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How about that for an abstract discipline, and I thought CMS was abstract. Sounds great though: Social Innovation Generation: "Social innovation is an initiative, product, process or program that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. Successful social innovations have durability and broad impact. While social innovation has recognizable stages and phases, achieving durability and scale is a dynamic process that requires both emergence of opportunity and deliberate agency, and a connection between the two."

A new social space news and networking site.

Network scientists have discovered how social networks can create the illusion that something is common when it is actually rare. One of the curious things about social networks is the way that some messages, pictures, or ideas can spread like wildfire while others that seem just as catchy or interesting barely register at all.

"The effect is largest in the political blogs network, where as many as 60%-70% of nodes will have a majority active neighbours, even when only 20% of the nodes are active." How convenient :-)

not the most fancy social network - but one around an interesting topic for us ...

We test the theoretical cognitive limit on the number of stable social relationships known as Dunbar's number. We find that users can entertain a maximum of 100-200 stable relationships in support for Dunbar's prediction.

"The Complexity of Nash Equilibria,", It also suggests that the Nash equilibrium may not be an accurate prediction of behavior in all situations. Daskalakis's research emphasizes the need for new, computationally meaningful methods for modeling strategic behavior in complex systems such as those encountered in financial markets, online systems, and social networks.

Blogosphere as social network (check the image!)

This is a social sciences paper trying to make use of ML. Quote from text: "Social scientists studying the life course must find a way to reconcile a widespread belief that understanding has been generated by these data-as demonstrated by more than 750 published journal articles using the Fragile Families data (10)-with the fact that the very same data could not yield accurate predictions of these important outcomes." "(...) In other words, the submissions were much better at predicting each other than at predicting the truth."

an important message to learn from

Asimov's Foundation meets ACT's Tipping Point Prediction?

still, some interesting thoughts in there ... "Then you have the 50-year cycles of violence. Turchin describes these as the building up and then the release of pressure. Each time, social inequality creeps up over the decades, then reaches a breaking point. Reforms are made, but over time, those reforms are reversed, leading back to a state of increasing social inequality. The graph above shows how regular these spikes are - though there's one missing in the early 19th century, which Turchin attributes to the relative prosperity that characterized the time. He also notes that the severity of the spikes can vary depending on how governments respond to the problem. Turchin says that the United States was in a pre-revolutionary state in the 1910s, but there was a steep drop-off in violence after the 1920s because of the progressive era. The governing class made decisions to reign in corporations and allowed workers to air grievances. These policies reduced the pressure, he says, and prevented revolution. The United Kingdom was also able to avoid revolution through reforms in the 19th century, according to Turchin. But the most common way for these things to resolve themselves is through violence. Turchin takes pains to emphasize that the cycles are not the result of iron-clad rules of history, but of feedback loops - just like in ecology. "In a predator-prey cycle, such as mice and weasels or hares and lynx, the reason why populations go through periodic booms and busts has nothing to do with any external clocks," he writes. "As mice become abundant, weasels breed like crazy and multiply. Then they eat down most of the mice and starve to death themselves, at which point the few surviving mice begin breeding like crazy and the cycle repeats." There are competing theories as well. A group of researchers at the New England Complex Systems Institute - who practice a discipline called econophysics - have built their own model of political violence and

It's not the scientific activity described in the article that is uninteresting, on the contrary! But the way it is described is just a bad joke. Once again the results itself are seemingly not sexy enough and thus something is sold as the big revolution, though it's just the application of the oldest scientific principles in a slightly different way than used before.

Perhaps when you think of bacterial communities you think of a flask full of rapidly dividing E. coli. But in non-lab conditions, bacteria grow in complex, heterogeneous communities composed of diverse microscopic organisms. In these communities, bacteria need a means to communicate with their kin, and they do this through a language known as quorum sensing (QS), where bugs secrete and detect factors that tell them whether they're surrounded by kin (and if so, how many there are).

it seems that there are indications that we are differently wired .... Sex differences in human behavior show adaptive complementarity: Males have better motor and spatial abilities, whereas females have superior memory and social cognition skills. Studies also show sex differences in human brains but do not explain this complementarity. In this work, we modeled the structural connectome using diffusion tensor imaging in a sample of 949 youths (aged 8-22 y, 428 males and 521 females) and discovered unique sex differences in brain connectivity during the course of development. Connection-wise statistical analysis, as well as analysis of regional and global network measures, presented a comprehensive description of network characteristics. In all supratentorial regions, males had greater within-hemispheric connectivity, as well as enhanced modularity and transitivity, whereas between-hemispheric connectivity and cross-module participation predominated in females. However, this effect was reversed in the cerebellar connections. Analysis of these changes developmentally demonstrated differences in trajectory between males and females mainly in adolescence and in adulthood. Overall, the results suggest that male brains are structured to facilitate connectivity between perception and coordinated action, whereas female brains are designed to facilitate communication between analytical and intuitive processing modes.

I like this abstract: sex, sex, sex, sex, SEX, SEX, SEX, SEX...!!! I wonder if the "sex differences" are related to gender-specific differences...

HealthMap uses algorithms to scour tens of thousands of social media sites, local news, government websites, infectious-disease physicians' social networks and other sources to detect and track disease outbreaks. Sophisticated software filters irrelevant data, classifies the relevant information, identifies diseases and maps their locations with the help of experts.

nice new social network - by French! ... also nice layout :-)

anybody here using Foursquare already? Location is supposed to be "the future" (this time)

this is worse than having a mobile ... !

A clockwork orange all over again.

Some other ingenious suggestions: death metal in rest homes motivates people to care for their parents, deafening techno in the doctor's waiting room decreases the rate of unjustified medical visits, Eros Ramazotti in UK stadiums keeps the hooligans away etc.

In a sign that the web is becoming more sociable than searchable Although Facebook is enjoying rapid growth, it is only beginning to cash in on its success. Revenues at the social media company are estimated to be in the range of $1bn to $1.5bn this year, while Google took in $23.7bn last year.

but so far only an announcement ... they want to be ready in autumn only ... :-(

yes, but already 172000 dollars of donation (!!) and plenty of guys offered their service for the coding ! this is something a lot of people is waiting for !

Anything that can has a chance to save us from the Facebook abomination is welcome...

Sounds too super to be true, no?

> Sounds too super to be true, no? Yeah, how else may it sound, being a combination of hi-quality (I assume) research targeted at attracting funding, raised to the power of Science Daily's pop-pseudo-scientific journalists' bu****it? Original article starts with a cool sentence too: > The ultimate proof of our understanding of natural or technological systems is reflected in our ability to control them. ...a good starting point for a never-ending philosophers' debate... Now seriously, because of a big name behind the study, I'm very curious to read the original article. Although I expect the conclusion to be that in practical cases (i.e. the cases of "networks" you *would like to* "control"), you need to control all nodes or something equally impractical...

then I am looking forward to reading your conclusions here after you will have actually read the paper

At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, employees can now log on to their own intranet portal designed for group collaboration, social bookmarking, and general employee-to-employee ...

and we are late again!!!!