To all the social scientists and researchers,
You might hear that research is me-search. What we perceive as the most important areas in our chosen field are also seen as the most important issues in our personal lives. So what does that say about you?
The Connected States of America illustrates the emerging communities based on the social interactions through the use of anonymized mobile phone data. From the projet’s website:
Investigating the interaction network of people reveals interesting facets on how people utilize space. Cities attract their citizens from all walks of life, from nearby and from distant areas across the country. This constant flux of people commuting, migrating, and travelling across the country establishes connections which are dominated by large cities. The social connections woven across the United States can be used to define communities, where the glue that holds a community together is a stronger relationship with other members of the same community compared to members of other communities. Naturally, one can ask whether the communities defined purely by social interactions coincide with the administrative boundaries, for example state boundaries? Remarkably, this is not always the case!
The above graphic represents cell phone calls (AT&T) across the country. By connecting the calls, Xiaoji Chen was able to show emerging cellphone communities defined by human networks. Hubs and ties are color coded, to show where the calls are coming from and ending.
All the cool kids are doing social network analysis now.
When Criminologists do IT, the law has been broken.
Sociologists do IT in groups.
Psychologists do IT in their heads.
Seen on I Fucking Love Science.
What else ya got for our social sciences?
Man unknowingly has a knife stuck in his face for four years.
A man who went to the doctor complaining of a headache was shocked to discover he’d had a 4in knife blade stuck in his brain for more than four years.
Li Fu from Yunnan Province, China, was stabbed during a robbery in 2006, and the blade of the knife had lodged in his cranium.
But despite receiving treatment for his injuries, doctors failed to notice the knife buried deep in the 37-year-old’s skull.
Wait, what?
Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.
- Robert K. Merton
Temporal network of a twitter conversation
Time dynamics of the twitter conversation about the general strike of March 29 in Spain. Each node is a twitter account and each link is a RT between accounts. The discussion is polarized into two groups obtained using community finding algorithms on the twitter RT graph. Those groups correspond to the two major opinions: in favor and against the strike.
I get really excited about nerdy things like this amazing visual representation of data. All the cool kids are learning R to take advantage of features like this.
If you are interested, I also saw this video showing you how to represent temporal networks using graph and R.
ASA Files Amicus Brief with U.S. Supreme Court in Same-Sex Marriage Cases: Research Shows Parents’ Sexual Orientation Has No Bearing on Children’s Well-Being
“The results of our review are clear. There is no evidence that children with parents in stable same-sex or opposite-sex relationships differ in terms of well-being. Indeed, the greater stability offered by marriage for same-sex as well as opposite-sex parents may be an asset for child well-being. An issue at the heart of these cases is whether family composition, per se, affects the well-being of children and thus, provides a justification for limiting the right to marry. This core question is an empirical one and is the subject of a broad range of social science research. As a scientific body, ASA has a duty to provide the court with a systematic and balanced review of the evidence to assess what the consensus of scholarly research has shown.”
ASA President Cecilia Ridgeway, Lucie Stern Professor of Social Sciences in the Sociology Department at Stanford University
“When the social science evidence is exhaustively examined—which the ASA has done—the facts demonstrate that children fare just as well when raised by same-sex parents. Unsubstantiated fears regarding same-sex child rearing do not overcome these facts and do not justify upholding DOMA and Proposition 8.”
Mapping the Fly Brain, Neuron by Neuron
A new computer-based technique is exploring uncharted territory in the fruit fly brain with cell-by-cell detail that can be built into networks for a detailed look at how neurons work together.
Mapping the estimated 100,000 neurons in a fly brain, and seeing how they interact to control behavior, will be a powerful tool for figuring out how the billions of neurons in the human brain work.
The supernova remnant W49B, formed a thousand years ago in the titanic explosion of a massive star.
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/L.Lopez et al.; Infrared: Palomar; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA
Gotta love research.
Deep Inside: A Study of 10,000 Porn Stars and Their Careers
For the first time, a massive data set of 10,000 porn stars has been extracted from the world’s largest database of adult films and performers. I’ve spent the last six months analyzing it to discover the truth about what the average performer looks like, what they do on film, and how their role has evolved over the last forty years.
By Jon Millward
