Scholarship of social influence
On the Data Mining blog, an intriguing set of notes from talks on social influence by Duncan Watt and Jon Kleinberg at the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media:
3. Diffusion of information may 'long circuit' the small worlds of social networks. In Kleinberg's presentation regarding the study of the largest internet chain mail (a petition) he described the role of the threshold model of diffusion in which we require multiple receipts of a stimulus (e.g. a chain mail letter) to pass it on, we are more sensitive to our immediate community - our strong links - than to small-world building weak links. This seems to have some relationship with Watt's work on Challenging the Influentials Hypothesis and both his criticism of the disease analogy and his focus on the importance of the network structure, not some magical power of the 'influential'.Influence - not as simple as Gladwell would have you believe!
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I must have had too many bratwursts and beers today. I didn't understand a single thing this guy is talking about. I guess I'll go Twitter, now.
me too, he could be talking about quorum sensing for all I can tell
I must agree with #1 and #2. "we are more sensitive to our immediate community - our strong links - than to small-world building weak links" seems bone-headedly self-evident: Yes, we trust those that we know more than we trust those we don't know. Er, yes?
Cory, if you understand a deeper context here, a few more contextualizing sentences will help point us in the right direction. =D Otherwise it seems like a keyword rich hit, but nothing more.
The Friend Sense experiment he refers to in point 2 seems more interesting to me.
A 3 day work week, 5 hour workday (1 lunch optional) in the U.S. is the MUST. Drink optional. Better time to take classes, better time to sleep and prevent work-related accidents, more time to spend with the kids. Better productivity all around. Or, In a home where both parents work, the kids can be put to work at 10 years old to allow for a 4 person income +overtime to support the home. If you don't feel like thinking, go watch gov't subsidized t.v.
Computer tech support is trivia. In 3 years, school age children will game doing tech support questions. I need a shower.
Explains why I paced around house like a caffeinated squirrel during the last power outage.
marching military honor bound America be
#1-#3 To me the key word in that sentence seems to be "small-world building".
A small-world phenomenon means that in a random graph you are connected via much fewer links then you'd expect to everyone else. What this research seems to indicate though is that the preferred connection of information in this networks is much longer then the small-world phenomenon might lead you to imagine.
That is certainly plausible, but he is reporting on scholarship not on plausibility so presumably beyond the links there is evidence for this. That's the key difference between Long Tail/Blink/etc.. they don't actually build arguments for their hypothesis they merely build plausibility.
Anyway, the "Influentals Hypothesis" is that a relatively small number of highly connected people influence opinion of the masses. But if our relatively shorter connection to these individuals doesn't actually influence the spread of information this entirely plausible idea becomes more questionable.
Some of this is in the book, Nudge. Recommended reading.
More Granovetter and less Gladwell?
Seems that BB members are on holiday leaving 1 person holding the fort based on the number of postings.
As an intelligent person I have to say that someone blogging about a blogger blogging about some presentations made by several people referring to papers published (peer reviewed?) based upon some rather esoteric research that refers to multiple prior research activity (see the references in the PDF) which in turn is dependent upon research by others...
...somewhat stretches my interest in the subject matter of influence.
In this case I would call it 'edited plagarism'.
I'm going to lie down now.
@#12HOT: I am going down too now. I am going to have a steaming hot cup of drink.
At least one paper that the data mining blog linked to (Salganik et al.) has some interesting social psychological insights derived from a controlled experiment.
In any case, knowledge is accumulated, so I don't see the problem with "prior research activity" as long as it's cited.