Connectedness

Network Centrality: Making us Lazy Conformists, Says NSF

2008-07-18T16:55:00.000-04:00

[Ed note: This is the last tangent before we really finally close the network centrality thread with a positive note, coming soon.]

The NSF reports today: "The Internet gives scientists and researchers instant access to an astonishing number of academic journals. So what is the impact of having such a wealth of information at their fingertips? The answer, according to new research released today in the journal Science, is surprising--scholars are actually citing fewer papers in their own work, and the papers they do cite tend to be more recent publications. This trend may be limiting the creation of new ideas and theories."

This is an argument for Google-induced stupidity that I can agree with (unlike last week's).

My only beef with the NSF blurb is the notion that anything "surprising" is happening here. There is plenty of evidence of our lemming-like ways in other contexts; we should expect a human tendency to dive over the cliff of the web's dark side. Here's a first-person demonstration. By doing a bit of Googling I can share the first decent link that pops up to support the claim that humans are lemmings: Conversation, Information, and Herd Behavior, in the American Economic Review, 1995. Using Google in this way, I can feel myself regressing into a rodent even now.

One of the first, most famous and shocking demonstrations of human lemmingness was devised by Solomon Asch in the 1950's. Most people after reading this story find it hard to believe that it could happen to them. I had the "good fortune" to be tricked by my college psychology professor into Asch's trap, exposing my irrational lemmingness for all my 200 classmates to see. I have no doubt that I am a weak-willed conformist.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Network Centrality: Making Us Stupid, Says Atlantic Monthly

2008-06-30T13:41:00.000-04:00

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" asks Nicholas Carr on the cover of this month's Atlantic Monthly. In a nutshell, Carr laments the decline of "deep reading" and suspects that we are losing "deep thinking" as well. I would not argue the "deep reading" point, but the connection to "deep thinking" is debatable and surely this excellent rebuttal is not the last blog post that will take Carr to task.

Here I will argue Carr on a different point. About two-thirds into his essay, he says:

"Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the men who founded Google, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence. 'The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,' Page said in a speech a few years back. 'For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.' In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, 'Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.' ....

[Carr continues] "Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ.... Still, their easy assumption that we’d all 'be better off' if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized."

Two counterarguments immediately come to mind in response to the above:

For many of us, it is quite natural to believe that intelligence can be the output of a mechanical process. I suspect I am in a minority on this point, so for those who are curious to consider intelligence outside the stuff of brains, I simply recommend the book, The Mind's Eye, a collection of essays around this topic edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett.
In the passage above, there is a belief espoused explicitly by Brin and implicitly by Carr that is even more unsettling (at least to me) than the notion of mechanized intelligence: That we'd be "better off" if we were smarter. Read Carr's entire essay and you'll see that, just like his essay title suggests, he is very pro-smart and anti-dumb. I'll grant that with more intelligence, we have a way to boast of being "better than..."; but being "better off" is another question altogether.

In short, Carr's passion for intelligence combined with his strict accounting of its boundaries are a recipe for fundamentalism.

...

My regular readers may be wondering what happened to the "celebration of competitiveness" that I promised last time. Or maybe, what does any of this have to do with networks? Good questions. I beg your patience, dear reader-- I just could not resist this tangent, and I promise to celebrate centrality, measurement, and competitiveness soon. Meanwhile, I close with this chapter from the Tao Te Ching, which comments on the consequences of increasing intelligence:

Network Centrality: More Current Events

2008-06-23T08:04:00.000-04:00

Last week we kicked off our "Separation of Network Power" series in honor of the June 12 Supreme Court ruling on hearings for Guantanamo Bay detainees.

This week we'll continue the series, inspired by Congressional action of June 19 to let the White House and phone companies off the hook for warrantless tapping of domestic US communications since 2001.

Showing how far one branch of government can implicitly subjugate itself to another, Congressional Democrats claimed victory for including a special clause in the law that prohibits the White House from breaking it. In the words of the NY Times:

The most important [White House] concession that Democratic leaders claimed was an affirmation that the intelligence restrictions were the “exclusive” means for the executive branch to conduct wiretapping operations in terrorism and espionage cases. Speaker Nancy Pelosi had insisted on that element, and Democratic staff members asserted that the language would prevent Mr. Bush, or any future president, from circumventing the law. The proposal asserts “that the law is the exclusive authority and not the whim of the president of the United States,” Ms. Pelosi said.
In the wiretapping program approved by Mr. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House asserted that the president had the constitutional authority to act outside the courts in allowing the National Security Agency to focus on the international communications of Americans with suspected ties to terrorists and that Congress had implicitly authorized that power when it voted to use military force against Al Qaeda.

Network centrality and the executive branch make for tough competitors in the struggle not only to separate but also to balance the powers of the collective. Last time I lamented the dark side of centrality and competition. Next time I'll celebrate the good side.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Network Centrality: Size Does Matter

2008-06-20T15:39:00.000-04:00

Today, the summer solstice, ranks with sunrises and full moons as one of the original inspirations to human time-telling and measurement. Here is a a classic New Yorker cartoon showing what that moment might have looked like.

We have come a long way since then. As recounted by author Dava Sobel, our ability to measure time with precision turned out to be the final critical breakthrough that enabled us to navigate across oceans, rather than simply drift and hope for a safe harbor to appear on the horizon. As the cartoon attests, however, we paid a high psychological price for this ticket to global connectedness. We measure time not just to travel over the horizon but also to worry about getting there soon enough.

So it is with network centrality. No matter what kind of network centrality catches your fancy, it can both empower you to navigate farther and more accurately across great "distances," and it can nag you with the question of how well you measure up.

One big difference between time and centrality is that unlike time, which rests on rhythms of nature (earth, moon, sun, cesium atoms, etc), centrality is a mathematical abstraction with a maddeningly circular non-grounding in reality. In other words, when it comes to centrality, "perception is reality." Martin Kilduff and David Krackhardt argue this much more rigorously in their Analysis of the Internal Market for Reputation in Organizations, which states: "We found that being perceived to have a prominent friend boosted reputation, but that actually having such a friend had no effect." The implications of this result for the practice of ONA consulting could not be more profound.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Network Centrality: All Your Links Are Belong to Us

2008-06-19T12:09:00.000-04:00

Yesterday was a full moon. Tomorrow is the longest day of the year. What better day to celebrate the brightest metric known to network science: centrality.

Connectedness celebrates centrality by putting Google, the world's most popular centrality-based tool, to work. For any set of keywords you can imagine, Google points you to the center of that universe. Each link below does exactly that, using the highlighted text as the keywords. Results are real-time and may change after this post goes to press.

Network Centrality: The center of this universe is Steve Borgatti. Yeah!
Organizational Network: The center of this universe is Valdis Krebs. Kudos to you, Valdis. I am jealous.
Community Network: Apparently centered in Seattle. Interesting. How did Seattle beat out Portland, OR?
Collaboration, Innovation: Centered on Dave Pollard. This confirms my excellent impression of him from a couple months ago--which was the first I heard of him.
Leadership, and most other words you care to look up: Wikipedia has the first answer you will find.

No celebration of centrality would be complete without asking, "What universe am I the center of?" For Connectedness, the answer is: sears refrigerator customer service repairman. To all my readers, let me say: Welcome to the inner sanctum.

While you're celebrating having "arrived," let me add that this weekend is the fourth birthday of Connectedness. All the more reason for jubilation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Holy Trinity of Network Power

2008-06-16T09:21:00.001-04:00

Last Thursday the US Supreme Court ruled that prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have a right to hear and to challenge the reasons for their detention.

Eric M. Freedman, a habeas corpus expert at Hofstra University Law School, called the decision "a structural reaffirmation of what the rule of law means," and said it was as important a ruling on the separation of powers as the Supreme Court has ever issued, according to the NY Times.

Dating back at least to ancient Greeks, the separation of powers traditionally splits state power into three parts: executive, legislative, and judicial.

Over the next few posts, Connectedness will celebrate the separation of powers by comparing each of its three components to three notable pillars of the network perspective: centrality, clustering, and structural equivalence.

Stay tuned for something like this:

Politics	Networks	Easy-to-Remember Stereotype
Executive	Centrality	Tyrannical Dictator
Legislative	Clustering	Mob of Special Interests
Judicial	Structural Equivalence	Politically Unaccountable Intelligentsia

Hopefully by July 4th, we'll have celebrated all three.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Fathers of Connectedness

2008-06-12T07:44:00.002-04:00

This Sunday is Father's Day. Here's a great picture of my dad growing up in St. Louis (far right, age 9):
My dad is first on the list of Fathers of Connectedness, naturally, because he's my dad. But he's also first on the list because his gift for letters and sense of humor inspired my own love of writing, which is the main reason Connectedness continues to exist.

My grandfather (wearing the tie) is next after my dad. He was a shoe salesman, but in that seemingly common role he had the singular opportunity to tour the country with Robert Wadlow, the tallest human being who ever lived. (Presumably Mr. Wadlow also wore the biggest pair of shoes ever cobbled.) Kudos to Grandpa for his marketing savvy, a quality I strive for with each post to this blog.

On my mother's side of the family, two more fathers have clear ties to Connectedness. My mother's father, Alan Foust, is the source of my inner engineer. He co-founded the Department of Chemical Engineering at Lehigh University, later served the College as Dean, and is the one grandparent I knew best. I was too young to appreciate his academic stature at the time, but I certainly understood his inexhaustible energy for explaining things. Whenever people wonder how I can go on and on about the same thing --long after the original question is answered-- that's me and my Grandpop doing our thing.

My mother's mother's father (aka my great-grandfather) was also a professor: Ralph W. Aigler. I never knew him at all, but he is certainly my most famous relative. Someone on Wikipedia really thinks he is famous, anyway. My favorite parts from the Wikipedia article include:

Ralph W. Aigler, law professor at the University of Michigan from 1910–1954, was a renowned expert on real property law and one of the advisors to the American Law Institute in the drafting of the Restatement of the Law of Property.

He is best known, however, for his contributions to the athletics programs at the University of Michigan. Aigler's contributions included leading Michigan back into the Big Ten Conference, leading the effort to construct Michigan Stadium, and negotiating the Big Ten's exclusive contract with the Rose Bowl starting in 1946. He was inducted into the University of Michigan Athletic Hall of Honor in 1982.

Aigler was the voice of the University, and at times of the Big Ten, on athletics eligibility and rules issues. In 1925, Aigler defended intercollegiate athletics against charges that they had a negative effect on institutions of higher learning. Aigler said that the harm done by athletics was almost nothing when compared to the evils caused by "common loafing." "The greatest vice in American college life today is loafing," said Aigler. "There is no doubt that this far overshadows the harm created by intercollegiate athletics. No one would be more pleased than I to see a Phi Beta Kappa (honorary scholarship society) man receive as much recognition by the public as do our leading athletes. But such a condition would be contrary to human nature. Intellectual attainments do not make such an appeal, and that is why athletics are so prominent in colleges and universities today."

It's great to hear voices from the intellectual mountaintop offering humble encouragement to regular human nature.

Speaking of regular human nature... The Wikipedia article on Great-Grandfather Aigler omits the part of his life story I know best. When he was 58, his wife died of breast cancer. When he remarried at the age of 60, his new wife was 27 (5 years younger than her new step-daughter, aka my grandmother). Here are the newlyweds, enjoying the beginning of their 19-year happy affair that lasted until his death at 79.

Thanks, Dad! And thanks, all my other fathers!
Love, Bruce

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Cell phone spying, physics, and ethics

2008-06-06T15:54:00.001-04:00

Laszlo Barabasi, network maven and author of Linked, has moved to Boston, where he now directs the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University (CCNR). Yesterday, the Center made headlines around the world after announcing that they had tracked the whereabouts of 100,000 cell phone users. The subjects of this experiment did not know they were being followed non-stop for 6 months.

The BBC headline was "Mobile phones expose human habits," which generated this post from Raph Koster, noting that the main technical result of the study (related to the "power law") is hardly as surprising as the researchers claim. (See Shirky for more on power laws; and if you really want to know, see Mark Neuman's scholarly explanation of why they pop up everywhere.)

American news coverage slanted away from the technical findings of the study and focused more on its dubious ethics. The passages below are from this this Reuters story published by the New York Times, and from yesterday's Boston Globe:

"Researchers who spied on 100,000 people using their cell phone signals confirmed on Wednesday that most human beings are indeed creatures of habit."

"The first-of-its-kind study by Northeastern University raises privacy and ethical questions for its monitoring methods, which would be illegal in the United States."

"'This is a new step for science,' said study co-author Albert-Lazlo Barabasi, director of Northeastern's Center for Complex Network Research. 'For the first time we have a chance to really objectively follow certain aspects of human behavior.'"

"Barabasi said he spent nearly half his time on the study worrying about privacy issues.... Barabasi said he did not check with any ethics panel. [Barabasi's co-author] Hidalgo said they were not required to do so because the experiment involved physics, not biology. However, had they done so, they might have gotten an earful, suggested bioethicist Arthur Caplan at the University of Pennsylvania."

I am confused about a couple things here. Is "physics" the most appropriate name we have for the science of observing human habits and movement? And even more importantly, what does it mean that physics experiments do not need oversight by an ethics panel?

I am also sad to see that the URL for the Center for Complex Network Research at Northeastern University is http://www.barabasilab.com/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Ownership and the Power of Networks

2008-06-03T11:17:00.003-04:00

An invitation to learn about "The Power of Human Networks®" crossed my desk recently. There's still time for you to join the webinar hosted by HR.com and featuring Myra Norton of Community Analytics among others.

I was fascinated to learn that Community Analytics now owns a registered trademark for "The Power of Human Networks®". Thank goodness they don't have a patent on human networks, or I'd be out of business.

Networks by nature tend to blur ownership for the benefit of collective power, and registering a trademark is among the clearest ways to claim ownership and thereby increase individual power. Wow! Fascinated by the interplay of these three concepts, I searched the US Patent and Trademark Office database to see who else owns a stake in "power" and "networks". The owners of these trademarks are surprisingly few. One is TheSquare.com, whose CEO owns "The Power of Your Network. Squared®". Hardly a threat to Community Analytics. The only real competition I see in the trademark archives is "Strategic Power Networks®", which is owned by strategic futurist Mary O’Hara-Devereaux, whose firm Global Foresight helps clients "Get to the future... Fast."

No review of "network" trademarks ("power"-ful or otherwise) would be complete without a bow to Sun Microsystems, which registered "The Network Is the Computer®" back in 1996. The slogan is only more powerful 12 years later. Sometimes I wonder if Sun got to the future a bit too fast with its slogan. Network power, just like a good joke, requires a talent for timing.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Chain mail and effective flow

2008-05-19T12:21:00.000-04:00

Network uber-guru Jon Kleinberg made headlines again this week: "Boffins question spread of email chain letters."

Before the newspaper headlines crossed my desk, Nathan Gilliatt at The Net-Savvy Executive saw the original paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Gilliatt sums it up:

"A study published by the (US) National Academy of Sciences demonstrates that email, at least, follows a meandering path to large audiences, rather than a short path via online influencers. Tracing information flow on a global scale using Internet chain-letter data, by David Liben-Nowell and Jon Kleinberg (via IntelFusion). The choice of email as the channel guarantees the deep and narrow result."

Gilliatt goes on: "The more interesting question—and the more challenging—is to track the spread of information and opinions across the many channels people use, both online and offline. .... Picture water flowing downhill. If there's a wide channel available, water will use it. If there's a narrow channel, it will use that. Where both are available, it uses both. Information works the same way. The key is that water wants to flow downhill. To make this work with ideas, you need ideas that people want to communicate."

I like Gilliatt's take, but I am frustrated how terms like "deep and narrow," much like "strong tie" and "weak tie," are so weighted with multiple cultural interpretations that it's pretty much impossible to quote Kleinberg's use of "deep and narrow" without distorting his point.

My favorite part of Gilliat's post is his "more interesting question" and his watery metaphorical conclusion. Kleinberg speaks to this in his own way as well. In this 3-minute NSF video/interview, he concludes by saying that the broader implications of his research are "how to make the spread of news more effective," and "how to make public discourse and participation more effective."

To me, the even more interesting question is, "What is 'more effective' as it applies to news and public discourse & participation?" I would love to hear Rupert Murdoch's answer to that question. I also wonder what a poll of net-savvy executives would reveal. Gilliatt's watery closing invites us to reflect on another expert on effective flow, Lao Tsu:

Competent Jerks and Lovable Fools, Part 2

2008-05-14T11:40:00.001-04:00

After an all-day grading marathon yesterday, today I am ready to file grades for the semester. No fun. But there were plenty of fun moments this term to make the pain of grading worthwhile. One of my favorites was this response to an exam question:
The student who wrote this never did any reading and forgot to submit almost half of his homeworks. But he was one of the most active participants in class--never missing an opportunity to turn my chalkboard networks into jokes that made the learning fun for all. How can a teacher reward the contributions of such a student? Certainly not with the grade I am giving him.

The title of this post refers back to an HBR story I reviewed: Competent Jerks and Lovable Fools. Now I also want to rehabilitate the notion of "fools": those jokers who are not foolish at all, but instead speak the wisest truths. It's a Shakespearean tradition and a quite a treat to encounter in real life.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Claire Reinelt and Evaluation of Leadership Networks

2008-05-02T14:21:00.003-04:00

Claire Reinelt is Director of Research and Evaluation at the Leadership Learning Community. We spent the last few months distilling our experience into a paper that we just submitted to Kelly Hannum and Bart Craig, who are guest editing a special issue of The Leadership Quarterly on Evaluation of Leadership Development. We are grateful to them for permitting us to share our manuscript.

Social Network Analysis and the Evaluation of Leadership Networks
By Bruce Hoppe and Claire Reinelt

PDF of article available here

Abstract
Leadership development practitioners have become increasingly interested in the formation of leadership networks as a way to sustain and strengthen relationships among leaders within and across organizations, communities, and systems. This paper offers a framework for conceptualizing different types of leadership networks and identifies the outcomes that are typically associated with each type of network. One of the challenges for the field of leadership development has been how to evaluate leadership networks. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a promising evaluation approach that uses mathematics and visualization to represent the structure of relationships between people, organizations, sectors, silos, communities and other entities within a larger system. Core social network concepts are introduced and explained to illuminate the value of SNA as an evaluation and program tool.

Introduction
Leaders need effective and efficient ways to connect with one another to share information, get support, mobilize resources, learn, and align their visions in a strategic direction. Often leadership networks form (or are created) to make it easier for leaders to connect. Leadership networks form in different ways. Sometimes networks form as the result of an intentional selection process. Many leadership programs bring together diverse participants who normally would not interact: for example, professionals who work in different fields or sectors; or business and civic leaders in a community. In these programs, they have an opportunity to get to know each other, share their experiences and perspectives, and form bonds that may endure over time. While individuals who participate in programs always have the chance to keep up individually with each other, organized network activities such as listservs, retreats, and learning communities can nurture those relationships both face-to-face and online.

Other leadership networks form through a process of collective emergence (Johnson, 2001). These networks are typically more complex and capable of reaching a larger scale. They have self-organizing processes that leaders participate in out of self-interest, shared values and/or a sense of collective purpose. These leaders communicate and engage in actions that are self-directed and facilitated by ties in the network. An example of an emergent network is Amazon.com where people purchase and review books. These activities create a large amount of information that is highly valuable to someone new who is considering purchasing a book. An emergent leadership network occurs when individuals and organizations come together around a shared purpose or cause. By acting together they have a collective power that is not possible if they remain fragmented and isolated.

One of the challenges for the field of leadership development is how to evaluate leadership networks. How does one visualize, analyze, and understand the relationships among leaders? What are the boundaries of a leadership network? What are the currencies (e.g., information, resources, etc.) that flow within networks? How can a network be strengthened? Can networks be mobilized for social and systems change?

In this paper we provide a framework for understanding different types of leadership networks, and consider how social network analysis can be used as a tool for evaluating leadership networks.

We distinguish four types of leadership networks:

Peer leadership networks
Organizational leadership networks
Field/policy leadership networks (sometimes called “production networks”)
Collective leadership networks

Each of these networks can be characterized by who participates in the network, what circulates through the network (e.g., information, expertise, resources), what binds people together, and what they do for and with each other. We discuss each network type and provide examples for each. We also identify outcomes that are commonly associated with each type of network and how participants in different types of networks are using social network analysis. Interspersed throughout the paper are discussions of three methods of network assessment: connectivity, centrality and structural equivalence. We end the paper with a discussion of network visualization, the ethics of collecting and interpreting network data, and some of the most promising uses of network data for leadership development purposes.

PDF of article available here

Learning and loving? at BU

2008-05-01T17:50:00.000-04:00

Classes ended today at BU. I am exhausted. Somewhere mid-Fall I got hooked by my own material and ended up deep in my head for most of the next six months.

Now I am seemingly returning to earth, slowly.

Along the way, I noticed this spectacular final project of Kristyn Ulanday, one of my students. It features this quote by Dorothea Lange:

"While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see."

That's sort of how I feel about words these days.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Knowing the path and walking the path

2008-04-25T09:49:00.001-04:00

One of the great and tragic lessons of my life so far is that the ability to distinguish four major categories of network centrality and code them all in an Excel spreadsheet does not, in and of itself, bring me the ladies. Denial, anger, depression--somewhere amidst these precursors to acceptance comes a revelation. Perhaps network centrality will show me who is getting the ladies, so that I can learn from them, or, failing that, construct an argument demonstrating some measure by which I am superior to them.

Looking at the network of sexual relationships among Jefferson High School students (which I mentioned last time), it doesn't take a PhD to see that these kids spend plenty of time away from their spreadsheets:
No matter how liberal I am, surely my desire for public health must respond to the above network. Measures of connectivity and centrality impel me to have a talk with the "key players" of the sex network. Their reproductive health (and the health of many of their classmates) depends on it. Yes?

Actually, no. This teenage sex network does make a great emotional appeal: hire a network analyst so that you can target key players in your advocacy campaign. However, the central point made by authors of the above map, over the course of 40 pages, is exactly the opposite:

"Epidemiologists, unable to observe or measure directly the structure of sexual networks, have tended to latch onto a single idea: specifically, the idea that the number of partners matters for STD diffusion dynamics.... Our data suggest that a shift in social policy toward comprehensive STD education for all adolescents, not just those at highest risk, would be significantly more effective than current intervention models."

In other words, when it comes to teenage sex, don't waste any time targeting key players in the network. The teenage sex network, by its very nature, tends to connect in a way that makes the very notion of "key player" irrelevant. So concludes the paper "Chains of Affection" by Bearman, Moody, and Stovel.

Not all networks connect in this way. Sometimes it does pay to hire a network analyst and target key players in your advocacy campaign. Specifically, if Bob and Alice complete the partner-swap we see here (and others do likewise), then my services are definitely called for.

Kids turn out to be better than adults at avoiding these sorts of messes.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

10 Minutes for Marty Kearns of Netcentric Campaigns

2008-04-15T13:44:00.000-04:00

Last week I enjoyed a presentation by Marty Kearns of Netcentric Campaigns and Green Media Toolshed. My big take-away was the notion of the 10-minute volunteer: if someone shows up willing to help me for 10 minutes, and will just as surely forget about me in 11 minutes, how can I make use of this gift? Most people would rather ignore such a flighty volunteer, but Marty makes a great case for bringing them in, just for those 10 minutes. For example, "Where are they now?" runs a massively distributed phone campaign to expose dubious staffer moves within Congress.

OK my 10 minutes is up. Coming soon--a closer look at the (in)famous sexual relationship network of Jefferson High School, which Marty used as part of his introduction:

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KM 0.0 by Dave Pollard

2008-04-03T06:47:00.000-04:00

Recently I was invited by HP's knowledge management (KM) connector Stan Garfield to join a conference call that featured Dave Pollard. It was the first I heard the expression "KM 0.0", which was perhaps coined by Dave here. Dave describes KM 1.0 as "content and collection," and KM 0.0 as "context and connection." This not only makes for a poetic KM checklist, but it also reminds us that the better we get at KM, the more our KM draws from pre-historic roots of humanity.

My attempt in the conference call to agree with Dave did not get very far. Too many ideas in my head and not enough sense out of my mouth, I think. Nevertheless, those who want to support Dave's "KM 0.0" notion will do well to notice how 1920's anthropological study of archaic societies anticipates this 2006 MIT Sloan Management Review cover on "Enterprise 2.0."

Dave's poem also deserves more consideration:

Content, collection;
Context, connection.

I interpret this poem as a tribute to Amazon.com and other exemplars of the Long Tail phenomenon--digital hosts who provide not only content but also ways for users to interact through their experience of that content. It's an amazingly successful network recipe cooked with equal measures of centrality, clustering, and structural equivalence.

Too many ideas in my head now, so I must sign off.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Please share with me so that I can beat you

2008-02-12T08:45:00.000-05:00

[Ed note: The Connectedness staff is behind in blogging, due to an overload of Web Science synthesis. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.]

Martin Nowak is one of the world's pre-eminent gurus of evolutionary dynamics (which I called "die and adapt" a few months ago). Yesterday at the Harvard Kennedy School Complexity Series, Nowak brilliantly outlined five reasons why I might willingly die so that you can live, and and what adaptations occur in our population as a result:

Kin selection: you are genetically similar enough to me (e.g., child, sibling) that I could rationally decide to sacrifice my own body for the sake of helping your/my DNA
Direct reciprocity: you and I interact repeatedly, and I expect that over time you will repay the favors I give you now
Indirect reciprocity: I may never see you again, but I care about my reputation (and know about yours), and I gain enough in reputation to make it worth doing you a favor.

The above three mechanisms of cooperations were rounded out by two more: graph selection and group selection, which allow one to model (1) a world where people don't randomly mix with the entire world but instead have specific neighborhoods of interaction, and (2) a world where tribes develop collective strategies. This last one (group selection) is still somewhat controversial, and Nowak himself has flip-flopped over the course of his career with respect to it. Currently he believes it is an important dimension of a complete model of the evolution of cooperation.

The talk and audience were theoretical-minded, but the person sitting on my right shared a very pragmatic reason for attending:

"The successful push-pull of collaboration and competition ... [in] both open source programming and wikis and is certain to find its way into many enterprises as collaborative design becomes commonplace."

More about that in his paper, "In Praise of Tweaking," where he makes clear one specific enterprise that is deliberately investing in theoretical evolutionary dynamics in order to redesign its own process of production. Thank you, Ned Gulley.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Economic externalities and network science

2008-01-10T06:59:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, which I use as the textbook for my course on web science, I have learned about economic externalities. I don't always include the topic of economic externalities in the class, but last fall I did--with intriguing results. It was all part of the major course redesign that preoccupied me more or less 24/7 from Columbus Day until Kwanza.

Here are the four types of economic externalities according to Duncan Watts, with explanations and examples by yours truly:

Information externalities: Knowing how others have acted under similar circumstances saves me the effort of evaluating all the options "objectively." Example: I am hungry. McDonalds has sold 30 billion Big Macs. They must be OK.
Coercive externalities: Anticipating the impact of my decision on others influences my choice. Example: Everyone is drinking at this party. What will they think of me if I don't drink?
Market externalities: As a particular option is chosen by more and more people, that option becomes more and more valuable to all those who have chosen it. Example: In 1980 very few people had email and so email was of very limited use. In 2007 many people have email and that popularity makes email exponentially more useful.
Coordination externalities: I will sacrifice my short-term selfish interests for long-term gains that depend on favors from others, to the extent that (1) I care about the future, and (2) I believe my actions affect the decisions of others. Example: When my friend lends me $10, I will pay him back the next time I see him. I lose $10 when I pay him back but gain more than that in the long run.

Watts discusses the above concepts almost exclusively in terms of their relationship to "tipping point" network dynamics. He also emphasizes the top of the list at the expense of the bottom. Having swallowed Watts' taxonomy of economic externalities into the same pipeline that is slowly digesting Tim Berners-Lee's framework for web science, I now have (1) a chronic case of indigestion, and (2) the following mapping of economic externalities onto basic concepts of network science:

Information externalities --> cardinality and centrality
Coercive externalities --> connectivity and clustering
Market externalities --> structural equivalence
Coordination externalities --> symmetry and asymmetry

As I prepare for spring '08, the above appears to be the backbone of my web science curriculum. If it doesn't make sense, dear reader, please be patient with me and stay tuned!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Performance reviews

2008-01-02T15:33:00.000-05:00

Now that grading is done, I get to see my fall student evaluations. I skimmed a handful earlier today and spotted a few "five-star" marks and a couple stinging criticisms. Time to pause now. The forms are resting outside in my car, so that tomorrow I can bring them inside and absorb them with an appropriately cool frame of mind.

The very same day my students wrote their anonymous evaluations, they handed in their final project reports. Each student had the entire semester to build any kind of website she wanted (e.g., Japanese, business, entertainment, sports, travel, cars). Each final project report told the story behind the website, concluding with the most valued lessons the student learned over the course of the project. One of my favorite endings was this:

I had, before this class, become obsessed with learning code "hardcore", but I see that I'll pretty much always be able to find useful code snippets in resources online.... For coding a whole website, it's not so much about a limitless knowledge of code, but about persistence. With trial and error, focus, solid consideration, and just a little work, you can usually make what you envision a reality (or something that works just as well as what you'd envisioned).

Cool!

The flip side of this lesson came out in the anonymous evaluations. (Written the same day.) One student said it simply: "Everything I learned I had to teach myself." Another said, "Sometimes it seemed like there were students who knew more than the instructor." In the context of my consulting work, those two quotes could very easily be compliments, but my students wrote them in response to the question, "What were the most significant weaknesses of this course?"

My impulse in these moments of paradox is WWLTD -- "What Would Lao Tsu Do?" I am not sure that Lao Tsu's paycheck depended on anonymous student evaluations, though.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Delete all your links, except to me

2007-12-05T07:19:00.000-05:00

As part of the course re-design I mentioned last time, I have been digesting this excellent summary of Google PageRank that my students found for me a few weeks ago. I have boiled it down to this. Another way I teach my students PageRank is by entering all their semester web-programming projects into a PageRank contest, where the PageRank is determined by student recommendations entered into our class wiki.

The contest has one more week to go. You can see the front-runners vying for votes (or not) in the wiki excerpt below. They are listed in order of PageRank:

Site Link / Description	Incoming Links
http://people.bu.edu/gatewood/index.html Quit editing this wiki, get out and do something! My site is a December calendar of events, from concerts to festivals, that would interest a college age student in Boston.	choy alliew rgm ajhlee jihong88 cohens11 xzhang08 dbrien lbdunn
http://people.bu.edu/afacini/gaijin/ A resource site for learning how to read and write basic Japanese. Learn to write both hiragana and katakana, the basic alphabet scripts of Japanese.	jasonhu gaep13 wcmundel icc arthim edflem yasmin89 kevshea slee0903 dan013 abg cnm lbdunn
http://www.tormor.org The homepage of me and a friend of mine and our upcoming vegetable oil fueled cross-continental adventure.	jasonhu alliew tjpirog billba edflem yuliyab cohens11 koates andrak lbdunn
http://people.bu.edu/xzhang08/psych/index.html Enjoy looking at optical illusions? This website has lots of optical illusions and explains how each works!	gaep13 gillianb arthim yasmin89 timwalsh ajhlee mgro27 slee0903 dbrien jfsr lbdunn
http://people.bu.edu/anishk/Kattukaran-Webproject/Index.html (Firefox recommended) A website for a startup company that i am working on. The new venture will deal with educational services targetted at students from developing countries and aims to improve the standards of education in many of these countries.	aecook gaep13 icc haysher edflem dechat eeun zucchig bross55 lbdunn eskizzle
http://people.bu.edu/ajhlee/cs103/index.html This page is about how hip hop is dead	jihong88 cohens11 gatewood eeun jfsr edflem lbdunn

My favorite feature of PageRank is this strategy suggested by the PageRank article: "Outbound links are a drain on a site's total PageRank... But there are 'abnormal' ways of linking to other sites that don't result in leaks. PageRank is leaked when Google recognizes a link to another site. The answer is to use links that Google doesn't recognize or count."

This is true enough. To dramatize the point, I have provided my class with an Excel spreadsheet that takes the above wiki table as a copy-and-paste and instantaneously provides the resulting PageRank scores and relative class rankings. Each student can edit the resulting spreadsheet and see exactly how much his score goes up when he deletes all his outbound links and stops recommending other students' websites.

Hopefully, by the time I do the final PageRank calculation, all my students will have taken this lesson to heart and deleted all their links. You should too. Boost your visibility on the Internet by deleting all outbound links from all your blogs and other sites--except links to me. Thanks!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Experiencing technical difficulty--please stand by

2007-11-03T16:09:00.000-04:00

Major course redesign happening in front of a live student audience has Connectedness staff preoccupied. Regular blogging will resume shortly.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.

Use Visone to make your first network map

2007-10-12T07:41:00.000-04:00

I often get asked about network mapping software. I switch back and forth between several programs depending on what I want to do. For most, I usually recommend NetDraw. However, for those wishing to make very simple maps, another excellent choice is Visone.

You can easily run Visone with the "webstart" option available here. Once you have it running, the picture below hints at how easy it is to (1) give yourself a starting set of nodes by creating a "random" graph with no edges, and (2) use "edit mode" to make your nodes look as you wish and add edges between them. Then you can use "analysis mode" to drag nodes around and try different automatic layouts, etc.I use Visone to make all the illustrations in my Introduction to Network Mathematics, but I don't use it for consulting because it is licensed only for non-commercial use.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License and is copyrighted (c) 2007 by Connective Associates except where otherwise noted.