“Mapping cancer’s ‘social networks’ opens new approaches to treatment”

lab-2_0Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research(link is external), London, compared proteins inside cells to members of an enormous social network, mapping the ways they interact. This allowed them to predict which proteins will be most effectively targeted with drugs.The team found that there are many molecular pathways that interact to affect the development of cancer. Cancer-causing proteins that have already been successfully targeted with drugs tended to have particular ‘social’ characteristics that differ from non-cancer proteins.

Read the full article here: http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-us/cancer-news/press-release/2015-12-23-mapping-cancers-social-networks-opens-new-approaches-to-treatment

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“Like air traffic, information flows through major neuron ‘hubs’ in the brain, IU scientists find”

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Non-gray circles and their connections represent 80, 70 and 60 percent (from top to bottom) of all outgoing traffic within the sampled section of a cortical region. | Photo by Indiana University

This article published by Indiana University Bloomington describes a new study one of its researchers has published in the journal Neuroscience, drawing a close analogy between airline routes and the neuronal network in our brain.

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“First, Let’s Get Rid of All the Bosses”

e06d7de9be807b8c8e1ab4665d762e69ce6e87deRodger D. Hodge of the New Republic reports on CEO Tony Hsieh’s recent decision to shift Zappo’s to the Evolutionary Teal style of management through HolacracyThis hotly discussed new approach discards static, hierarchical power structures for more distributed and plastic forms of leadership. As defined by Frederic Laloux in Reinventing OrganizationsEvolutionary Teal organizations “trust in the abundance of life” and focus on self-actualization rather than material goals. This means something different to every organization and Zappo’s implementation came with a wave of controversial new policies. The sudden and radical switch was received with mixed reviews from within and without. The jury is still out on whether Hsieh’s move represents a meaningful reform or is simply another flash in the pan of the avant-garde corporate.

Read the full article here: https://newrepublic.com/article/122965/can-billion-dollar-corporation-zappos-be-self-organized

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“Links that speak: The global language network and its association with global fame”

Screen Shot 2015-12-04 at 5.15.41 PMIn an article recently published by PNAS, Shahar Ronen et al. “introduce a metric of a language’s global influence based on its position in the network” of co-spoken languages. They show that the “connectivity of a language in this network … remains a strong predictor of a language’s influence”. In other words the more likely a language is to show up on a polyglot’s resume, the more influential it is. The authors provide a super cool user-friendly web-based visualization tool to explore the data!

Read the full article here: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/52/E5616.abstract

Check out the super cool interactive language mapping tool here: http://language.media.mit.edu/visualizations/books

 

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“Pumpkin Pie in Miami: Thanksgiving Flight Patterns”

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Happy Thanksgiving from the SONIC Lab!

How was your holiday travel? A recent New York Times article “Pumpkin Pie in Miami” shows flight pattern networks in the US over thanksgiving holiday, using search data from Google Flights revealing the movements of over 3.6 million Americans during the Thanksgiving holiday. The takeaway: Americans fly warm and late. An overwhelming number of travelers chose destinations like Miami or Las Vegas and flight volume peaked at noon on Thanksgiving Day!

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Noshir Presents “Some Assembly Required” for University of Florida’s CTSI Team Science Talks

TeamScienceTalks

Lab Director Noshir Contractor presented his lecture “Some Assembly Required: Organizing in the 21st Century” on Oct. 26, 2015 for the Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s Team Science Talks at the University of Florida. His talk illustrated how comprehensive digital trace data provide an unprecedented exploratorium to model the socio-technical motivations for creating, maintaining, dissolving, and reconstituting into teams – arguing that Network Science is foundational in advancing our understanding of effective team emergence and that these insights are building a new generation of recommender systems that leverage our research insights on the socio-technical motivations for creating ties.

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Noshir Contractor Presents Invited Lecture on Leveraging Computational Social Science at Syracuse University

Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences & Humanities

Lab Director Noshir Contractor presented a Kameshwar C. Wali Lecture in the Sciences & Humanities on September 24th, 2015 at Syracuse University. His talk, entitled “Leveraging Computational Social Science to Address Grand Societal Challenges” argues that computational social science is the foundation on which to unleash intellectual insights locked in big data, illustrating how these insights offer scientists and scholars an unprecedented opportunity to engage more actively in monitoring, anticipating, and designing interventions to address grand societal challenges.

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SONIC Alumnus Featured in NU Alumni Association Spotlight Series

NeelThe Northwestern Alumni Association chose to highlight former SONIC Research Assistant, Neel Kunjur, for his post-college achievements at SpaceX. In his profile, Neel reflects on how his undergraduate education in McCormick prepared him to work at the cutting edge of space technology.

For his full profile, check out:

http://www.alumni.northwestern.edu/s/1479/02-naa/naa/naa-interior-2.aspx?sid=1479&gid=2&pgid=15063#q4

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Noshir Teaches MSLCE Students About Social Connections

Networkspic3Noshir Contractor was featured on School of Comm’s “Creative Buzz” after leading an all-day workshop with the entire cohort of MSLCE students on November 14th. Master’s student, Zach Hyman, remarked, “For us MSLCE students, who come from a variety of different educations and locations around the world, Professor Contractor’s lessons rang true.”

Full article available here: http://comm.soc.northwestern.edu/mslce-blog/2015/11/24/network-expert-teaches-mslce-students-about-social-connections/

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