Category Archives: Gadgets and Technology

A call to “begin creating synthetic sociology”

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Two academics call for “synthetic sociology”:

Well, it’s time we begin creating synthetic sociology. Along with Nicholas Christakis, I recently laid out the potential for this new field:

We wanted to see if this could be done in humans. Like crabs, humans have specific kinds of behavior that can be predicted, in groups. To harness this, we created a survey on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, surveying lots of people at once.

We asked a couple hundred people to complete a string of 1’s and 0’s, and asked them to make it “as random as possible.” As it happens, people are fairly bad at generating random numbers—there is a broad human tendency to suppose that strings must alternate more than they do. And what we found in our Mechanical Turk survey was exactly this: Predictably, people would generate a nonrandom number. For example, faced with 0, 0, there was about a 70 percent chance the next number would be 1.

From this single behavioral quirk, it is theoretically possible to construct a way in which a group of humans can act as what is known as a logic gate in computer science. By running such a question through a survey of enough people, and feeding those results to other people, you can turn them into what computer scientists call a “NOR” gate—a tool to take two pieces of binary input and yield consistent answers. And with just a handful of NOR gates, you can make a binary adder, a very simple computing device that can add two numbers together.

What this means is that, given sufficient numbers of people, and their willingness to answer questions about random bits, we can re-deploy humans for a purpose they were not intended, namely to act as a kind of computer—doing anything from adding two bits to running Microsoft Word (albeit really, really slowly).

On one hand, it sounds like we are far from using these methods to have humans finish complicated tasks yet, on the other hand, this continues to build upon research about social networks and how information and other traits can be passed along and built on in a group of people. As these academics suggest, we have come some distance in recent decades in understanding and modeling human behavior and advances are likely to continue to come in the near future.

This also isn’t the first time that I have heard of social scientists using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for studies. For a relatively small amount of money, researchers can find a willing group of participants for experiments or other tasks.

Facebook’s Data Science Team running experiments

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Facebook’s Data Science Team of 12 researchers is working with all of its data (900 million users worth) and running experiments:

“Recently the Data Science Team has begun to use its unique position to experiment with the way Facebook works, tweaking the site-the way scientists might prod an ant’s nest-to see how users react… So [Eytan Bakshy] messed with how Facebook operated for a quarter of a billion users. Over a seven-week period, the 76 million links that those users shared with each other were logged. Then, on 219 million randomly chosen occasions, Facebook prevented someone from seeing a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this way created a control group so that Bakshy could assess how often people end up promoting the same links because they have similar information sources and interests.

“He found that our close friends strongly sway which information we share, but overall their impact is dwarfed by the collective influence of numerous more distant contacts-what sociologists call “weak ties.” It is our diverse collection of weak ties that most powerfully determines what information we’re exposed to.”

But if that sounds a little creepy, it shouldn’t. Well, not too creepy, because these kinds of experiments aren’t designed to influence us, but rather understand us. The piece continues:

“Marlow says his team wants to divine the rules of online social life to understand what’s going on inside Facebook, not to develop ways to manipulate it. “Our goal is not to change the pattern of communication in society,” he says. “Our goal is to understand it so we can adapt our platform to give people the experience that they want.” But some of his team’s work and the attitudes of Facebook’s leaders show that the company is not above using its platform to tweak users’ behavior. Unlike academic social scientists, Facebook’s employees have a short path from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people.”

I think there is a lot of room to explore the world of weak ties on Facebook and similar websites. Just how much do friends of friends affect us? What is the impact of people a few ties along in our network? For example, the book Connected shows that traits like obesity and happiness are tied to network behavior which could be examined on Facebook.

I would guess some people may not like hearing this but there are at least three points in Facebook’s favor here:

1. They are not the only online company running such experiments. Google has been doing such things with search results for quite a while. Theoretically, these experiments could help create a better user experience.

2. People are voluntarily giving their data. I don’t think these companies have to explain that user’s data might be used in experiments…but perhaps I am wrong?

3. This is “Big Data” writ large. Facebook and others would love to be able to run randomized trials with this large group and with all of the information available to researchers.

A Prius can only power a McMansion for a few hours but a Japanese home for four days

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A future study will look at how a Toyota Prius can power a home:

Pull electricity from a Toyota Prius Plug-in to a McMansion, and the lights may go out within a matter of a couple of hours. For a typical Japanese house, though, you’d be taken care of for the better part of a week.

Toyota said it will start testing a vehicle-to-home (V2H) system with the Prius Plug-in in Japan by the end of the year. The trial will involve a two-way power-supply system in which the car could supply the home with power in the event of a black-out. About 10 Toyota City homes will be involved in the testing.

The Japanese automaker says a fully-charged, filled-up Prius Plug-In can supply a typical Japanese house with 10 kilowatts, or enough for about four days. In addition to supplying power to blacked-out homes, the car will eventually be able to power up emergency shelters and other buildings.

Last August, Nissan started testing a similar system with its battery-electric Leaf, which the automaker said could provide about two days electricity for an average Japanese home when the car is fully charged. Nissan said it intended to commercialize the system, but didn’t provide further details.

So, if you are really worried about your power supply, one option is to buy a Toyota Prius and purchase a Japanese-sized home. Figures from 2003 suggest the average Japanese home has about 1,021 square feet. Or, you could go further: pair a Prius with a Japanese or American “tiny house” and have power for even longer!

In the long run, is having the Prius help power your home (or other objects) a greener outcome?

Civilization II a good “sociological simulator”? I say no

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I was amused earlier this week to see a report from a guy who has been playing the same game of Civilization II for ten years. Here is a little bit of his report on the state of the Civ II world:

  • The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.
  • There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

While I loved playing Civ II (and I think the gameplay was superior to later versions of the game), I’m scratching my head at how much attention this report has received in the media. Does it really tell us anything about the world’s possible future? Here is one overview from the BBC that I think goes too far:

A man who has been playing the computer game Civilisation II for ten years describes the year 3991 AD as a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.

Daniel Knowles, from the Telegraph and a fan of the game, says the game has certain assumptions built in to it about what will happen if there is a nuclear war or if you stop producing green technology.

“It’s a kind of sociological simulator… a giant economical model” he told the Today programme.

He believes gamer James Moore “would not still be playing it if he had reached an Utopia”.

Civilization II is a “sociological simulator”? I doubt it. Granted, the game is intended to replicate real-world nation-building and interaction. As you build your society, you have to make decisions like what kind of government to have (for example, in latter stages of the game fundamentalism is quite effective when waging all-out war), what to build and produce in individual cities, how to move certain units (military and otherwise) around, and pursue scientific and technological advancements. But, all of these types of games (and I’ve also been a fan in recent years of Age of Empires III) are only as good as what they account for. In other words, this is a low-level simulator of anything. The real world is far more complicated and many more moving pieces that games like this can allow. Indeed, these sorts of games seem geared toward all-out war between nations even as some would argue the international scene is getting more peaceful.

We are still far from a true “sociological simulator” that could account for all of the human variability in real life. This hasn’t stopped some scientists from trying – there was news recently of a group trying to put together a “Living Earth Simulator.” But, we need to remember what Civ II really is: it is a fun game with some modeling of human behavior but it really tells us very little or nothing about what the world might look like in 3991 AD.

Earn sociology credit by volunteering at Illinois’ new 2-1-1 info phone number

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A new information phone number, 2-1-1, is close to being available to northeastern Illinois residents and sociology students at a few Illinois colleges can earn credit for volunteering at the call centers:

The number is a free, nonemergency option for information on health and human service agencies, spearheaded by United Way. More than 30 states have coverage for 100 percent of their residents, as does Puerto Rico. Illinois and Arkansas are the only two states with less than 20 percent of residents able to dial 211, according to United Way Worldwide 2011 statistics…

Now though, David Barber, executive director of the United Way of Greater McHenry County, is working with six other local United Ways to create a similar collaborative across McHenry, Kane, Kendall and Lake counties. Barber is on the board of 211 Illinois and was the chairman for the committee that issued a request for information from potential 211 operators for downstate counties…

Local college students studying sociology or psychology could get real-world experience helping people in need by volunteering at the call centers for class credit — as Illinois State University and Illinois Wesleyan students already do. A single call center could serve the entire region or multiple call centers could be formed.

And data about the content of calls will be available to constantly improve service.

This is interesting that this service is making its way to more suburban areas. Chicago has had a popular 3-1-1 number for years. The Chicago number had 4.2 million calls last year. According to the FAQs, here are the “most requested city services in Chicago“:

  • Street Lights – All/Out
  • Graffiti Removal
  • Garbage Cart Black
  • Rodent Baiting/Rat Complaint
  • Shelter Request
  • Building Violation
  • Pot Hole in Street
  • Abandoned Vehicle Complaint

I would be interested to know what these sociology (and psychology) students encounter when answering these phone calls. How much could their sociological training come into play?

I am intrigued by the last idea quoted above: the phone number operates as a sort of voluntary needs-based assessment. On one hand, the phone number is not a representative sample of needs in an area and people may not call the phone number about certain issues. On the other hand, if a subject continually comes up, it could be some indication that services in that area are needed.

Media looks for ways to better measure fragmented audience

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As media platforms proliferate, media companies are looking for better ways to measure their audience:

“We have Omniture data, comScore, Nielsen, some of our internal metrics that we look at — they don’t match,” Wert said.

Hampering the effort are audiences splintering into ever smaller shards as they use an array of outlets and platforms — including websites, mobile devices, print and broadcast…

The tinier the pieces the more precious each becomes. It’s more important than ever for traditional media looking to cover the costs of producing content to deliver to marketers as much information as possible about who’s watching, reading and listening.

Arguably, technology has made the measurement systems better than ever. But the result is counterintuitive: Consumers are followed more closely but the numbers don’t always add up, and it’s not clear how to put a value on those numbers…

Nielsen’s Patrick Dineen, senior vice president of local television audience measurement, said it’s “wildly inappropriate” to try to track audiences through one medium. Kevin Gallagher, executive vice president and local director at Starcom, said his firm has replaced talk of traditional media planning with something that tracks targeted consumers’ daily interaction with media.

Getting the right numbers means media companies will be able to more accurately gauge advertising, particularly target audiences, and then make more money. Solving these issues and appropriately valuing these media interactions will be a huge issue moving forward and whoever can do it first or do it best could have an advantage.

Microsoft promo videos feature a preponderence of McMansions?

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In the middle of a “Xbox music preview,” Paul Thurrot makes an interesting observation about the homes shown in Microsoft promotional videos:

A promotional video then ensued. It was loud and peppy and featured the same overly-white, McMansion-living trendy families that always seem to exist in Microsoft’s promo videos since this is the only life that Microsoft employees in Redmond area understand. But it reveals a few interesting clues about how the Zune Music service will be changing and evolving as it becomes Xbox Music…

I don’t know how accurate this observation is as I don’t regularly watch tech industry promo videos. However, let’s assume it is true. Perhaps McMansion owners are more likely to purchase Microsoft products so Microsoft is simply portraying its target demographic. Perhaps Microsoft critics would love to tie Microsoft to McMansions and put together ideas that Microsoft simply mass produces products that don’t work well in the long run.

What are particular companies or perhaps products that would work well in advertisements with McMansions? A few ideas:

1. McDonald’s. An easy connection: mass production, supersizing, quantity over quality. Both have their enthusiastic detractors. Both seem to continue on anyhow (see this recent piece about a recent jump in sales of McMansions).

2. SUVs. These are commonly put together as symbols of excess and environmental waste. A Hummer would work well here. But what about a Honda CR-V or a Toyota Rav4?

3. Home Depot or any other big box home improvement store. Your mass produced McMansion is falling apart after five years or you need materials for a big brick fireplace on your 300 square foot patio? Save money and buy whatever you need here.

Contrast this with companies that might rather drop dead than be caught advertising with McMansions. Apple: not exactly the image they are trying to portray. Ikea tends to go with smaller spaces. Trendy companies as well as green products likely want to avoid being tied to McMansions.

Sociologist Duncan Watts helped come up with the idea for the Huffington Post

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Here an interesting sidelight to sociologist Duncan Watts career: he helped create the Huffington Post.

The origins of the now famous Huffington Post began at a lunch in 2003 between AOL’s Kenneth Lerer and author and sociologist Duncan Watts. The two met to discuss Watts’ book, and left with the beginnings of the Huff Post.  The Columbia  Journalism Review recently gave its own take on Watts’ book, Six Degrees, that inspired Lerer from the get-go and on the history of The Huffington Post as we now know it. According to CJR, before AOL’s purchase of HuffPost in 2011, the company was not known for revenues or breaking news stories. However, the website had managed to master social media integration and search-engine optimization.

Here are more details from the story in the Columbia Journalism Review cited above:

He brought the book with him and Watts would recall that the copy was dog-eared, the flatteringly telltale sign of a purposeful read. Lerer had a plan and he wanted Watts to help him. He had set himself an ambitious target. He wanted to take on the National Rifle Association.

He told Watts: “I know the answer to this is somewhere in these pages.”…

Ken Lerer listened, and he was not deterred. Networks did, in fact, occur—vast networks through which previously disconnected people suddenly found themselves joined together, perhaps to share an idea, a song, a sentiment, a cause. Why not then try to create a network that could challenge the vast and powerful and sustaining network of the NRA?

“I know the answers,” Watts told him. “I am confident they are not there.” Then, having deflated Lerer, Watts threw him a lifeline: “Maybe my friend Jonah can help you.”

An interesting read: in order to fight the NRA and counter the DrudgeReport, people wanted to make the Huffington Post both viral and sticky.

However, from his Twitter account, here is Watt’s Apr 18 take on the CJR piece:

Six degrees of aggregation: A fascinating (in my biased opinion) take on the origins of the Huffington Post.

Sharing data among scientists vs. “Big Data”

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In a quest to make data available to other researchers to verify research results, researchers have come up against one kind of data that is not made publicly available: “big data” from big Internet firms.

The issue came to a boil last month at a scientific conference in Lyon, France, when three scientists from Google and the University of Cambridge declined to release data they had compiled for a paper on the popularity of YouTube videos in different countries.

The chairman of the conference panel — Bernardo A. Huberman, a physicist who directs the social computing group at HP Labs here — responded angrily. In the future, he said, the conference should not accept papers from authors who did not make their data public. He was greeted by applause from the audience…

At leading social science journals, there are few clear guidelines on data sharing. “The American Journal of Sociology does not at present have a formal position on proprietary data,” its editor, Andrew Abbott, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, wrote in an e-mail. “Nor does it at present have formal policies enforcing the sharing of data.”

The problem is not limited to the social sciences. A recent review found that 44 of 50 leading scientific journals instructed their authors on sharing data but that fewer than 30 percent of the papers they published fully adhered to the instructions. A 2008 review of sharing requirements for genetics data found that 40 of 70 journals surveyed had policies, and that 17 of those were “weak.”

Who will win the battle between proprietary data and science? The article makes it sound like scientists are all on one side, particularly because of an interest in fighting issues like scientific fraud. At the same time, scientific journals don’t seem to be “enforcing” their guidelines or the individual scientists who are publishing in these journals aren’t following these guidelines.

The other side of this debate is not presented in this story: what do these big Internet firms, like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook think about sharing this data? This is not a small issue: these firms are spending a good amount of money on analyzing this data and probably hoping to use it for their own business and research purposes. For example, Microsoft recently set up a lab with several well-known researchers in New York City. Would the social scientists who work in such labs want to insist that the data be open? Should these companies have to open up their proprietary data to satisfy the requirements of the larger scientific community?

I suspect this will be an ongoing issue as social scientists look to analyze more innovative data that big companies have collected and that are more difficult for researchers to collect on their own. Will researchers be willing to forgo sharing this kind of data with the wider scientific community if they can get their hands on unique data?

History class “Lying About the Past” fools Wikipedia and the Internet…for a short time

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Here is a fascinating story of a history class at George Mason University that asked students to fabricate information on Wikipedia and it worked…for a short time.

Each tale was carefully fabricated by undergraduates at George Mason University who were enrolled in T. Mills Kelly’s course, Lying About the Past. Their escapades not only went unpunished, they were actually encouraged by their professor. Four years ago, students created a Wikipedia page detailing the exploits of Edward Owens, successfully fooling Wikipedia’s community of editors. This year, though, one group of students made the mistake of launching their hoax on Reddit. What they learned in the process provides a valuable lesson for anyone who turns to the Internet for information.

The first time Kelly taught the course, in 2008, his students confected the life of Edward Owens, mixing together actual lives and events with brazen fabrications. They created YouTube videos, interviewed experts, scanned and transcribed primary documents, and built a Wikipedia page to honor Owens’ memory. The romantic tale of a pirate plying his trade in the Chesapeake struck a chord, and quickly landed on USA Today’s pop culture blog. When Kelly announced the hoax at the end of the semester, some were amused, applauding his pedagogical innovations. Many others were livid.

Critics decried the creation of a fake Wikipedia page as digital vandalism. “Things like that really, really, really annoy me,” fumed founder Jimmy Wales, comparing it to dumping trash in the streets to test the willingness of a community to keep it clean. But the indignation may, in part, have been compounded by the weaknesses the project exposed. Wikipedia operates on a presumption of good will. Determined contributors, from public relations firms to activists to pranksters, often exploit that, inserting information they would like displayed. The sprawling scale of Wikipedia, with nearly four million English-language entries, ensures that even if overall quality remains high, many such efforts will prove successful…

Sometimes even an apparent failure can mask an underlying success. The students may have failed to pull off a spectacular hoax, but they surely learned a tremendous amount in the process. “Why would I design a course,” Kelly asks on his syllabus, “that is both a study of historical hoaxes and then has the specific aim of promoting a lie (or two) about the past?” Kelly explains that he hopes to mold his students into “much better consumers of historical information,” and at the same time, “to lighten up a little” in contrast to “overly stuffy” approaches to the subject. He defends his creative approach to teaching the mechanics of the historian’s craft, and plans to convert the class from an experimental course into a regular offering.

Should this professor be applauded for his innovative use of technology or questioned about the possible unethical nature of asking students to create stories online?

I’d love to see the student evaluations for this course. This course could be practical on a variety of levels: it reveals some insights into how history is “made” (it requires a certain number of sources, credible sources, and a narrator or place where the facts can be put together), it involves current technology (a plus for today’s college student who spend a lot of time online and rely on Wikipedia a lot), and it shows students how to evaluate information (whether online or otherwise). These sound like laudable goals. Here is the syllabus for the second iteration of the course (Spring 2012) and some of the material from the first page:

Why would I design a course that is both a study of historical hoaxes and then has the specific aim of promoting a lie (or two) about the past? I have two answers to this question, both of which I hope will convince you that I’m onto something. The first answer is that by learning about historical fakery, lying, and hoaxes, we all become much better consumers of historical information. In short, we are much less likely to be tricked by what we find in our own personal research about the past. That alone ought to be enough of a reason to teach this course. But my second reason is that I believe that the study of history ought to be fun and that too often historians (I include myself in this category) take an overly stuffy approach to the past. Maybe it’s our conditioning in graduate school, or maybe we’re afraid that if we get too playful with our
field we won’t be taken seriously as scholars. Whatever the reason, I think history has just gotten a bit too boring for its own good. This course is my attempt to lighten up a little and see where it gets us.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have only taught this class once before and to my knowledge,
no other history professor in the world is willing to teach something similar (or works in a
department where they could get away with it). Various courses taught around the world spend
some time on hoaxes and hoaxing, but I haven’t found one that is all about the hoax. So the only
model to work from is the one I used last time (Fall 2008). The last time around, the final class
project generated a great deal of discussion (much, but not all of it negative) in the academic
blogosphere. As you’ll see when we discuss the previous iteration of this course, I’m not
particularly sympathetic to those who took a dim view of what my students did.

Learning Goals

I do have some specific learning goals for this course. I hope that you’ll improve your research
and analytical skills and that you’ll become a much better consumer of historical information. I
hope you’ll become more skeptical without becoming too skeptical for your own good. I hope
you’ll learn some new skills in the digital realm that can translate to other courses you take or to
your eventual career. And, I hope you’ll be at least a little sneakier than you were before you
started the course.

Interesting.