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The Manchester social networks group (MSNG) is a cross-disciplinary research group located in the School of Social Sciences. MSNG aims to discuss and to promote the application and development of Social Network Analysis methodology to answer important research questions in social science. The following SNA topics are of interest to the group: Data collection for social network analysis Longitudinal networks and network formation Neighbourhood and network variations in social and health outcomes Qualitative network analysis Social Networks and Social Movements Statistical modelling of social networks Visualising and describing social networks

What makes a tweet go viral online? And what does a viral trend actually look like? Those are a couple of the questions that can be answered by a new Microsoft Research project, called Viral Search. The company's researchers are showing the project this week at an internal gathering this week in Redmond. The program crunches large amounts of data from Twitter (and potentially Facebook and other platforms in the future) to analyze and display patterns of distribution on the social network.

It is well known that Canada is an urban nation. Most people now live in cities. But most growth is occurring in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas and in nearby towns and cities. Yet academic research has often focused on our central cities. Better understanding of suburbs as places, and suburbanization as a process, have less frequently been explicit aims of research.

Rioting and related intra-crowd dynamics are significant human processes, but we know less about the basic behavioral science and subsequent processes that drive and shape rioting than we would like to. This is due, in large part, to the difficulty in studying riots on the ground and to the sheer complexity of riot phenomena. We know even less about the geographical dynamics of rioting, even though there is a dedicated (but only general) appreciation that geography is important. Existing work has, for the most part, adopted the most straightforward path to discovery, by examining coarse (city-scale) geographies of rioting, or in the few instances where intra-crowd riot dynamics are considered they have focused on stylized abstractions of behavior. Because of the difficulties of using standard social science inquiry to study riots (surveys, ethnographic analysis, interviews), many researchers have turned to computer modeling to create synthetic riots that can be configured, sampled, and experimented with. But, building models of something as bewilderingly complex as rioting is really quite difficult and so many short-cuts are taken. In particular, models are usually cellular-based in form (where rasters represent people and their local environment) and founded on physical interactions between relatively "dumb" particle-people (where continuum mechanics, random walks, or particle-particle forces serve as a substitute for socio-spatial interaction and behavior).

Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) is a Java-based application for qualitative category-based content analysis. It serves two purposes: coding statements of actors into categories, and converting these structured data into networks that are readable by UCINET, visone and other network-analytic software packages. The software can extract either bipartite (affiliation) networks or adjacency networks. It is complementary to semantic network analysis applications because it neither relies on algorithms for automatic text processing, nor does it focus on the internal meaning or mental representation of a single text or document. Instead, tags are applied to the text data by manual inspection, thus rendering it more flexible, yet at the same time more work-intensive. DNA can be used to code a large body of text documents and then convert them into graphs. The application is currently being developed, tested and heavily used in my dissertation research project on German pension politics. Updates will be posted here as soon as something has been published. If you use DNA, I would love to hear from you about your project (if possible, via the DNA-help mailing list). For more information about the software, please consult the documentation or obtain a free copy from the download page.

GeoPlatform.gov/gulfresponse is a new online tool that provides you with near-real time information about the response effort. Developed by NOAA with the EPA, U.S. Coast Guard, and the Department of Interior, the site offers you a "one-stop shop" for spill response information. The site integrates the latest data the federal responders have about the oil spill's trajectory with fishery area closures, wildlife data and place-based Gulf Coast resources - such as pinpointed locations of oiled shoreline and current positions of deployed research ships - into one customizable interactive map.

SecLists.Org Security Mailing List Archive Any hacker will tell you that the latest news and exploits are not found on any web site-not even Insecure.Org. No, the cutting edge in security research is and will continue to be the full disclosure mailing lists such as Bugtraq. Here we provide web archives and RSS feeds (now including message extracts), updated in real-time, for many of our favorite lists

Bing Fund is looking for startups that are building online or mobile experiences that incorporate fresh insights. Participants are not required to use Microsoft technology. We enroll startups into our program on an ongoing basis, investing in and working with a small number at any given time. Here's what we offer: * Subsidized use of unique APIs from Bing's data ecosystem * The opportunity to access certain technology assets developed by Microsoft Research * Assistance from Bing Fund team members who specialize in design, engineering, marketing, and building businesses * Consultations with Subject Matter Experts at Microsoft, some of whom are world experts in their areas * Exposure to Microsoft executives * Connections with our partners and customers * Funding * Co-workspace for startups located in the Seattle area.

How Big Data Became So Big By STEVE LOHR Published: August 11, 2012 This has been the crossover year for Big Data - as a concept, as a term and, yes, as a marketing tool. Big Data has sprung from the confines of technology circles into the mainstream. First, here are a few, well, data points: Big Data was a featured topic this year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a report titled "Big Data, Big Impact." In March, the federal government announced $200 million in research programs for Big Data computing.

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Visible is the leader in social media monitoring, analytics, and services for enterprises globally. Visible's award-winning technology and expertise helps businesses analyze social media conversations to better understand consumer preferences, market dynamics, competitive strengths and weaknesses, and other information critical to a company's reputation and brands. Visible is the solution of choice for many Forbes Global 2000 companies in a variety of industries including financial services, pharmaceutical, automotive, consumer products, retail, travel and hospitality, telecom, technology, and agencies.