting--a study which suggests businesses should think of their customers differently in the context of social networks. This article made me think of a blog I read a while ago (http://comcast-hitandrun.blogspot.com/). I wonder if the author has high network value!

Mapping Social Networks over Time and Space

As a novice in social network analysis (SNA), I feel I should be sticking to the basics for now.  I came across this realization while reading Prell (2012), who discusses (pp. 77-78) among other things the potential problems posed by data “reliability,” defined roughly as “the extent to which a measurement will yield the same results time and time again.”  Not yet knowing exactly how to analyze social data, let alone how to account for problems with reliability, I feel comfortable gravitating toward social data and social actor relations that are likely to have a high intrinsic degree of reliability...  

The Social Networks of Myths

I suppose it was inevitable the someone would make the case that the characters in Beowulf and the Iliad could be described as living in small-world, scale-free networks...

Kony 2012: How it spread

A very relevant article on the recent Kony 2012 phenomenon.

Even more interesting is the blog where Zuckerman got the data visualization: http://giladlotan.com/

Setting the Advocacy Agenda: Theorizing Issue Emergence and Nonemergence in Transnational Advocacy Networks

The reading for my Politics of Statecraft class on advocacy groups included this article on transnational advocacy networks using a case study of children in armed conflict organizations. It uses UCINET to map the network of hyperlinks for Watchlist and children in armed conflict organizations.

R. Charli Carpenter. "Setting the Advocacy Agenda: Theorizing Issue Emergence and Nonemergence in Transnational Advocacy Networks." International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 99–120.

10 Ways To Transform Into A Social Enterprise

Expert advice from IBM's Connect 2012 conference :

10 Ways To Transform Into A Social Enterprise