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The Value of Social Network, by IBM research

From http://smallblue.research.ibm.com/projects/snvalue/

The goal of this project is to integrate financial capital, human capital and social network analysis to formally and quantitively define and model social capital. Our interest is to find out what are the real dollar value of social networks.

Nine hundred and forty-eight dollars.

That’s the annual dollar value of each person in your email address book at work, according to a novel IBM study published in the Winter Information Systems Conference in February 2009.

IBM researchers, together with researchers in MIT, were looking to scientifically determine how valuable electronic social networks are, such as those in a group that primarily communicates electronically. Using mathematical formulas, honed by observing the email traffic and financial success of 2,600 anonymized far flung IBM consultants collaborating on thousands of projects during one year, researchers found that not all email relationships were equal.

In fact, they found that people with strong email ties with a manager, or had a more diverse circle of correspondents, enjoyed greater financial success than those who were more aloof. Teams with an even mix of genders also performed well financially. Individuals have more diverse networks and thus have more people who are reachable within 2 social steps (i.e., your friends’ friends’ friends.) is valuable. Too intensive communications to the same people have negative impact, perhaps because of the repetitive redundant information exchange.

Google and Virgin to conquer Mars … opensourceing it!

virgle
UPDATE: thanks to the comment by Vincenzo, I now know this was a April 1st fool! Thanks Vincenzo! The application form with its strange questions could have me realize that! Example:
# I am a world-class expert in
physics
medicine and first aid
engineering
Guitar Hero II

Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars, by Google and Virgin.
The vision is heavily based on Open Source and Crowdsourcing. Clever move, both from PR perspective and from practical perspective!

It comprises three equal partners: Google, Virgin and a diffuse network of talented individuals who want to participate in our mission.

Who do I see as the perfect leader for this project? Yochai Benkler, fabolous author of the book “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom” and of “Sharing Nicely: On shareable goods and the emergence of sharing as a modality of economic production”, most inspiring paper I ever read.

More from http://www.google.com/virgle/opensource.html:

A post-post-industrial economy
What does “open source” mean in the context of a distant, planet-wide, century-long enterprise? Today’s industrialized (and post-industrialized) (and, one imagines, post-post- industrialized) economies are sustained not so much by physical wealth as by advanced systems of shared knowledge whose marginal productivity grows as more is accumulated. “Shared,” however, doesn’t mean valueless; we see Virgle as a decidedly for-profit venture that will develop most efficiently via decentralized models of effort, authority and reward. If the first economic revolution was agricultural, the second industrial and the third digital, the fourth will be Open Source — the birthing of a planetary civilization whose development is driven by the unbound human imagination.

We want to engage, one might say, the Long Tail of human creativity. Instead of 5,000 people working 12 hours a day six days a week in exchange for a full salary and benefits, imagine 5 million people working a few hours a week in exchange for contribution-based equity in the form of shares in Virgle Inc and ownership of the land of which the colony will ultimately take some form of possession.

You weren’t thinking real estate? Start. Virgle’s costs will be considerable — we’re planning on up-front investments of $10-15 billion in the first two decades –- but so too will the colony’s long-term earnings. Whatever one’s interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty, for instance, it seems clear that the initial explorers and developers will be able to claim ownership of some significant portion of 143 million square kilometers of Martian real estate, which, sold (or traded as open-source sweat equity) at an average value of $10 per acre, would be worth a cool $358 billion. Multiply that by 100x for its post-terraforming value and you get a figure of $36 trillion. Clearly, whatever model of real estate distribution our emerging society adopts, its worth will exceed the investments likely to be required to unlock that value.

Our civilization’s most valuable export, meanwhile, will be intellectual property. The problems our Pioneers solve in the course of their world-building enterprise will represent an engine of invention in dozens of lucrative areas, from biotechnology to geology, physics to agriculture. We see the community’s system of intellectual property development evolving from a community open source model to commercial open source (or perhaps we mean that the other way around?). We can imagine that commons-based peer production model — in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or direct financial compensation — extending to almost every imaginable aspect of Martian life.

Pretending not to. Social networks as covers (both for love and work)

Great paper by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski (Harvard Business School) “Networks as Covers: Evidence from business and social On-line Networks” . Amazing which patterns everybody can unveil when (almost) all out social interactions leave electronic trails everybody can collect and analyze! Amazing and of course scary!

This paper proposes that networks can act as covers which allow actors to participate in markets while maintaining a plausible excuse that they are not. Most generally, a cover is any action which allows ego to signal to alter that he is of type A when in reality they are of type B.

Evidence from Linkedin: “LinkedIn allows people who are currently employed to go on the job market without looking like they are on the job market. Recruiters are attracted to LinkedIn because they can obtain access to people who are ordinarily very hard to find in the labor market. Interviews with employers reveal that they are aware of this function of LinkedIn, and lose their employees this way.

Evidence from another network (the paper does not explicit which one but says “the network has been designed largely for people to keep in touch with their friends, and not for business purposes. Results indicate that almost 70 per cent of all activity on this on-line network is related to viewing profiles and pictures of others.”, so I might guess the network is Facebook, wondering why Mikolaj didn’t write which is the network… ): Men in particular look at pictures of women they do not know. Furthermore, regression analysis shows that men who publicly declared themselves to be in a relationship are more likely to examine profiles and pictures of women they do not know. Consistent with the view of networks as covers, (…) men in relationships and with large on-line networks are more like to look at women they do not know. In contrast, single men with large networks are more likely to look at women they do know. Implications for network theories as they pertain to organizations are explored.

Credits for picture: pagedooley from Flickr Creative Commons released

Linus about network of trust in software development (git)

Transcript of the last part:
“It is how we think.
We don’t know a hundred people. We have 5, 7, 10 close personal friends. Well, we are geeks, so we have 2.
But that’s basically how humans work that we have these people we really trust, it’s family, it’s close friends.
It really fits, you don’t even have to have a mental model, it fits how we are wired up.
So there are huge advantages on this model of networks of trust.”

User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization conference (UMAP), Jun 22 – 26, in Trento


User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization conference (UMAP) will be in Trento from today up to Jun 26, organized by Fondazione Bruno Kessler. UMAP is the most important conference for those interested in any aspect of (interaction with) systems that acquire information about a user (or group of users) so as to be able to adapt their behavior to that user or group.
The conference is very web2.0, having a Facebook, a Twitter, a Flickr, a Linkedin.
Many ways to follow it, and for real time I suggest Twitter search for #umap09, search for #umap2009, search for @UMAP09, search for umap2009.
Great time for the attendees since they just landed in time for feste vigiliane, 15 days of events, yesterday the notte bianca, events up to the morning!!! Trento usually is not like that! ;)

Layar and see the world through your phone through the eyes of the internet

wow
Layar.eu
is a new ‘Augmented Reality Browser’ for Android phones. Forget everything you’re used to about searching the internet, Layar throws that all away.

By holding your phone in front of you and looking through its camera lens you can actually see the world ‘through the eyes of the internet’.

Imagine you want to know which houses in your area are for sale – just hold up your phone and Layar will point out which ones around you are on the market and how much they are. Phoning the estate agent is just a touch of the screen away.

WOW!

(from thenextweb)

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Diversity initiative and blind audition and female musicians and male twitter users

From the Office for diversity initiative at Columbia University:

Social psychology research has found that both men and women are more likely to hire a male applicant than a female applicant with an identical record (Steinpres et al., 1999).

Deaux & Emswiller (1974) found that success is more frequently attributed to “skill” for males and “luck” for females, even when the evaluators are presented with evidence of equal success for both genders.

Beginning in the 1970s symphony orchestras started requiring musicians to audition behind screens; since that time, the number of women hired has increased fivefold and the probability that a woman will advance from preliminary rounds has increased by 50% (Goldin and Rouse, 2000).

I first read about the fivefold increase in hired female musicians after the introduction of blind auditions in the insightful book by Malcolm Gladwell “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” and reminded about it by a recent study on 300.000 twitter users by Bill Heil (billheil @ twitter) and Mikolaj Piskorski (mpiskorski @ twitter).

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This “follower split” suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships.

This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get this figure, we cross-referenced users’ “real names” against a database of 40,000 strongly gendered names.

Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.

Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity – both men and women tweet at the same rate.

These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women – men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.

Social networking 4 your business

I presentation I gave on June 10th 2009 at Trentino Sviluppo, local agency in charge of developing local businesses. It is about the how and why (and why not) of using social networking systems such as Facebook or Twitter for small businesses. The slides are released under Creative Commons By-Attribution so share them, play with them, tear them apart! The only exception are the two photos below for which I don’t know who the copyright holder is. If you know please get in contact with me. Thanks!