Contractor, Foucault, and Young to attend Network Theory Workshop at USC

SONIC Lab members Lindsay Young, Brooke Foucault and Noshir Contractor will attend the 4th International Workshop on Network Theory jointly organized by the Annenberg Network of Networks (ANN) and SONIC Workshop on April 26-28 at the University of Southern California. The theme this year is on “Social Movements and Network Theory.”

Information and many excellent presentation videos from last year’s Network Theory Conference are available here:
http://sonic.northwestern.edu/news/events/webnetsciworkshop/
Check them out to discover what exciting science is motivating these three.

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Weak ties may just be weak

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.

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