In the wake of the Arab Spring, the US sponsers social media to secure democratic change. http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/04/28/3431430/foreign-social-networks/

http://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/social-networking-technology-unlocks-mystery-chimp-civil-war-n103206 Notes of the Chimpanzees were taken over a four year period. The alpha male had died and some of the chimps followed a male named Humphrey, in the North. Others followed two brothers, Hugh and Charlie, in the South. One of the software pieces that helped figure out the social ties between chimps was UCINET. It showed that the chips decided who to stay with based upon the amount of time they had spent together before the alpha male, Leakey, passed away.

In the United Kingdom, Tower Hamlets Primary Care Trust allocated their 34 local practices into 8 geographical networks, equipped with a network manager, administrative assistant, and an educational budget to deliver care packages for diabetes, childhood immunization, chronic obstructive lung disease, and cardiovascular disease. Tower Hamlets PCT outpaced England and surrounding PCTs in the coming years in reducing deaths due to cardiovascular disease and increasing the amount of cholesterol prescriptions.

The gponline article can be found at: http://www.gponline.com/local-gp-practice-networks-save-lives-boost-qof-scores-study-finds/cardiovascular-system/myocardial-infarction-left-ventricular-dysfunction/article/1293427

The British Journal of General Practice paper can be found at: http://bjgp.org/content/64/622/e268.full.pdf+html

A short answer: less than $4/month. Data brokering is a multibillion dollar industry to collect, analyze and sell your personal information. Would you rather sell it by yourself? Tom Brewster @ BBC put his information on EBay including “one month’s worth of browsing history, posts from Facebook and Twitter accounts, three email addresses in frequent use and 10 photos.” It is a no-go. Only 31 viewers in 7 days. Later, he did manage to sell his data from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to DataCoup for $4 a month. It’s an interesting experiment on the data privacy issue. Read more at: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140509-how-much-is-your-facebook-worth

If you’ve ever been on a subway or public bus, you know the rules. Don’t make eye contact, stay as far away from other people as the space allows, and for the love of God, don’t talk to anyone. But what if the rules are wrong? Behavioral scientists Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder approached commuters in a Chicago area train station and asked them to break the rules. Read about what happened here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/opinion/sunday/hello-stranger.html?smid=tw-nytimes

“We Heart It” has 30 million monthly active users. Most of them are teenage girls. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/05/07/30-million-people-use-this-social-network-and-youve-probably-never-heard-of-it/

A new iPhone app called Cloak is marketing itself as “Incognito mode for real life.” The app is essentially a map that uses location data provided from social media friends on Foursquare and Instagram to show you where your “friends” are located. The app doesn’t seem to provide any services that aren’t already available through Foursquare or Facebook’s new Nearby Friends feature, but it does differ simply by marketing itself as an app for avoiding your friends. What do you think; is social media making us more anti-social? Read more at: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/04/the-antisocial-media-app.html

Universities Offer Courses in a Hot New Field – Data Science – NYTimes.com.

Network Science: Interactive Textbook.