What makes one a good group member? Is it intelligence? A recent study found that, “having a lot of intelligent people in the group did not necessarily mean that your group will have sure success.” 

According to this study, what mattered more for group success was how individuals scored on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) test. “The better the group members are in reading other people’s emotions through their eyes, the better the chances for the group’s success.”

Given some thought, the results of this study are not surprising. It certainly makes sense that a group member with the ability to be empathetic towards a fellow group member would be a better team-player than one who does not have that ability. Perhaps you might want to practice with this online RME Test before embarking on future collaborations?

Read more here: http://www.rappler.com/science-nature/ideas/science-solitaire/80143-science-group-success

This special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE focuses on how digital technology is changing the structure and dynamics of social networks and the tools we have for studying and designing them. Three main take-home messages:

• Social media, search, and data extraction technologies are not only changing the structure and dynamics of social networks, but are also changing how controllable these systems are.

• Precision, quantitatively justified interventions into behavioral dynamics are increasingly feasible within the digital domain, permitting large-scale experiments on human behavior and social systems. This is useful and presents challenges.

• We understand the relationship between energy and information – how bits get converted to watts – for electrical circuits, but not for social networks. In biology, computational social science, and the science of social engineering, the development of a functional theory of information is a central theoretical challenge that needs to be addressed if these disciplines are to have strong foundations.

Read more here: http://mae.engr.ucdavis.edu/dsouza/Pubs/PIEEE_vol102_12.pdf

Twitter announced last week that it will now make all tweets since the launch of the site in 2006 publically searchable to all users. Although the new search function is still in the works, this massive archive of tweets could mean more accessible datasets for social network researchers. From this day forward, Twitter’s search engine will index roughly half a trillion tweets.

Read more at the Twitter blog.

McFarland used two different datasets (one looking at classroom level and one looking at school level friendships) to analyze the network ecology of tie formation. His team found that larger school size and greater freedom to choose activities resulted in more homophily, while small school size and a more prescriptive curriculum resulted in greater integration.

However, they point out that student bodies rarely fall into just one camp – instead, both types of systems may exist within the same institution.  Rabinovitz-Stanford explains: “A bigger and more diverse student population may well foster self-segregation, but a smaller and more elite school is almost inherently more segregated in the first place.” In the words of McFarland: “The truth is that we are not sure which kind of adolescent society is best for youth social development…There likely isn’t a simple answer.”

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A team of researchers from MIT and Notre Dame are using an innovative modeling approach to predict the flow of traffic. This new model takes into account potential changes that may occur in the network (eg. construction or road closures), and is better able to deal with such changes than previous versions of the model. In the future, similar models could be applied to any network flows that include human choices.

“This work fills a gaping hole in our understanding of — and ability to predict — network flows,” says Stephen Eubank of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Lab.

For the full article, see here.

Using Wolfram technologies, Dr Marco Thiel from Aberdeen University created a computer model to predict which countries are most likely to suffer an Ebola outbreak next.

He said: “The US would be less at risk than the European countries, that is, it would get significant numbers of infected later. All of that seems to be qualitatively quite correct. Australia and Greenland would get the disease very late, or not at all, again in agreement with our model.”

Read more here. For a more in-depth look, see Dr. Thiel’s discussion on the Wolfram forum here.

Some facts first:

• It’s the most wide-open Senate and Governor election in a decade;
• Young people (Facebook user base) are more Democratic but less likely to get out to vote;
• There is a strong social influence and peer pressure in social networks.

Tomorrow, Facebook’s high-profile button that proclaims “I’m Voting” or “I’m a Voter” will remind its 150 million users to get out and vote. This may be a deciding factor in the close race. Moreover, what is hidden is that Facebook also takes this as an experiment to study how to affect users’ voting behavior. In the future, social media could offer political campaign services besides traditional marketing and advertising businesses.

More information at http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/can-voting-facebook-button-improve-voter-turnout

After Apple’s celebrity photo leaks, now it comes to everyone. CNN Money reported that numerous third-party apps like SaveSnap, SnapBox and SnapSpy offer to save incoming photos. And some of them got hacked. We are back to the square one of network security: usability vs. privacy.

How to protect personal communication in an open network environment? Snapchat’s business model has a big challenge.

Moreover, Snapchat Stories has been introduced last week.

This article sheds some light on a new game that the SONIC Lab will be looking at as part of the Virtual Worlds Exploratorium.

“Travian is the 7th-most popular site in Iran, 9th-most in Libya, 11th-most in Kuwait, and 12th-most in Palestine, and 25th in Iraq.”

“…the key to being successful in Travian is the ability to build a strong network with other users to reach the goal of endgame.”

“Nearly all social networking sites facilitate interactions between people, and massive multiplayer games can often act as social networks.”

Read more here:

http://www.strategicsocial.com/tag/travian/

Companies worldwide now have access to the Facebook’s user information database, and can use this information to target ads towards users in mobile applications outside of the Facebook network. This transfer of information across networks will likely have a profound impact on the world of digital advertising.

In April, the social network announced it would begin tapping its enormous vault of personal information on users to show them ads on mobile apps outside of Facebook. At the time, the ads were available only to a small number of advertisers and mobile apps. Now, they can be purchased by any of Facebook’s 1.5 million advertisers, and can appear on any app.

Read more here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/10/07/facebooks-ad-network-opens-to-everyone/

http://www.insidefacebook.com/2014/10/07/facebooks-audience-network-now-available-worldwide/