Monthly Archives: February 2013

Social network analysis: “The Friendster Autopsy”

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A group of researchers has provided an autopsy of Friendster:

Friendster was once the hottest thing in social networking. Google wanted to buy it for $30 million back in 2003, but — burdened by technical glitches and a more nimble competitor in Facebook — it was pretty much dead in the U.S. by 2006. That said, it trudged along for a few more years, helped by a relatively strong following in southeast Asia. Then, around 2009, a site redesign crushed it…

What they found was that by 2009, Friendster still had tens of millions of users, but the bonds linking the network weren’t particularly strong. Many of the users weren’t connected to a lot of other members, and the people they had befriended came with just a handful of their own connections. So they ended up being so loosely affiliated with the network, that the burden of dealing with a new user interface just wasn’t worth it.

“First the users in the outer cores start to leave, lowering the benefits of inner cores, cascading through the network towards the core users, and thus unraveling,” Garcia told us during an online chat…

The researchers describe heart of successful networks in terms of what that they call K-cores. These are subset of users who not only have a lot of friends, but they have “resilience and social influence,” Garcia says. As these K-cores disintegrated, the whole Friendster thing fell apart.

This sounds like a classic social network analysis: are there enough strong bonds in a large network to keep it together? As they note, it is not just about the number of users involved but rather the relationships and interactions between key groups that have an outsized influence on the entire network.

I suspect Facebook (and other social network people) has some idea about this idea already. What I would want to hear about is how then Facebook helps keep these “k-cores” or hubs or key nodes together. Are the algorithms for news feeds geared toward these people or groups? How are things tweaked to help these k-cores grow and continue to have an outsized influence?

Is it worth holding local elections for less than 15% turnout?

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The Daily Herald asks whether the low turnout for Tuesday’s local elections in the Chicago area means the elections should not be held:

Voter turnout Tuesday was so poor area election officials were calling the effort a waste of tax dollars…

Numbers show no county in the area managed even a 15 percent turnout. Suburban Cook County faired the best overall with a 13.8 percent turnout, according to the summary report available online. Much of even that low number is attributable to interest in the special primary to replace Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr. In other places, such as Palatine Township, the top vote-getter was township clerk candidate Lisa Moran with a mere 1,612 votes.

Without a Congressional draw on the ballot, Lake County logged a turnout of a little more than 11 percent. The low total left Lake County Clerk Willard Helander scratching her head…

In DuPage County, a narrowly focused ballot fueled a 3.9 percent voter turnout, officials said. Tuesday’s primary affected voters in only two precincts who could make a choice between five candidates for Aurora Ward 9 alderman…

Kane County Clerk Jack Cunningham took that sentiment one step further. His county logged a 2.9 percent turnout. That works out to about one vote cast per minute in all of the county for the entire election day, Cunningham said. That’s not enough to justify the cost of running the election.

Those are some low turnout totals. To be honest, I didn’t even know there was anything to be voted on in DuPage County and I keep up with local news and regularly read the newspaper. If it hadn’t been for some of the coverage of New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg giving money in the race for Jesse Jackson Jr.’s former seat, I may not have known anything was being voted on.

Some obvious points (to me):

1. Why not vote for these offices and other matters during bigger elections? Yes, this may mean there is more for voters to consider at a time and it is hard to keep up with it all, but at least people would have more of an idea to vote.

2. In response to the low turnout, one county clerk asked whether people care about their local government. My short answer: no, not really. Most communities don’t generate the kind of involvement or major issues that consistently divide the community that would drive people to vote. Even in talking to local public officials, some of them will tell you that they got involved in local government because they saw something they wanted to change and then got involved.

3. I would love to see this story include some data about local voter turnout over time. We know that election turnout has dropped even with the bigger elections. What about these smaller elections? Is there a “golden age” when people used to care more about local government and voted?

Proposing marriage through a statistical model

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Statistical models are supposed to help predict life, right? So why not use a statistical model to help make a marriage proposal?

I think this is clever. And the one-page paper that goes with it is not bad either.

h/t Instapundit

An overview of IKEA’s new 26-acre redevelopment in London’s East End

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Here is a quick look at IKEA’s large redevelopment project in London’s East End:

The new project is only the first step of Ikea’s journey into urbanism. Inter Ikea’s LandProp division has acquired a second parcel north of London and has initiated talks for a $1.45 billion project in Birmingham twice the size of the one in London; it has reportedly shopped for sites in Hamburg, Germany, too. LandProp also intends to build a hundred budget hotels across Europe and is considering a push into student housing, all covered by the stores’ bottomless cash flow. “Once we decide to do something, we go like a tank,” said LandProp’s chief, Harald Muller, at Strand East’s unveiling in 2011. (Citing overwhelming media interest, LandProp refused repeated requests for an interview.)…

The new town within a town pursues this dual goal by putting the Swedish vision of the folkhemmet (the “people’s home”) to the test. It’s a utopian dream that dovetails nicely with the aim of London officials to use the Olympic legacy to address historic inequalities in the city’s East End. Plans for Strand East depict car-free streets lined with low-slung multifamily town houses, while smaller homes face the back alleys in an echo of London’s beloved mews. Of the 1,200 homes and apartments, LandProp promises that 40% will be large enough for families; another 15% will be set aside for affordable housing, for which London has considerable pent-up demand. The remainder of the site will consist of public squares and parks, with mid-rise commercial districts along the edges.

So far, urbanists are impressed with what they’ve seen of the project. “Compared to the towering cities popping up around the world, Strand East is a quaint, pleasant surprise, mixing old and new in a way that gives the area an uncommon sense of history and place,” says Paul Kroese, strategic adviser for the International New Town Institute. The plans are of a piece with Ikea’s other ventures, too. “Ikea wants to build a world that leverages its knowledge of how people live,” says Steen Kanter, a former top Ikea executive in the United States who today runs his own consultancy, Kanter International. “And it’s a good way to gain expertise installing kitchens and wardrobes and other large environments.”

Indeed, some retail analysts suggest that Strand East is both a branding exercise for Ikea and a living laboratory for a renewed drive into housing. The company has been trying to crack the U.K. market since 1997, when it intro duced a flat-pack home. The BoKlok comes in three configurations (none larger than 800 square feet), with prices starting at about $112,500. (The houses are assembled by Ikea’s construction partner, Skanska.) More than 4,900 BoKloks have been built to date in Scandinavia, but it hasn’t caught on in the United Kingdom despite recently renewed interest in prefab housing.

Curbed sums up some of the more interesting aspects of the project:

1. Included in Ikea’s masterplan: shops, schools, theaters, a hotel, and, you know, apartments for 6,000 people.

2. Strangely absent? An actual Ikea store.

3. Starting prices for the town’s flat-pack houses, called BoKlock, are less than half the price of an average U.K. house—$112,500 vs. $260,850...

5. Of the 1,200 houses to be built, 40 percent will be large enough for families, and 15 percent of them will be earmarked as affordable housing...

7. The whole shebang will supposedly cost around $500M.

We’ll see what happens. Even if this wasn’t built with IKEA, there could be some questions about the design, how successful it will be as a mixed-income neighborhood, and how it will fit in with the surrounding area. While people seem interested in how might affect IKEA’s global image, I would be more interested to know how the community itself will relate to IKEA as developer and major corporation. The experiences of a place like Celebration, Florida and Disney suggest this can be a convoluted process that both attracts a certain kind of resident but can lead to governance and identity issues.

State of the housing market: spring here but inventory of homes for sale still down

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Even though spring is often the time when the housing market picks up, inventory is still down as we approach March:

But a return to healthy inventory levels could take years. Many homeowners can’t afford to sell because they don’t have enough equity to put into buying another house — or would have to write a check to sell. The supply of distressed houses for sale is thinning as the foreclosure crisis recedes, especially in some states. Home building, while improving, is still at low levels. And, after years of holding on, few homeowners want to sell when prices are just coming off the bottom, Realtors say.

“We’re making a painful transition from a market dominated by distressed sellers to a market in which the only people selling are people who want to sell,” says Glenn Kelman, CEO of online brokerage Redfin.

The nation now has a 4.2-month supply of existing homes for sale. A healthy market, defined as a six-month to seven-month supply, will arrive when home prices rise another 20%, estimates John Burns, CEO of John Burns Real Estate Consulting.

A jump that size will lure enough sellers to match demand pouring in from renters and investors, he says. Rising prices will also drive more home building, he says…

Nationwide, almost 28% of homeowners with a home loan owe more on their loan than their home is worth, data from market watcher Zillow show. That’s 13.8 million homeowners. They’d likely have to write a check to sell, especially if they have to pay a Realtor.

In other words, a housing recovery will still take some time. Even with foreclosures easing, prices have not recovered to the point where more people want to or can sell.

One thing I like about this article: it doesn’t engage in speculation about when the market will be back to “normal.” Too often, real estate articles are full of people making predictions about when the tide will turn. Shouldn’t years of more uncertainty like the last few years make us at least a little more conscious about making such predictions? Also, we might be closer to recognizing that perhaps times like this might be “normal” for a while.

I wonder how much this data/information is related to lower levels of mobility in the United States…

Joel Kotkin links population increases in Sunbelt, Great Plains, and Mountain West with positive business climates

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Joel Kotkin argues the recent population growth and population loss in certain regions of the U.S. is related to business climate:

These trends point to a U.S. economic future dominated by four growth corridors that are generally less dense, more affordable, and markedly more conservative and pro-business: the Great Plains, the Intermountain West, the Third Coast (spanning the Gulf states from Texas to Florida), and the Southeastern industrial belt.

Overall, these corridors account for 45% of the nation’s land mass and 30% of its population. Between 2001 and 2011, job growth in the Great Plains, the Intermountain West and the Third Coast was between 7% and 8%—nearly 10 times the job growth rate for the rest of the country. Only the Southeastern industrial belt tracked close to the national average…

Energy, manufacturing and agriculture are playing a major role in the corridor states’ revival. The resurgence of fossil fuel–based energy, notably shale oil and natural gas, is especially important. Over the past decade, Texas alone has added 180,000 mostly high-paying energy-related jobs, Oklahoma another 40,000, and the Intermountain West well over 30,000. Energy-rich California, despite the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate, has created a mere 20,000 such jobs. In New York, meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is still delaying a decision on hydraulic fracturing…

Since 2000, the Intermountain West’s population has grown by 20%, the Third Coast’s by 14%, the long-depopulating Great Plains by over 14%, and the Southeast by 13%. Population in the rest of the U.S. has grown barely 7%. Last year, the largest net recipients of domestic migrants were Texas and Florida, which between them gained 150,000. The biggest losers? New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California.

As a result, the corridors are home to most of America’s fastest-growing big cities, including Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City and Denver. Critically for the economic and political future, the growth corridor seems particularly appealing to young families with children.

This is part of a larger demographic trend that has taken place in the last 50 years in the United States: larger population growth in the Sunbelt and West. This has been accompanied by the growth of major cities, particularly places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix, and the movement of jobs to these areas.

It would be interesting to view these struggles as part of a larger power struggle between regions. It is obvious to pick up on the political implications but we could also look at economic, social, cultural, and religious implications. These growing Sunbelt cities don’t quite have the global status several of the northern cities do. Is this a function of time or can they catch up? Where does Washington D.C. fit into this – still a compromise city between North and South? How different are everyday lives in these different parts of the country? How much do businesses who relocate to these areas like the regions beyond the bottom-line considerations?

h/t Instapundit

How the Library of Congress will archive and make available all tweets

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The Library of Congress announced a few years ago they will archive all tweets. Here is how they plan to store the data and make it available:

Osterberg says the costs associated with the project, in terms of developing the infrastructure to house the tweets, is in the low tens of thousands of dollars. The tweets were offered as a free gift from Twitter, and are being transferred to the Library through a separate company, Gnip, at no cost. Each day tweets are automatically pulled in from Gnip, organized chronologically and scanned to ensure they’re not corrupted. Then the data are stored on two separate tapes which are housed in different parts of the Library for security reasons.

The Library has mostly figured out how to make the archive organized, but usability remains a challenge. A simple query of just the 2006-2010 tweets currently takes about 24 hours. Increasing search speeds to a reasonable level would require purchasing hundreds of servers, which the Library says is financially unfeasible right now. There’s no timetable for when the tweets might become accessible to researchers…

While you can’t yet make a trip to Washington D.C. and have casual perusal of all the world’s tweets, the technology to do exactly that is readily available—for a cost. Gnip, the organization feeding the tweets to the Library, is a social media data company that has exclusive access to the Twitter “firehose,” the never-ending, comprehensive stream of all of our tweets. Companies such as IBM pay for Gnip’s services, which also include access to posts from other social networks like Facebook and Tumblr. The company also works with academics and public policy experts, the type of people likely to make use of a free, government-sponsored Twitter archive when it comes to fruition…

All the researchers agree that Twitter is a powerful tool for sociological study. Soon, if the Library of Congress can make its database fully functional, it’ll also be an easily accessible one. And one day, long after we’ve all sent our final snarky tweet, our messages will live on.

And what will people of the future think when they read all these tweets?

While this could be a really interesting data source (notwithstanding all of the sample selection issues), I find it odd there is no timetable for when it might be more easily searchable. What is the point of collecting all of this information if it can’t be put to use?

English sociologist says “suburbs not so boring”

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A sociology lecturer in England argues that suburbs are more complex than many think:

A sociology lecturer has delved into life on the Kingsynmpton estate, the racial make up of Kingston and TV show The Good Life as part of a new book about suburbia.

Kingston University’s Rupa Huq’s book, On The Edge, says that those who fondly imagine the suburbs as the preserve of maiden aunts on bicycles, archetypal Englishness –or places of stifling conformism are wide of the mark.

She said: “I think suburbs are much more complicated and dynamic than we give them credit for.”

My short response: I think Huq’s argument would also work well for American suburbs. While critics argue they are dull and similar, suburban communities are quite varied. But, I’m not sure the image of “maiden aunts on bicycles” would quite apply…

Can Chicago art convince suburban residents that they have a responsibility to help fight violence in the city?

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Chicago Tribune theater critic Chris Jones argues that the Chicago art scene can help convince people in the suburbs that they should help fight violence in the city:

But there’s another common theme gaining steam this winter. Many of these artistic responses to violence are trying to impress upon people that geography does not inoculate a city — a region, a nation — from responsibility. Because the killings have, for the most part, been confined to certain neighborhoods, it has been possible for the rest of Chicago to live, work and go about its business mostly untouched. There is this crisis, a crisis of which Chicagoans increasingly are aware, yet still it often is not seen. Were this violence evenly spread throughout the city’s ZIP codes, then there certainly would not be business as usual. Of that there can be no question.

So in works like “Crime Scene: A Chicago Anthology,” staged by Collaboraction on Milwaukee Avenue and full of compelling insights, the point is made that the killings have been taking place very close to the actual artistic venue. Indeed, in art exhibits and performance lobbies across Chicago, you can often see so many maps and charts, it feels like you are in a police incident room. It’s not far from here, these pieces keep reminding us. You could ride a bike there in 20 minutes. If you’re driving home, you’re probably going farther. This is a crucial element of raising awareness.

Many of these works, such as “It Shoudda Been Me,” created for the eta Creative Arts Foundation by the University of Chicago’s Dr. Doriane Miller, one of the first in Chicago to understand that fictionalizing violent scenarios makes it easier for those who live them to talk about them, have been created to tour. Officials from the Chicago Park District were at Collaboraction on Monday, checking out the piece as possible programming for neighborhood parks. Clearly, there is a need for such programming in the neighborhoods where this level of violence is a daily reality. Especially this summer, when nerves will on edge all over Chicago, the amount of that programming will need to increase. It’s one way to keep kids off the streets.

But I kept wondering about the places beyond the boundaries of the Chicago Park District, beyond the hipster neighborhoods like Wicker Park. What about Wheaton or Winnetka? Are the stories behind the violence in Chicago understood there in the way that the city’s stunning cultural assets are understood?

This is a fascinating argument: can art bridge the gap between city violence and suburbanites who have the luxury of watching the problems of Chicago from a distance? Jones hints at the broad gulf between suburbs and city and even between the wealthier areas of Chicago and the areas experiencing more violence and difficulty. Urban sociologists have been discussing these for decades. The Chicago School classic The Gold Coast and the Slum noted the cultural gaps between the wealthy and poor on the near north side in the 1920s even though the two groups lived in close proximity. Work in the last 50 years has emphasized how suburban growth has contributed to the problems of the inner city by removing social capital, resources (in the form of jobs, money spent on highways rather than mass transit, tax revenues, etc.), and middle-class norms and values. People in the suburbs may lament the violence in Chicago but how willing are they to act against it or contribute to actions that might help or sacrifice some of their own life?

The trick seems to be to get the suburbanites not just to experience the art or the true stories of violence. Rather, Jones wants the suburbanites to act in response to what they see in art or the news. This is a much tougher nut to crack.

How a developer of big homes differentiates his homes from McMansions

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Few builders are aiming to have their new big homes labeled McMansions. Here is how one developer describes how his new homes differ from McMansions:

According to brothers Taylor and Milton Chamberlin, the goal for the Georgian style homes is for them to be an alternative to “McMansions.”

“We really take our time to design the homes to fit in the neighborhood. We’re not builders that come in and put this huge McMansion in a small neighborhood where it doesn’t fit. That’s not what we do,” said Taylor. “All of this is really thought through and it’s really livable, usable space. It’s not those McMansions where you walk in and wonder, ‘What do you do in this room?’”

The base model runs around $1.4 million and features four bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms, with the possibility of another bedroom and bathroom on an additional level. Costs will vary based on the different lot sizes and individual add-ons the purchasers want in their homes…

Another goal is to foster a 1950s sense of community among the owners of the nine properties, in which everybody knows and interacts with their neighbors. The homes will only be accessible via a private road and there will be a small fence around the subdivision…

The brothers noted The Barrett Companies’ effort toward green building and energy efficiency. From better insulation and caulking to installing appropriate outlets in the detached garages for plugging in an electric car, the Chamberlins believe small touches make their properties stand out.

These are big new homes that at first glance might fit several traits of McMansions. But, here is the argument the developer uses to say their homes are not McMansions:

1. The homes will fit the neighborhood. Critics argue McMansions, particularly teardowns, can disrupt the character of existing neighborhoods.

2. The home is not just about space; it is about well-designed and usable space. One argument about McMansions is that they provide lots of square footage but this is often contained in cavernous rooms or in poor layouts that are difficult to utilize in day-to-day life.

3. They are hoping to promote a community atmosphere in their small development. I wonder if this is primarily a function of size; the fenced-in neighborhood with a private road will only contain nine homes.

4. These homes will be greener than normal big homes. McMansions are often said to about excessive consumption and part of sprawl.

5. There will be a consistent design scheme with Georgian architecture and detached garages on the private road away from the streets surrounding the neighborhood. McMansions are criticized for mixing architectural styles.

In the end, I wonder if a majority of buyers and critics would think these reasons are enough to separate these homes from McMansions. These are still big homes in the midst of suburban neighborhoods. They may be more consistent and be less mass-produced but are they different enough?