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Showing posts from 2011

Newt or Mitt: Predicting the 2012 US Presidential Republican Candidate

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Based on earlier work analyzing and visualizing the hidden links in Wikipedia, we have added a new dynamic Wikipedia mapping function to Condor. The new Wiki-Evolution feature collects all links originating and/or pointing to one or more Wikipedia articles over a given time period. Today I used this feature, to see what the Wikipedians have to say about Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich . The picture below shows the bidirectional link network of the most important articles about the two contenders for RepublicanUS presidential candidate. The nodes are colored by actuality (the more edits they have in the last 14 days, the darker the red. (0 to 20 edits is grey, 21 to 50 edits is orange, over 50 edits is dark red). As we can see, the articles about the two candidates have attracted the most edits, but also the rock group LMFAO (whose singer SkyBlu was involved in an altercation in a plane with Romney in 2010), Pope John Paul II (who shares the distinction with Gingrich of having been chos...

Will the EURO break up?

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With the crisis in the Eurozone approaching its climax, I was curious to read the collective mind. On the Web, in the blogosphere, and on Twitter there is a lot of buzz about Eurozone breakup or survival. I decided to ask both the swarm (through blogs) and experts (through News Web sites) as well as the crowd (through Twitter), using our Condor coolhunting tool. It turns out, swarm and experts think the Euro will survive intact - albeit by quite a slim margin: The picture above shows the Blog/Web site network, with the two search terms weighted by the importance (betweenness centrality) of the bloggers and Web sites. The bloggers/Web sites vote 52% for Eurozone survival, and 48% for Eurozone breakup. The crowd, measured through the tweeters , believes the opposite. The picture below shows the snapshot of today (11/27/2011) of the retweets about “euro survive” and “euro breakup”. The crowd on Twitter votes only 33% for Eurozone survival, with a decisive 67% of the vote for Eurozone brea...

Occupy Wallstreet battling TeaParty – Divided they tweet!

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Today (11/20/11) I ran a Condor twitter analysis for #ows (the Occupy Wallstreet Twitter tag) and #teaparty (the Tea Party Twitter tag), trying to predict public sentiment for these two social movements. I only collected retweets, and constructed the retweet-network, measuring the importance of people retweeting based on their social network position. The picture below shows the resulting network, each dot is a twitterer, each line is one or more retweets. Surprisingly we get three clear clusters, a Occupy Wallstreet cluster (blue, at the bottom), a Tea Party cluster (yellow, in the center) and a mixed cluster at the top. Red dots are people tweeting both about #ows and #teaparty. A closer look at these three clusters tells us that the blue cluster is Occupy Wallstreet sympathizers talking about issues near and dear to them, the yellow cluster is Tea-Party sympathizers doing the same about their cause, while the mixed cluster at the top consists of Occupy Wallstreet sympathizers badmou...

What creative swarms can learn from the bees

Last Friday night I had a great discussion with Billie Bivins, host of the show " Make Art...Feel Better " at the Belmont Media Center about creative swarming and the bees. She even got me to cobble together my own bee. Here is the link to the resulting video . Very cool.

Wikimaps Revised

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The first version of the Wikimaps Page ( http://www.ickn.org/wikimaps/ ) that we published a couple of weeks ago helped to visualize the basic idea of Wikimaps. It consists of an interactive animation that allows visitors to visually track the changes in Wikipedia articles over a given time period. Real world activities and events are reflected in updates of the respective articles and the links between them. Rise and Fall (of Swiss Tennis Star Hingis) on Wikimaps A good example is the retirement of the Swiss tennis player Martina Hingis. While her page (node) is still well connected to the network in 2008 (roughly a year after she retired), the page is not listed in the network anymore after February 2010. It is important to note that this view of the network is filtered and only displays nodes that “survive the cut”: The page of the former number one ranked player is still there and has many links pointing to it, just not enough to appear in this filtered “most important pages” view...

Wikimaps: Dynamic Maps of Knowledge

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Wikipedia does not only provide the digital world with a vast amount of high quality information, it also opens up new opportunities to investigate the processes that lie behind the creation of the content as well as the relations between knowledge domains. In their daily work Wikipedia editors make sure to keep articles updated: Natural disasters, shiny new pop icons and scandals are reflected in new articles or in links between them. But how do these pages and their links evolve over time? Can we visually track how ties between subject-areas grow stronger, is there a way to notice that an article becomes more influential? Our first attempt to come up with an answer to these questions was the development of a visualization that renders pages as nodes of a graph. If there is a link between two pages, the corresponding links are represented as an edge. Each graph represents a snapshot of the articles at a specific date, the slider and the video controls on the left allow you to navigate...

The US – a Loophole Society – or a Society of Trust?

My immersion into the loophole society concept took place in 2007 when I was bringing used computers to Ghana, to be donated to schools. While the total value of the computers was about $1200, getting them through Ghanaian customs took two weeks and cost me another $1200. I had to hire an agent, who was a relative of the headmaster at the receiving school, who expected to be paid $200 to shepherd me through the myriad customs clearance offices. This customs process, designed to plug customs loopholes for importers, doubled the costs of the goods. However when I had delivered the computers I found out that I could have bought the same computers for about $1200 on the public Makola market in Accra – so it seems clever people always find ways to exploit the loopholes. It is my perception that the loophole society concept is not restricted to African countries. Even the US has become more and more a society where people exploiting loopholes are rewarded and admired. Last week we learned t...

Might growing health care costs be a good thing?

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Everybody is complaining about the ever-rising costs of health care. But could it be that this is actually a good thing, because it means we can afford to spend an ever-rising share of our dispensable income on our health? While there is undoubtedly some misuse of our healthcare dollars, and money is wasted on unnecessary beauty operations, or even worse, on lawyers filing malpractice suits, I think that the overall fraction of dispensable income a society can afford to spend on healthcare is a good benchmark for gross national happiness. There are many variables influencing happiness, such as income, being married, and age, but being in good health has been found to be one of the most reliable predictors of happiness, as has been shown by many researchers . Countries which are able to spend a large amount of their income on healthcare should therefore be happier. Does national happiness and healthcare spending indeed correlate? Because I could not find statistics, I did a quick calcu...

Prediction Market predicted Oscars correctly 11 out of 12 times

I just stumbled on this interesting Blog post which compared the predictive quality of the Intrade prediction market to correctly predict this and last year's Oscars. It seems the market picked the winner correctly 11 out of 12 times. Also interesting is the comment by BarTaxCa on the post, noting that depending on which prediction market one picks (HSX, Intrade, Inkling market) prediction differs. So it seems there is still a role to play for analyzing the wisdom of swarms through their Web buzz on IMDB and Rottentomatoes. In fact, what we found is that throwing the two together (prediction market + Web buzz) leads to the best results.

Facebook Pages, and why we know that you probably like Lady Gaga.

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The Idea Ever since Facebook rolled out pages in 2007, it has become very easy for users to show their interest in music, film, books, artists and other entities in various categories by clicking the "like" button on a specific facebook page. Most of the time, the inform ation about your personal “likes” is not protected automatically and therefore can therefore accessed by everyone, even if not logged in. We know that Mark Zuckerberg likes the Yankees and is a fan of Jay-Z, but that might just be of interest to his friends or People magazine. But there is much more information that we can infer from the social graph. Can Barack Obama know about the preferred beverages or favorite books of his fans? He can! ...but he probably doesn' t care. With the information provided by Facebook’s social graph it is easy to identify connections between books, films or brands - without conducting a survey. The Data Building a network by linking two pa ges, depending on the frequ...

To Be a Better Manager Means Not to Be a Manager!

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I think that time has come to fundamentally rethink the way we train and reward managers. While social entrepreneurship has become a popular buzzword at management schools, and Andrew Cuomo, the new governor of the state of New York asked all his senior staff to take an ethics class in the first sixty days of his tenure, this is still just lip service. My proposal is far more radical: Make managers redundant! Let me explain what I mean. 4 Motivational Phenotypes of Knowledge Workers When trying to understand the behavior and motivation of knowledge workers, it helps to group them into four phenotypes. These four types of knowledge workers, vastly differing in skill set and motivation, are: (1) the artists, (2) the scientists, (3) the teachers, and (4) the managers. Artists want to create something new and beautiful, to touch the lives of people interacting with their art. Whether it is painters, sculptors, actors, singers, or orchestra musicians, they do what they do mostly not becau...