Group items tagged

"Building a social network isn't an easy task, let alone a successful one. As developers our job is to create, build, and bring to life the gears and functions of a social network. When it comes to marketing, well that's a different department in most cases. We build then later deploy, and in order to develop a highly efficient and functional social network we'll need to use a few tools."

"Building a social network isn't an easy task, let alone a successful one. As developers our job is to create, build, and bring to life the gears and functions of a social network. When it comes to marketing, well that's a different department in most cases. We build then later deploy, and in order to develop a highly efficient and functional social network we'll need to use a few tools."

"Opensource-Socialnetwork (OSSN) is a social networking software written in PHP. It allows you to make a social networking website and helps your members build social relationships, with people who share similar professional or personal interests."

"Opensource-Socialnetwork (OSSN) is a social networking software written in PHP. It allows you to make a social networking website and helps your members build social relationships, with people who share similar professional or personal interests."

"Social Networks Visualizer (SocNetV) is our project to build a flexible and user-friendly, cross-platform tool for the analysis and visualisation of social networks, targeting primarily the researcher. SocNetV lets you construct social networks with a few clicks on a virtual canvas or load networks of various formats (GraphML, GraphViz, Adjacency (Sociomatrix), Pajek, UCINET, etc) and modify them to suit your needs. "

"Taking their cue from social media, educators at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a social networking application called Classroom Salon that engages students in online learning communities that effectively tap the collective intelligence of groups. Thousands of high school and university students used Classroom Salon (CLS), http://www.classroomsalon.org/, this past academic year to share their ideas about texts, news articles and other reading materials or their critiques of each others' writings. With the support of the Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, CLS will be used in an innovative experiment at the University of Baltimore to see if it can help students who are in danger of failing introductory courses or otherwise dropping out of college. "Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have captured the attention of young people in a way that blogs and online discussion forums have not," said Ananda Gunawardena, associate teaching professor in the Computer Science Department, who developed CLS with David S. Kaufer, professor of English. "With Classroom Salon, we've tried to capture the sense of connectedness that makes social media sites so appealing, but within a framework that that allows groups to explore texts deeply. So it's not just social networking for the sake of socializing but enhancing the student experience as readers and writers.""

Can't stay away from social media? You're not alone; social networking is engineered to be as habit-forming as crack cocaine. By Mike Elgan

Can't stay away from social media? You're not alone; social networking is engineered to be as habit-forming as crack cocaine. By Mike Elgan

"This course will use social network analysis, both its theory and computational tools, to make sense of the social and information networks that have been fueled and rendered accessible by the internet."

[A directory of social and political movements related to the P2P (participatory), open (open access to knowledge), and 'commons' paradigms. Please read: Mapping a Coalition for the Commons. By Philippe Aigrain.]

"Based on the unexpected response to my original post, I've decided to discuss some of the social networks that I left out of last week's post."

"Based on the unexpected response to my original post, I've decided to discuss some of the social networks that I left out of last week's post."

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community. ... [M]y approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents of political economy.

"Half a billion people around the world spend more than 20 hours a week "wearing" avatars, that is, using digital representations of themselves. Did you know that a virtual representation of a politician could be more convincing than the politician himself? That your heart beats just as fast when your girlfriend winks at you from your computer screen as when she walks into the room? That if you make your onscreen surrogate mimic your friend's head movements, he's more likely to do what you say? Within three years, many online interactions will not simply involve passages of text typed on a keyboard but will instead be rich exchanges involving sophisticated representations of ourselves. Those digital beings are called avatars, and today at least half a billion people around the world are routinely socializing through them over the Internet, for example in online games."

"Social butterflies who shine at parties may get their edge from special genes that make them experts at recognizing faces. Scientists have found the strongest evidence to date that genes govern how well we keep track of who's who. The findings suggest that face-recognition and other cognitive skills may be separate from each other, and independent of general intelligence. This could help explain what makes one person good at math but bad at music, or good at spatial navigation but bad at language "People have wondered for a long time what makes one person cognitively different from another person," said cognitive psychologist Nancy Kanwisher of MIT, coauthor of the study published Jan. 7 in Current Biology. "Our study is one tiny piece of the answer to this question." The ability to recognize faces is not just handy for cocktail parties, it's crucial for distinguishing friend from foe and facilitating social interactions. If face recognition increases our ability to fend off predators and find mates, there is an evolutionary drive to encode this ability in our genes. To test this, Kanwisher's team looked at whether the ability to recognize faces runs in the family. They found that identical twins, who share 100 percent of their genes, were more similar in their face-recognition ability than fraternal twins, who share only 50 percent of their genes. This suggests the ability to recognize faces is heritable."

"There is a civic hacker in you! He or she is in there... I promise! Today, technology has evolved into a perfect storm of open source tools, code, social networks, and lots of data. Civic technologists thrive on all of these getting together with like-minded hackers and turning all these sources into useful applications, websites and visualizations."

"There is a civic hacker in you! He or she is in there... I promise! Today, technology has evolved into a perfect storm of open source tools, code, social networks, and lots of data. Civic technologists thrive on all of these getting together with like-minded hackers and turning all these sources into useful applications, websites and visualizations."

"Up until recently, there was no such thing as information overload, but with 24 hour news cycles, blogs, social networks, viral videos and more, it's hard not to have your mind bogged down with news, messages, trivia and the like"

"Up until recently, there was no such thing as information overload, but with 24 hour news cycles, blogs, social networks, viral videos and more, it's hard not to have your mind bogged down with news, messages, trivia and the like"

"Europa va mal. La percepción de muchos ciudadanos es que la Unión Europea no solo no resuelve sus problemas, sino que los agrava. Desde que estalló la crisis financiera en 2007 y la del euro en 2010 los mandatarios europeos han dado prioridad a sus esfuerzos para resolver los problemas de los bancos. La creación de la Unión Bancaria prácticamente ha monopolizado los debates durante los dos últimos años. "

"The Baby-Boomers and the Millennials are both worthy of special attention. They are large groups: there are 77 million Boomers and 82 million Millennials. Millennials are showing strong interest in civic participation and reversing some of the declines observed among youth since the 1970s. Meanwhile, the Boomers are reaching the period of life when typically we see the highest levels of civic engagement, thanks in part to resources such as savings, networks, community ties, and knowledge that accumulate over time. The two generations are linked in that most of the Millennials' parents are Boomers. "

"Would you be better off paying for online newspapers like this one? Should you feel guilty about downloading free music? Is the Web's "information-wants-to-free" culture hurting writers, musicians and the rest of the "digital peasants," as Jaron Lanier calls us, now providing unpaid content to be exploited by the "lords of the clouds" like Google? In my Findings column, I discuss Mr. Lanier's new book, "You Are Not A Gadget," a manifesto decrying the Web's effect on individual creativity. (You can see excerpts of his criticism at Edge and at Cato Unbound.) Mr. Lanier mentions this newspaper as one of the victims as well as the promoters of the Web's ideology. "The New York Times," he writes, "promotes so-called open digital politics on a daily basis even though that ideal and the movement behind it are destroying the newspaper and all other newspapers. It seems to be a case of journalistic Stockholm syndrome." Mr. Lanier also faults himself: "

"When does the wisdom of crowds give way to the meanness of mobs? In the 1990s, Jaron Lanier was one of the digital pioneers hailing the wonderful possibilities that would be realized once the Internet allowed musicians, artists, scientists and engineers around the world to instantly share their work. Now, like a lot of us, he is having second thoughts. Mr. Lanier, a musician and avant-garde computer scientist - he popularized the term "virtual reality" - wonders if the Web's structure and ideology are fostering nasty group dynamics and mediocre collaborations. His new book, "You Are Not a Gadget," is a manifesto against "hive thinking" and "digital Maoism," by which he means the glorification of open-source software, free information and collective work at the expense of individual creativity."

Still 30-below! lol

it's a balmy -11 now, breaking out the beach shorts tomorrow