Advancing The Science of Networks in Communities
Professor Noshir Contractor presented at “Profiting from the New Web,” May 23, 2011. The event was hosted at the Royal Society in London. Professor Contractor was a speaker on the panel “Is every company a media company?”
View video from the conference featuring Professor Contractor here: http://www.littlefoxcommunications.com/webscience_trust/.
SONIC undergraduate researcher Curie Chang recently visited the land’s highest court as a part of her Supreme Court class (SocPol 351). The class is application-based, where 9 students are chosen every year to study the behind-scenes process of the court, culminating up to the visit to observe the court in person. At Washington D.C., the class was given a special tour around the supreme court, sat in on the oral argument for McNeill v. U.S., and were fortunate enough to have a Q & A session with Justice Sonia Sotomayor. The nine students sat across from Justice Sotomayor and were able to ask questions they had prepared in advance.
Feature story on Northwestern University website: http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2011/05/students-visit-supreme-court.html
Professor Noshir Contractor will present a keynote lecture entitled “Social and Knowledge Network-Building to Advance Global Health Decision-Making” at Rutgers University’s “Advancing Global Health Decision-Making” conference. The conference will be held May 20-21, 2011 and marks the launch of a new initiative on health decision- making by EABIS, Rutgers Universiy, and Johnson & Johnson.
The conference website can be found at: http://www.eabis.org/projects/project-detail-view.html?uid=20.
SONIC director, Noshir Contractor, was the keynote presenter at VOSS “Toward a Science of Virtual Organizations” invitational workshop. The workshop was hosted by the University of Central Florida and National Science Foundation in Orlando, Florida, May 16-17, 2011.
For more information regarding the workshop please visit: https://sites.google.com/site/ucfdelta/voss2011.
In this month’s edition of WIRED magazine (May 2011), writer Clive Thompson made a startling assertion. Mark Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties” has been at the foundation of many different network theories since its publication in 1973. But Thompson says that this may not be true. Based on in-press research done by Sinan Aral and Marshall Van Alstyne, they find that even though a person who is dissimilar to you may have interesting things to say, the fact that you don’t interact with them very often (the weak tie) greatly reduces the probability of them actually telling you something interesting and instead the people you interact with very often (the strong ties) have a much higher likelihood of tell you something new. This article is set to be published this summer.
Noshir Contractor was quoted in a recent article published in Bloomberg Businessweek, discussing some of the issues in companies’ internal social networks:
Some sociologists warn that with so many people making gaffes on Twitter and Facebook, companies should prepare for similar behavior on internal social networks. “Because this started out in the social sphere before the corporate sphere, people will bring the same cavalier attitude,” says Noshir Contractor, a professor of behavioral sciences at Northwestern University. “When people locate something in their mind as being informal, they get in trouble.” That could create problems for employees who are too open on services like Yammer and Chatter, a rival product sold by Salesforce.com. “When you’re considered for a promotion … anything you said on Yammer will be used in some cases to determine if you’re qualified,” Contractor says.
The visualization we featured about the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami was featured by a Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman at the MIT Media Lab’s “Sandbox Summit” and subsequently picked up by David Ewalt at Forbes magazine in a blog post “Playing Well With Others“.
The SONIC lab was bustling on April 28 with children visiting campus for Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. SONIC led two workshops designed to teach children, ages 10-16, basic concepts in network science. The kids explored network concepts such as degree, balance, and brokerage by examining Harry Potter’s friendship network. Then, they had a chance to apply their newly-learned skills when they constructed their own friendship networks out of M&Ms and pretzel sticks. The workshops were a hit, and we’re hoping to see some of the participants back in a few years in the classes of 2016-2022!
Prof. Noshir Contractor presented a talk at the Spatial Simulations for Social Sciences conference, hosted by the Université of Lausanne titled, “Multidimensional and multi-level network theory.”
You can view the entire video here.
Communications of the ACM, May 2011, features an article on the “Web Science meets Network Science” workshop co-hosted by SONIC at Northwestern University. Read the article at http://bit.ly/flfp2C.