More Like Google Minus

In order to get up and going on my blog posts, I had to log into my non NEU gmail account for the first time in a couple of months.  I noticed that I had a few Google+ messages, and had completely forgot that it existed. 

When it first came out, my close friends and I started using Google+ a lot, neglecting Facebook for a few weeks, since they were the only ones I really kept in close touch with online anyways.  One friend even deleted his Facebook to migrate to the Google network.  That lasted no more than a month.  Not a lot of people migrated and  Facebook had all my pictures and friends already.  I thought that Google+ would have taken off just because Google's always putting out a good product.  It seems that Facebook is locked in pretty good, but something is going to inevitably take its place. 

Since most of my friends and I will be graduating in a couple weeks and are looking for jobs, we're trying to keep our online activity to a minimum because everyone's always using HR horror stories to scare us from having incriminating pictures up.  A lot of my friends are considering finally getting rid of their Facebook's permanently.  I think there would definitely be a market for a new social network for the young professional crowd, I'm curious what it will be.

McContagion

Earlier in the semester we talked about how obesity can spread quickly throughout a network.  Living with 5 guys surrounded by takeout that is cheaper than making a dinner at home has had its tole on my waist line.

My friends are pretty much all seniors, and it is funny to see the guts growing on my friends that have never had any body fat before.  One friend, "Senna" has been made fun of recently by his high school friends on trips home because he has a good sized belly and looks a couple months pregnant.  Another friend had his sister tell him to go to the gym because his belly overhung his belt for the first time in his life during his Easter trip home.  This past weekend, I woke up craving McDonald's, so since I have a car I was gonna make it happen.  A couple of my roommates wanted to come too.  The original plan was just to get a Big Mac meal, but honestly who gets full from a number one anymore since McD's got rid of super size and jacked prices?  So one friend offered to split a 20 piece McNuggets with me on top of the burger I was getting.  But then the third friend who was going was feeling left out, and we decided to split 2 20 piece nugs 3 ways.  It ended up with all of us getting our our 20 piece on top of a burger, because a 10 piece costs 4.79 vs 4.99 for 20 (a whole other blog post could be dedicated to how whack Mc'D's pricing is down Mass ave).  The 'social norm' for my group of friends has been to be a fatty lately.

While the obesity spreads quickly, you would think that exercise would as well.  I like to run to stay in mediocre shape, and had been slacking all winter because it was too cold to go outside and the gym is not my cup of tea. Once it warmed up I started getting back into it, trying to log around 20 miles/week to ease back into it.  One of my roommates who used to be in real good shape just gets mad at me when I go running and makes fun of me for going before we go out, asking why I don't just chill and drink a beer instead.   Another friend ("Senna") bought new shoes and was all set to get going, but quit after 1 run on his new kicks, and has resorted to ridiculing me as well for trying to be in shape.

Obama Transparency

While browsing Reddit the other day i found a post that reminded me of one of the videos we watched earlier this semester on open policy and transparency on government.  The woman who gave the presentation talked about how the current administration was pushing to be more transparent with its doings and let there be more access to information for the public.  The article that I saw was a list of all the charities that the president gave to this year.

I read another article today that Romney will open up his fundraisers to the media.  This is due to pressure from democrats and other critics of Romney who wanted to be more open with his campaign.  It is following an incident that occurred earlier in the month in which a reporter overheard Romney and leaked previously unreleased information on his tax plan.

Homophily in the CD Player

The theory of homophily definitely applies to group of college friends.  Most of my friends favorite type of movie or TV show is comedies.  The summer after my freshman year, 3 of my favorite comedies came out:  Pineapple Express, Step Brothers, and Tropic Thunder.  When I got back from the summer break my friends were discussing which movies were our favorites over the summer, and all of us had gone to see these three, and most had seen Step Brothers more than once in the theater.  One of the things that has kept my group of friends close knit through school is our sense of humor, and half of the words that come out of our mouths are movie quotes. 

Another thing that we share is our taste in music.  Most of my roommates (including myself) that I was assigned with in freshman year were big fans of rock music and played some sort of instrument.  One of my friends had even gone to the same Allman Brothers/Tom Petty tour the summer before school.

There is lake in the town where I'm from, and every summer there is a large party in one of the bays with thousands of people that come from all over to celebrate the end of the summer. My roommate came up for that weekend to hang out.  I had a mix CD in my car of all the hits that I was listening to at the time and we played the CD all weekend while we were hanging around.  When he went back home to Boston, I hopped a ride with him.  When we got in his car, he threw on one of his mix CDs, and 10/15 songs on his CD were the same as the ones that were on mine.  Neither of us had talked about what music we'd been listening to, and we had a pretty good laugh.

An Experimental Study of Taxes

I went to a psychology study at the Harvard Business School last week. It was an interesting experiment. I was told to type in a series of 9 symbols repeatedly, and that I would make 2 cents apiece for each line I typed. Easy enough. For ten minutes, I typed furiously away trying to see how fast I could type and how much money I could make as a broke college student. I ended up making $2.22. Not bad for ten minutes work, but also a low value for what I thought would be achievable. Afterwards, I was shown what I had typed with each line stacked atop the next. It looked like hieroglyphs from Ancient Egypt or a Totem Pole from the Native Americans in the Northwest Pacific, I could not decide which. I was then again asked to type rows of nine for ten minutes, but this time the game changed. I was told that I was “taxed” one penny per line, or about fifty percent, of my earnings. This, to me, meant that I was still making one penny per line rather than two, which was more money than I would have had sitting at home for the same ten minutes. Both ten minute intervals had the option of surfing the web instead of typing for cash. As I typed furiously away the second round, my earnings adding up to a measly $1.35, I could not help but listen to the key boards around me. Many fell silent on the second ten minute interval. This just made me want to type faster to make even more pennies, hoping to pay at least for my bus fare to the campus. At the end of the session, we were asked what we saw when we typed.

At that point, I could not tell if we were being studied to see our actions when faced with a “tax” of fifty percent of our earnings, or a kind of ink-blot test in which they determined our emotions from what we saw in the symbols. I have since decided that it was the former. But as I mindlessly typed during the second ten minute session, I could not help but think about how the tax translated to the “real” world, as opposed to our virtual world of typing hieroglyphs. A fifty percent tax is one higher than any American pays, and is equal to some countries considered to have the highest taxes in the world (for example in Scandinavia). But I still worked hard to earn the cash I would not have otherwise had, regardless of the diminished earning potential due to taxes. I wonder if this would hold true when considering real lifetime wages. I think for a person like myself, I would continue to work hard to keep my head afloat. However, clearly there are some people who would rather surf the web than make an extra dollar, and that must be accounted for in public policy making.

FLOS

For the first night in a while, all my roommates were home at the same time.  Four of us were doing work tonight and the other 2 had a free night and were relaxing watching TV in the living room.  One of my roommates has always had a tough time getting his work done around the house, and always wants to be hanging with the guys.  As my roommates who had nothing to do started playing foosball in the living room, the one trying to do work got up right away and got involved in a quick tournament with the rest of the guys.  We got into a discussion of FLOS, or feeling left out syndrome.  It was a term I'd never heard before and we were having a good laugh about it.  It made me think of class though and how Facebook has a tendency to amplify the problem.  Whenever I'm trying to get my final paper (or blog posts) done in time, its not easier when I see half my friends are at Connors all day.  I had a friend who just attended the Coachella music fest in California this weekend, and I had a serious case of the FLOS. 

Slacktivism

The last class we discussed whether or not the revolution would be Tweeted.  This debate made me think of the whole Kony 2012 ordeal earlier in the year.  My Facebook news feed was chock-full o' Kony stories detailing how he had committed many atrocities in Uganda, stealing kids from their homes and forcing them into his army.  The whole time I felt like this is terrible, but are these people really that invested in this cause?  It's easy just to post something, but its a whole other story to actually go to Uganda and do something about it.  Eventually the guy who started the whole Kony craze with a half hour long documentary (for the invisible children organization that has commercials on TV) was caught in some public scandal, and the organization was under fire for shady usage of the money it raised.  Then the Ugandan government said that the documentary put their country in a negative light, and that Kony had been out of the country with hardly any support for 6 years. 

Although it seemed like Twitter, Facebook, etc. were raising a ton of awareness for people who couldn't easily take to the internet, it was not up to date information, and most of the people posting were not actually invested more than a quick status update. 

I think that there is no way that any huge political change won't be covered on the internet and fill up social networks with info, but I don't know if those who are directly involved will be using Twitter right away.  I think that after some action goes down, then the social network sites will play a larger role.

Predicting the next best seller... in my apt.

We recently read the Salganik article about the study done that tried to test the predictability of what song would be most popular.  Some participants were shown the download counts of each song and some weren't.  It was more unpredictable in the social influence groups, where participants could see which songs were trending.

I felt that this was one of the more interesting articles we read this semester.  In my group of friends we usually have a few songs that we beat to death for a few months.  One summer in particular, we had a certain playlist that we listened to every single time we hung out.  The songs we pick to overplay are not always the best quality, similarly to the study. 

Its always tough for us to trace who got the song popular among our group of friends, everyone seems to think that they listened to Led Zeppelin before everyone else, even though John Bonham died almost a decade before we were born.  I don't know what bring out that hipster in all of us that wants to be the first to listen to a band or introduce them to our friends, but its deep within all of my friends.

Chosen In Name Only

Awhile back, we read an article on the fact that proximity encourages social ties.  It made me think back through my time grade school, through the end of high school where we were constantly lined up alphabetically, seated by last name, or divided into sections by the letter your name started with.

I wonder if this hasn't affected us in some way.  When I think about the 5-6 people I interact with most, their last names begin with S, Z, P, or R.  When adding my own Z, that means a heavy bias towards the end of the alphabet.  In fact, there's a stark minority of people in the first half.  It could be that after having it drilled into us for years that we need to sit next to our peers with similar last names, there was a subconscious trigger instilled in us.  Personally many of my friends throughout grade school fell into the proximity rule.  Maybe by this point we naturally seek out people whose last names are close to ours, since our subconscious assumes they'll make better friends?  

International Creeping

One of my favorite DJ's is Berlin's Boys Noize.  I follow his page on Facebook to keep up to date on new tracks and tours as there's not a ton of German tech house played on Boston's radio stations.  I've seen him spin a few times and always wanted to get one of his hats that have his record company's logo on the front, but they were never for sale at the swag booth or online.  Finally on the Facebook page there was an announcement that the hats would be released soon.  Once they went up on sale I was disappointed to find that a snap-back Starter hat cost 47 USD before shipping from Europe.  I posted something along the lines of "BOYS NOIZE RULEZ! but how fast is the shipping and is it gonna get squished on the trip across the ocean?"  I never got a reply, but I did manage to get a friend request from a random German kid who I had no idea who he was, but noticed he had been posting on the thread for the hats.  I have done my share of creeping around friends of friends online before, but this was a new level for me.  It's still kind of cool to realize how connected we are to everyone who has computer access, but at the same time scary that some weird European has any interest in befriending someone in another country based on a thumbnail (mine is currently a picture of me 1 biting a pb&j, not sure what the appeal is there?).

Modernizing Family communication

Up until last year, I'd say that my direct family was easy to get in touch with, even though we only used "old fashioned" means of communicating.  It used to be that my parents and my sister were only 45 minutes away, and all in one place.  If I wanted to reach them, I generally called, and we could meet in person as often as I liked.  Sure I'd send some emails back and forth with my Dad, but that was about the extent of our online presence.

Now that has all changed.  My sister has gone off to college a few hours drive away, and my parents up and moved overseas.  Which is all great, it's mostly interesting to see how this displacement affected our interactions.  These days, my parents are on Facebook more than I am, chatting with friends back in the U.S.  It's rare that I ever talk to my parents and my sister at the same time, and we haven't been in the same room in months.  We all had to upgrade so we could take advantage of Skype in place of face to face meetings. All of this has changed our communication network.  Instead of everyone telling everyone else what is going on with their lives, a new network has taken it's place.

These days each of us will still only update another family member once, and its up to that person to spread the news.  For example, I'll chat with my sister about an upcoming hiking trip, and assume she'll pass the information on at some point to my parents.  The only downside is when a few people get busy and holes occur, and a month later you find out some news never reached the full network.

Constantly Plugged in...

...to advertising.  Discussion recently centered around the online world, and touched on the concept of personalized advertising.  It's easy to forget that our online presence leaves a trail of breadcrumbs of the sites we visit, and the products we shop for.

This unseen network is meticulously tracked by advertisers, so that when you visit enough pages with the word "bike" on them, you start seeing ads for new bicycles, accessories, guided bike tours and destination bike vacations.  On one hand I'd rather have targeted advertising that is relevant to my interests, like ads that display what products you've recently viewed, taunting you with sales.  However, somewhere out there is a data mined list of all the things I've ever clicked, building a profile about my interests, and that is a bit unsettling.

Of course there are some ways to "reset" your tracking network, but then it starts all over again.

Skyrim Wiki

There are many wiki's for specific things.  For example there's a wiki for the Gephi visualization program that we used.  I used this when trying to better understand the different layouts available in the program.

One that has been very helpful for me was the Skyrim wiki for the popular game The Elder Scrolls V:  Skryim which was released this past fall.  The game is set in a fantasy universe that is a cross between Norse folklore and Middle Earth from the Lord of the Rings.  The game has a main quest line that is pretty easy to follow, but there are many mini side quests that add up to provide several hundred hours of gameplay.  The Skryim wiki has walkthrough guides for every quest in the game, guides on how to level your character, different character builds etc. 

In one of our classes we discussed what makes people want to contribute to something like this.  In the case of Skyrim, the guide was up at the time the game was launched, so people had quickly put together a comprehensive guide to the entire game.  There are now over 15,000 pages in this wiki.  I think that one of the benefits of adding your experience to the wiki is that you would hope someone else will add what they had gone through.  For example, if there are several different ways to beat a certain quest, maybe you will only find one and someone else will post another way to do it.  Another reason I believe is that people genuinely want to help others get through the game.  There are a lot of people who are serious gamers and want to get a 100% completion of the game, which would take hundreds of hours, even with the help of the wiki.

Emergency Network

While visiting my uncle in the hospital last week, my aunt was swamped with text messages from family members and friends wondering how my uncle was doing.  This was the first time that she had been dealing with reaching out to family members mostly by text.  I remember when I was younger and my grandparents or other family members were sick, there would be a big call network where each of my parents brothers and sisters would be in charge of reaching out to different family members.  Most people wouldn't even have the number for the land line in the hospital room where the sick relative was staying.  This time however, my aunt was the hub, similar to the simulation we did in class to figure out what shape each group was missing.  Although texting is often more convenient than making a phone call, in this situation it would have been easier to call a few relatives and have them spread word that everything was OK instead of being in charge of contacting everyone.

It may have been easier for my aunt to send and email or try and make calls like the way my family's emergency network used to work, but since everyone had her cell phone number, people were trying to directly contact her anyways.  Also, not all of my relatives use email or check their messages regularly, so it's not the most reliable way to contact family members anyways.

Contagion?

          Earlier we read a Cohen-Cole article discussing obesity becoming contagious within a network. 

            On the contrary, I have personally found that the network I am in has affected my weight in an opposite manner. When I am on my own, I am more free to determine my own terrible eating and exercising habits.

            After starting to room with people I am better friends with, I have noticed a very different change. We do our grocery shopping together, and therefore, I generally go more with whatever they want to eat, which is a lot healthier, and I do not buy as much junk.

            I am also more prone to exercise as we will play frisbee or make trips to Marino together or walk together to places all over the city or participate in intramural sports like soccer and broomball. Because we are sharing in nutrition and exercise, we seem to be positively impacted in terms of our weight. I for one have lost weight since we started living together, and odds are, I will put a lot of it back on over the summer while I am home by myself with very little to do but eat and sleep.

            So in a way, I guess it is somewhat true that we are effected by the weights of those around us, for better or for worse. In middle school, my best friend and I were both extremely overweight, but it took the awkward phase of puberty, both physically and socially, to motivate us to get in better shape, and we both managed to do it. Now, the difficulty is in keeping the weight off, but it certainly helps to have your friends around as spotters whether they mean to be them or not.

Wiki Wacky

            We all know there are some glaring errors on Wikipedia pages. But why do we do so little to correct these issues?

            Perhaps it is too much effort. There is far too much to correct that maybe we feel once we start, our work will never be finished. We will fix something on one page, and then see another error elsewhere.

            Maybe we feel as though we shouldn't have the right to edit the page, regardless of whether or not editing is available to anyone.

            Or maybe we are afraid our work will be undone. In the past I have tried to fix something on a page and the next time I looked at the page, it had been taken down by someone at Wikipedia who thought my edit was inaccurate and there was a message at the top warning me not to "vandalize" the page.

            I also remember someone I knew in high school who created a page for the "s'more dog," basically a s'more but with a hot dog bun instead of graham crackers. Wikipedia deleted the page because they did not think that it was a legitimate thing. While I would agree with them, I feel as though there are many other non-legitimate articles on the website.

            In terms of so much work to do editing, sometimes it can become a little too addictive. I find another website, wikipella.com, which was an a cappella database. I found my group on their and noticed some errors so I edited it and expanded the information. But then I noticed none of the other Northeastern groups had accurate pages. I was worried that if I continued editing  their pages I would go on an editing rampage, so I stopped.

Inactive Activism

            There is a lot of activism these days, but a lot of it is done online. This is a rather ineffective method for a number of reasons. As we discussed in class, it is extremely easy not only for people to be a part of something, but to be an organizer. When too many people are organizing too many events, things become extremely organized. There are so many simultaneous happenings that it is almost not even worth going to them.

            For instance, on Facebook I receive an innumerable number of invitations to events from NU AfterHours. There are so many that I just ignore them, and I feel as though I miss out on a lot of events simply because there is too much going on for me to take a legitimate interest.

            The Occupy movement is also a good example of people being too active. I went into the Northeastern Occupy Facebook group to look for a possible source for a story on the movement and all I saw was post after post of people telling the other activists to come to this event and that event. It seemed as though there was just far too much going on to keep track of.

            Similarly, when there is such a large volume of invitations online, it is very easy to just skim over them or forget about them, which is a huge issue with online activism. People click a button and feel like they are involved, but do very little to actually support a cause.

Online Meetings

          We discussed online town meetings in class. The ability to conduct a meeting online is very useful not only in a town meeting, but in a meeting where all of the administrative members cannot meet in person. Over winter break, the officers of my a cappella group had very important details to iron out for our upcoming ICCA competition in early February. We were all home for break but really needed to discuss some very important matters. So, we all joined Google plus and were able to have all 6 main officers "attend" the meeting, even though most of us were spread across the country at our homes. One of our members still could not be at a computer, but was still able to be a part of the meeting on his phone. 

          While in-person meetings are always preferable for a number of reasons, sometimes they simply cannot be done. In this case it is wonderful to have this technological resource at our disposal. The ability to still verbally talk to multiple people at once helps to keep transparency within the group and is key in avoiding any confusion that could arise had we simply done our meeting through and email chain. Responses are immediate, and everyone can hear them and the speaker can make sure that they are not misinterpreted.

          From a connectivity standpoint, a tool such as this is also great. For instance, I know a lot of people that use video tools like Skype to keep in touch with friends from high school.

What happens in high school does not stay in high school

Everyone has heard the saying, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”.  While that ideology might work for the city of sin where no one knows each other and no one has any care about how their actions affect others, it does not apply to the world of high school.  High school is a network where everyone knows each other and has known each other for at least twelve years.  No one has secrets and everyone knows every personal detail about your life.  In a network like this, you are held accountable for your actions, which in turn helps to keep you in check.

College is similar to high school because you interact with the same people on a day to day basis except on a bit larger scale.  Since coming to Northeastern, I have become more aware of how regulatory my high school network actually was.  Once you developed a negative reputation it was very difficult to improve your image.  In many cases, this regulatory system was beneficial because people were more careful of their actions when it would have been far easier to disregard the feelings and opinions of others.

In college, you get a fresh start on your reputation however the ramifications of your collegiate actions never leave.  At the start of freshman year, people are the most cautious of how they act around people because they don’t want to isolate potential friends or classmates.  The groundwork that you lay down in your first few weeks can affect your entire college experience, so people are careful to maintain a good reputation.  The regulatory nature of networks helps prevent a world of chaos and the smaller the network, the more regulated it actually is.

When to Give Up and Start Over

The Avolio article explains how Chris Reid observed ants solving the Towers of Hanoi maze. When the ants' path was blocked off, they at first attempted to use the original route and found a much longer way around the blockage, but after an hour, they abandoned the first path entirely and managed to find the new optimal route. This idea is somewhat reminiscent of something I mentioned in my last post about how it is difficult to give up on something that one is so deeply invested in. The ants did not have an issue giving up and starting from scratch, but I am confident that humans would. For instance, I can recall doing a corn maze with my family in Vermont once and there were 4 possible routes to take at the very beginning (labeled eenie, meenie, minie, moe). We would choose one path and walk around for close to an hour. At times we questioned whether we took the right path at the beginning, but felt that we were too far down this path to turn around and go back to the beginning (of course, we weren't even confident that we could even find our way back there). We also needed to cross several bridges. We could see one of the bridges, and we passed under it several times. We wasted around a half hour constantly checking every path in the near vicinity trying to find the way to the bridge, when in fact the path necessary was quite far away. Sometimes higher intelligence is a curse!

Groups Hold Their Own

In Infotopia Sunstein states that a group is more likely to hold onto a failing idea than an individual is. An individual often has a freer ability to change an opinion or position. Say someone doesn't think people should have health care until they see someone suffering without it, so they change their opinion. Members of a group however, are generally united by an idea, and therefore, are more likely to stand firm in their ideas. Even individuals within the group may be especially unlikely to change their opinions because they are afraid to go against the other group members. This seems to be a common idea in the world of politics. Politicians belong to parties and can be seen as traitors by other party members if they don't vote a certain way or challenge an opinion of the party. And any ideas that have been put into place already are defended by the party where the originated whether or not they are actually working. One possible explanation for this is that it is more difficult to scrap a plan that a group is so heavily invested into. Even an individual has a tough time of letting go of an idea they have pursued already, but with a group, a lot more people need to break from the original plan, and this totally delays or even kills the process. A lot of political policy likely only remains within certain policies because it is too hard to convince a majority to let go of what they have worked on for so long.

What's in a Name?

There are 14 guys in my a cappella group. Six of us have last names that start with S. Nine of us have last names that start with letters S-Z. Two of us have last names that start with B and the remaining 12 of us have last names that start with letters K-Z. The proximity of letters and high volume of letters later in the alphabet is somewhat strange and kind of an inside joke among us in the group. On the surface, this would seem simply coincidental. However, after reading the Segal article, I can't help but wonder if there is some connection. The article explained that cops in the academy listed friends as people with similarly alphabetically placed last names, which made sense because the roommates were paired alphabetically. They were exposed mostly to each other and became friends and could develop similar interests. All throughout schooling, I know that I was paired in groups, put on gym teams, and even sorted into homerooms based on where my last name falls alphabetically. I would generally be one of the later people in roll calls and making choices because my last name starts with Sw. I can't help but wonder if maybe somewhere along the way, we singers experienced some kind of alphabetical segregation that led us to musical interest. Perhaps we all had friends with similarly late-falling last names whose musical interests rubbed off on us.

Elections

The Northeastern University International Relations Council had our biannual elections last week for the Executive Board that will take the stand in the fall semester. Elections in a politically oriented club of students who are used to debating can take hours. First, candidates give a speech. Then there is a question and answer session with all candidates at the front of the room. After that, we have the option to hold a caucus to discuss the candidates while they leave the room so that we are better able to, as a unified group, make a decision. This has been helpful in the past as members of the club who have never sat on the Executive Board before benefit from the knowledge and expertise of those who have. There is a lot that the Board does that people do not often realize. As this is a particularly unpleasant rule in the elections process, one club member this year who has run for the E-Board for many years without success requested to remain in the room during this caucus.

This was not only an unpleasant experience for all involved, but it may have actually changed the course of elections. This person is somewhat peripheral to the social network of the club, and has failed at certain tasks when given the chance in the past. In order to bring up instances where an individual has proven themselves unfit for the position to newer members, it had to be brought up with the individual present. There were a few brave souls who spoke up with an apology as a precursor to their speech, but it seemed as if several people were speaking a favor of a candidate just because they were present to hear about it.

Humans want to be liked by as many as possible. To be in constant favor and to try to please everyone, they may make speeches such as these to garner favor from an individual. The way we behave in large group settings is more carefully managed than the way we behave for smaller groups. It was striking to see this phenomenon in action at this very tense election night.

"Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded"

Yogi Berra made a famous observation about a NY restaurant: "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded." At the end of one of the Sex and the City movies the characters are all sitting around drinking Cosmopolitans, their signature drink, which they apparently had not had for a while. Someone asked "Why did we ever stop drinking these?" to which someone replied "Because everyone else started."

Your network of friends might be the first to discover a great new restaurant, a good nail salon, or the up and coming cupcake place. It feels cool to be the one to discover a new, trendy spot, so you share the discovery with your friends. They like it, and soon share it with their friends. The network expands onward and outward until everybody knows about the "new, up and coming place" and then all of the sudden, it's not so up and coming -- it's just plain old normal. Some people don't mind going to hang out the place where everybody and anybody is, but some people like to frequent only the places where "everybody who's somebody" is.

There is a delicate balance between not enough people knowing about a place for it to be considered trendy, and too many people knowing about it for it to be considered trendy. I believe that this is why various venues tend to remodel their spaces, or rebrand their companies on such a frequent basis -- this ensures that they will stay fresh, interesting, and exciting in people's minds. Sometimes, though, this can backfire. There is something to be said about tradition, and going back to your favorite restaurant when visiting home won't feel the same if it has changed forty times. Consistency can keep a network together, and that is just as necessary as "changing to keep up with the times." Businesses need to take a careful inventory of the types of customers they attract to determine whether it would be more beneficial to be the constant within the network, or if they should be the innovator.

Contributing to the Internet

Since our discussion about contributing to and correcting things we find on the internet, my experiences while using sites such as Wikipedia, Yelp, and Reddit have been quite different. Even though all three of these sites thrive on the contributions of their readers, I never felt the need to add anything; I assumed that anything I would be able to contribute, someone else with more authority or knowledge would just add later. However, this logic is pretty flawed. If I feel this way about the impact I could have on what’s available on the internet, or lack thereof, then odds are a majority of other internet users feel the same way. But then I started thinking, why shouldn’t I post about the experience I had at a restaurant on Yelp or give my opinion on a question posted on Reddit? I take advantage of the experiences that other internet users post all the time, so I really should give back to these communities by sharing what I have to offer.

Taking this class and talking about information aggregation on the internet was the push I needed to contribute to consumer based internet sites, but what makes other people? I asked all of my roommates if they had ever edited a Wikipedia page or posted a review on Yelp and out of the four of them, only one had posted something on Yelp, and the only reason she did was because it was a horrible experience. Instead of only posting a review when I have a really good or really bad experience, from now on I want to try and review as many places that I can. By contributing to information sources, such as Yelp, I am able to increase the information available to a larger network that can then use the information to aid in the decision making process. And hopefully, as more people use these types of sites, they will feel compelled to contribute, just like I did. 

John Doe

I went home for the weekend a few weeks ago and found myself with some time to kill and with no desire to get out of bed, so I went through the recommendations of shows that Hulu had selected for me and came across a show called "John Doe." The show is about a man who woke up on an island of the coast of Washington with no recollection of who he was, but he instead had knowledge of everything else there was to know in the world -- names in the phone book, capitals of countries, and every other trivial (and important) fact you could think of. He was very analytical because of this, and helps the police solve many cases. In the most recent episode I watched, John Doe went on a "Most Wanted" show to find out if anyone was missing him or knew anything about his life or where he came from, as well as his name!

John woke up on this island with no network and had to start from scratch, as an adult, which is a very interesting concept. It got me thinking about how our networks start. When we are young, we have arranged playdates with other children that we meet from daycare and preschool and other events planned specially for kids. We don't always keep these friends -- but we learn how to make friends and make connections with people. John Doe is a little socially awkward because he has no connections with anyone, no memory of experience making them, and no basis to connect with people.

People tend to make friends with people like themselves, so we learned, but he doesn't even know what he's like, so he has no real likes or dislikes to base friendships on. He made a list of all the things he liked (hot dogs, fast cars, and so on) because he had no idea and needed to keep track. At the point where I paused the latest episode, he was being shown a video montage of his life up until that point. I can't imagine having amnesia where I couldn't remember my parents, home, friends, likes, dislikes, or anything about my life. John Doe, who we find out now is named Thomas, is gradually building a network from the ground up and his life seems to be getting easier as his number of both strong and weak ties increases, and as he finds about ties from the past. It just goes to show how important networks really are.

Northeastern Networking

So, since this class I have really started to pay attentions to networks in my life. I noticed how much networking plays a role in job searching, particularity at Northeastern. With Northeastern's co-op program establishing connections and ties is an essential part of school. This really helps Northeastern students have a step ahead of students from other universities because Northeastern students will have more connections in the work world upon graduation from college.

This year I applied for my first co-op. It seems that the reason I got this co-op offer had to do with networking. I am in a pharmacy group on campus that is well known to many pharmacy schools. The woman who interviewed me had also belonged to this in college and is still very active in it today. I felt like my whole interview revolved around her asking me questions and talking about the organization, more so than the actual job. This company offered two co-op positions and both positions went to people in this organization. I'm thinking that being in this group is why I got the co-op offer. The woman who interviewed me made the connection between us and realized that we had a shared network, which gave me an advantage over others.

Another one of my friends is graduating this year and just secured a job because of a past co-op. She was able to make a good impression with a company on her first co-op. Throughout school she made sure to keep connection with this company and worked a couple hours a week. She kept this company as a weak tie so that she would be able to use them as a resource further down the road. This proved to be a great networking tool and helped her get a career.

Co-op is an exciting part of Northeastern, but most importantly, it is a great opportunity to network. It allows students to build ties with employers that students at other schools do not have the chance to do. Connections like this give us an advantage are very helpful in getting jobs.

Neighbor to Neighbor

I found the idea of President Obama’s neighbor to neighbor campaign very interesting, especially since it was clearly successful, so I decided to look up some more information on the topic.  They market the campaign by saying that it is built on the idea that “everyday Americans, when organized and focused, can change their country.”   This is a similar idea to the debate we held in class because we argued that unless there is an organizing factor, social networking will not alone be able to start a revolution.  In this case, the organizer behind the neighbor to neighbor campaign tool is the Obama campaign.

In order to participate in the campaign you first need to register on the Obama website.   There are no deadlines or restrictions that would inhibit participation and their goal is to make it as easy as possible.  Participants receive a list of voters in their neighborhood who they are encouraged to reach out to.  They are also given a script to facilitate discussion and a customized flyer to distribute.  It is also encouraged that they report back on the efforts of their campaign, most likely so the Obama campaign can track the progress that they are making. 

In the age where people are more likely to blog about their ideas on the internet, or through Twitter or Facebook, this personal interaction has more of an impact on voter decisions.  By talking with people you interact with on a daily basis, it is harder to just completely disregard what they are saying because you would have to deal with the consequences of seeing them day in and day out.  Arguments for a particular politician mean more coming from a neighbor as well because they understand the regional issues you are facing and are more likely to share similar views with you.

The neighbor to neighbor campaign was a semi-grassroots method to gain more votes for Obama and it will be interesting to see if he uses the same techniques in the upcoming election even after serving four years as president.

Tweeting the Revolution

In case anyone has been living under a rock for the duration of this class, I LOVE social media; however, I do not think it is flawless, or the end all be all for everything, and I think there is really something to be said about the value and richness of face-to-face communication. I think this was expressed in the article arguing that the revolution would not be tweeted.

Some people might find this surprising, but I was actually excited to take the side that the revolution would not be tweeted for the debate. At first I was a little apprehensive, if we're being honest. I'm good at playing devil's advocate but I know that the reasons why it would be tweeted would have their strengths as well. But I truly believe that social media should be used as a supplementary measure to person-to-person communication when you're trying to make a big change. One of the reasons why, which I didn't think of until after, is that anyone who spends a lot of time with social media is familiar with the idea that "trending topics" on twitter are called "trends" for a reason. They're not meant to stick around forever, and will be forgotten and changed before you can say "hashtag." This can discredit trending topics to a degree. This is because they allow people to "support" a cause without actually supporting the cause or putting in any effort whatsoever. They don't even have to know much, if anything, about it, so even spreading an idea can be challenging, unless it's a hot enough topic to get people to look it up on the internet or the news.

Although I am a huge proponent of Twitter, Facebook, and so forth, I fear the day when it replaces face-to-face communication. There is a certain element of seeing someone's body language and emotions that you couldn't express even if you were given 1400 characters instead of 140.

Spreading Controversial Ideas

I recently read an article online called "I'm Christian Unless You're Gay," as well as a response to it by a mother. The article was about a very conservative, very Christian community where everyone was highly critical of gays. The author of the article lived in this community, as did one of his closest friends who happened to be gay. The author criticized how religions preach love, kindness, and acceptance and somehow manage to make themselves believe that it's okay to ignore those values when you are interacting with people who are different from you (gay, a different race, and so on).

The mother's response to this article was interesting. She and her son lived in a community much like the one the author wrote about, and her son had been asked to read the article at school. She was outraged that the teacher was teaching them that being gay was okay, only to find out that her son had showed her the article because he himself was gay. She was mad at him at first and he left the house and refused to come home until she read the article. She ended up reading it and found it really insightful and is trying to spread the message.

It is amazing how an article like this would probably be ignored and written off as something stupid that no one needed to read in this community, but with a strong tie who is similar to others in the community, the message can be spread and accepted. The teacher wasn't enough to make it happen on her own, as we can see from the mother's initial reaction. However, when someone accepted in the network has an opinion on a subject, it is given a lot more credibility than it would otherwise get coming from an outsider. However, if it wasn't for the teacher, who appears to be a weak tie and on the periphery of the community, it is most likely that no one would have seen the article at all. As it is proved time and time again, it is important to have both strong and weak ties to get the most unique information, and then to spread it, and get people to accept and understand it.

Webidemiology

Webidemiology is the method of using internet activity as an indicator of epidemic outbreaks. This is the topic of my final paper for the course and I must say that I honestly found it fascinating. The examples of webidemiology that I focused on were Google Flu Trends and Google Dengue Trends, which use recorded search queries and IP addresses to determine flu and dengue fever outbreaks, and HealthMap, which uses social media, news sites, blogs, and even an iPhone app to produce an interactive map that displays current disease outbreaks around the world.
The  most amazing thing about this technology is how accurate the data that it aggregates is. In each study that I researched there were graphs showing a very high correlation between data gathered by official sources (i.e. government health agencies) and data gathered by informal sources (i.e. Google Trends, HealthMap, Twitter). Also, when there were discrepancies, the reasons behind them were also really interesting. For example, towards the end of one study pertaining to dengue fever the informal estimates were significantly lower than the official estimates, which was attributed to the fact that fewer people discussed the disease on the internet because by that time it was old news.
Projects that use webidemiology have the potential to not only detect epidemics early but also to make their estimates available to the public very soon after the data is gathered. While I learned that government health agencies around the world can take between a week to a year to publish their results, some of the websites for these projects update their estimates once a day or even every hour. The main benefit of this is the potential to help health agencies better prepare for epidemics and thus reduce their spread through populations. This is especially important in developing countries, as without adequate preparation the treatment and vaccines necessary to combat these epidemics may not be readily available.

Using Prediction Markets to Predict Flu Trends

My second paper for this class was originally intended to be about webidemiology (which I will discuss a bit in my next blog post) and prediction markets. However, as the paper would have been too long had I included both topics, I opted to focus on just webidemiology in the paper and write a bit about prediction markets here.
Anyways, one of the studies that I researched for the paper involved organizing a prediction market in which healthcare professionals would buy and sell "contracts" that represented different levels of flu activity. The participants would buy a contracts that they thought represented the correct flu activity level and would sell contracts that they thought represented the incorrect flu activity level. The market prices of the contracts would then reflect the participants' opinions on the level of flu activity that would be present in their state in two weeks from the start of the buying and selling period. New contracts were released once every two weeks (in accordance with how frequently the CDC releases flu activity data). Participants were also narrowed down by giving "money" to those who held contracts to the correct flu activity levels, not giving money to those carrying incorrect contracts, and not replenishing the amount of theoretical money in their theoretical accounts once they ran out.
The ability of the participants to predict flu activity during a flu season was compared to historical data. The results showed that historical data accurately predicted flu activity 36% of the time, while the participants did so 79% of the time. Also, the predictions of the participants noticeably improved as the buying/selling periods neared the end of their two week span, though their estimates at the beginning of the periods were already accurate 90% of the time. This makes sense, as the participants see the effects of flu in their communities firsthand and every day as part of their jobs, so one would think that they would have a the sort of experience and awareness that would enable them to predict flu activity. This also demonstrates the advantage of using prediction markets in this way.

Foldit: Using Crowdsourcing to Fold Proteins

The TedTalk about open-source economics reminded me of a program that I've used that is similar to the ones mentioned in the talk. FoldIt is a computer game that has the player manipulate proteins into different configurations. Different manipulations and configurations will add or deduct points from the player's total, and the player's goal is to determine the configuration that gives them as many points as possible. The highest scoring protein configurations that players come up with are reviewed by researchers who determine if the configurations are actually feasible. By this method, average people who tinker with the proteins have actually assisted researchers in determining the real folding patterns of certain proteins.
In my opinion, the most interesting part of this is that originally, the program was designed to be completed by a computer that would fold a protein in different ways which would be submitted for review by the researchers. However, they found that human brain, due to its natural inclinations for spatial reasoning and finding patterns, is actually a better protein folding machine than computers. (In other words, Humans: 1 Computers: 0.)
The feats that have been achieved by this program are pretty astounding. One example that I though particularly impressive was that, when an enzyme whose folding structure was previously unknown was put forth to the players of FoldIt, they determined its correct folding structure within 10 days. Previously, scientists had been struggling to figure out this structure for 15 years! Players have also determined better folding structures for previously designed synthetic proteins, making them considerably more effective reagents.
To me, it's just generally awesome to see how the collective effort and brainpower of ordinary people can contribute to scientific discovery. It just shows that though education and experience are absolutely essential for the designing experiments and making discoveries, in some cases it appears that crowdsourcing can be just as (if not more) successful.
Here's the link to Foldit site where you can learn more about the program and download it: http://fold.it/portal/ It's actually a really way to exercise your brain while contributing to science.

Everyday I'm Creepin' (On My Friends' Tastes in Music)

A while back we discussed social media outlets that provide information about the habits of the user and their peers, and about how the user's response to this information may vary depending on the outlet from which they received it, I got to thinking about social media that I regularly use that exemplify these phenomena. One that I thought of afterwards was a music streaming program called Spotify, which allows you to listen to music of your choice for free.*
*Naturally, in order to compensate for this they bombard you with ads of the most annoying variety, but such is life.
Not too long ago my iTunes library was stored on only an external hard drive for three terrible weeks, but I managed to stave off withdrawal by replicating most of my music library (with the extremely unfortunate exceptions of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles) in playlists on Spotify. Whilst doing this, I noticed one of Spotify's more peculiar features. Along the right side of the page there's a live feed of what your Facebook friends are listening to at the time, which first made my feel alternately creepy and terrible (being the music prude that I am I found myself judging people based on what they were listening to). However, after a week or so I noticed that one of my closest friends kept listening to the same song over and over again by I band that I had heard of but hadn't gotten around to listening to yet. So, I added the song to my playlist. And then the album. And then all of the artist's albums. And soon enough I was musically smitten.
It was then that I thought about what we had discussed in class, about how people are more likely to look favorably upon things that their friends have also looked favorably upon. It was interesting to notice how Spotify uses this as a tool to introduce their users to new music and to realize that I experienced this exact phenomenon myself. Admittedly, had it not been a close friend with similar tastes as I who was listening to the song, I probably wouldn't have sought it out. Basically, I'm glad that the social influences the we discussed worked on me and that I unknowingly demonstrated their effectiveness. Now if only Spotify would just get rid of those pesky ads...

Apartment Hunting like a Honeybee

I just recently accepted my next co-op at a company in Stamford, Connecticut and have unfortunately re-entered the game of apartment hunting. When I was looking for an apartment for the first time last year, it was a rather smooth process. My four roommates and I were all living in Boston and looking for a place near campus. We were able to go look at the apartments together and to make a decision based on our collective needs and wants pretty easily. This time is pretty different though. Because I am about 3 hours away from where I need to look for apartments, I have drafted a scout bee to help me find a suitable hive, if you will. A family friend lives much closer to Stamford so she has been going to places and checking them out for me. After each place she looks at, she’ll call me and give me a rundown of the attributes and an overall feel of the place; how big it is, how far it is from my work, if it’s a safe neighborhood, etc. After having taken this class, all I can think of when we talk is her on the other line of the phone doing a “waggle dance” trying to accurately judge the apartment based on what I need. Even though I will make the ultimate decision because I am the only one affected by the decision, unlike a colony of bees making a collective decision, the process is very similar. Information is being transferred from a person, or bee, that has the ability to observe and gain knowledge about a decision to another that for one reason or another has to be removed from the situation. It is vital in these types of situations for the scout or observer to be objective so that the decision making process is based on the most accurate and appropriate information possible.    

The Power of Retweets

After our discussion on Wednesday around the question “Will the revolution be tweeted?” I started thinking about the way in which I utilize my Twitter account and other forms of social media. I would say that I am a moderate user of Twitter and Facebook; I post updates and occasionally articles, but I mostly use them to see what other people are doing.  While it is interesting to see where friends are and what they did over the weekend, I tend to pay the most attention to articles that my friends have posted. If they have actually taken the time, as minimal as it might be, to post an article, they have to be passionate about it to some degree, and odds are if they’re my friend, I will find the post interesting as well. This is a time saver for me because I don’t have to sift through pages of articles to find ones that pertain to my interests. And the same goes for Twitter. I noticed that I tend to pay more attention to posts that have been retweeted by the people I follow. If a note on Twitter was interesting enough to my friend that they wanted to share it with others, I am most likely going to get something out of it. Actually, most of the people or things that I follow on Twitter I found because someone else repeatedly retweeted their posts. While some people might think that it is easy to over look ideas posted on Twitter or Facebook, they really can be powerful tools. I’m sure I would eventually hear about important current events or things happening on campus by word of mouth, but Twitter and Facebook allow that information to be communicated instantly and provide me with access to a wider range of information that I might not be privy to otherwise. 

Coffee Shop Talks

When I used to work at Dunkin Donuts there were many customers that would come in everyday as regulars. Most of them would sit in the dining area for hours and talk and catch up with others. There was one group in particular that came at the same time everyday without fail. They were all construction workers who worked at different sites. On their breaks they would all come to Dunkin Donuts to grab a coffee and to meet up and talk. This is when I realized the importance of coffee houses.

It is hard to run a business when all of the workers are at different places during the day and not communicating. There would be very little information flow if anything were to go wrong. Also, it would be hard for the workers to share ideas and strategies that would help for better and more efficient work. Since these workers don't have much of a break from their work day it is important that they use the little time they have to the best of their advantage. Meeting up all together is the best way to do this.

By planning to meet in one location, all ideas can be shared at once and there is no gap in information flow. This would be the best way to utilize the little time they have. One day in particular, I noticed that one guy was having a lot of trouble getting his job done by himself. He was easily able to communicate this to all his co-workers because they were all in the same place for break. One other worker was able to leave his job for the day and help out the other guy becuase another worker who was working close to his job was able to go finish up with that job when he was done with his own. If all of the workers did not meet up together they would not have been able to arrange the job placements for the day to ensure that all of the work would get done.

I was reminded of this situation after listening to Steve Johnson's talk "Where good ideas comes from". In this case, the combination of everyone's ideas helped the group to get all of the work done. If only one person had been working alone, the work would be unfinished. A good idea came out of the collaboration of many workers. So many people use coffee shops, even still today to meet up with each other and create new ideas. When many people are contributing to new ideas, the outcome is greater than if a single person was doing it by themselves.

Sometimes you just need structure

"The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy."


When reading this quote in the New Yorker article, one thing immediately came to mind -- the Occupy movement. One of the biggest criticisms that the movement received was that there was no leader, and barely any organization. There was barely even a cause, or a set goal that they were trying to accomplish. Their idea was to advocate for change, but they had no operational definition of what change meant to them. They probably could have gotten away with this and made a bigger splash if they had simply had a leader.


This relates back to the experiment we did in class with the missing symbol. Generally speaking, a group with a leader is more effective at communicating, and there is a much higher chance that the relevant information will get to all the people who need to hear it in the most timely manner. If the occupy movement had been able to communicate the information about ideas, protests, etc. through some sort of chain of command and a formal communication channel that unified the members there would have been a much greater effect.


In communication classes we talk about the importance of the grapevine, or informal communication in an  organization, and there is no denying it is powerful; however, it cannot be the ONLY form of communication because no one will ever be able to keep track of who knows what. The networks cannot be random, they must be organized to ensure that messages are received by the people who are supposed to get them.

So I got a facebook

My first post of the semester was involving my lack of a Facebook. I intended to view how my lack of having a Facebook has either harmed or helped my social experience. As I look back on my semester, I can see very many reasons it was harmed. Where should I start?

Firstly, it was difficult for me to establish “two hits” for my social connections. It is common nowadays when you meet someone at an event to find them on Facebook and become friends that way. I have had many experiences where I met someone, didn’t see them for a while, and only when I saw them far later did they say “I looked for you on Facebook but couldn’t find you.” This (I’m conjecturing) has caused me to lose out on a lot of potential connections.

Secondly, as many of my friends organized events such as birthday parties and other such impromptu social occasions, I frequently learned about them after the fact. Why? They asked me “Didn’t you see the Facebook event?” I did not.

Thirdly, I have missed out on a lot of promotional items due to not being on Facebook. For example, a video game I am going to buy called Guild Wars 2 had a promotional event where you could see an exclusive trailer of their upcoming game…if you liked their Facebook page.

Fourthly, not having Facebook often made it difficult to put a name to a face. It was common in my two groups for my business classes to friend each other on Facebook, so when you would meet up in person you would know what each other looked like. As I did not have a Facebook, I had to use other reference items (I’ll be in a gray jacket reading the accounting book on the right hand side) in order to meet up.

Fifthly, Facebook “Likes” are often a way to find new content from your friends that you wouldn’t be able to find otherwise on your own.

All these reasons clearly indicate that Facebook is becoming a crucial tool for interacting in the modern-day world. Not having a Facebook can be likened to not having an email account; you simply need this tool to communicate in the modern social environment.

Therefore, I will be creating a Facebook on Wednesday after we leave our final class. If anyone would like to “friend” me, I will gladly accept your friendship. I may be a little bit awkward on Facebook at first, as I have a lot of catching up to do in regards to using social media, but I hope that I can learn to adapt to this changing world and not be left in the dust.

Copy That: Education, Being a Teacher, and Group Problem Solving

I have volunteered as a TA in various organizations for the past 3 years. I have volunteered in kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, and high school. If there’s one problem that’s the bane of my existence, it’s copying.

In our class we briefly discussed various techniques for controlling the spread of information across networks, especially in the aspect of problem solving. This caused me to think of the situations where I allowed copying.

Oftentimes, kids doing homework are working simply to solve the problem, not to learn the techniques used to do so. If one kid solves a problem, it’s highly likely he will be willing to show it to other students (coming from a homeschool environment, this was a behavior I thought to be quite peculiar.) Oftentimes, a class was simply too big for me to keep eyes on all students at all times; I often knew kids were copying answers behind my back, but there wasn’t too much I could do. Besides, I wasn’t the teacher; I had no real means to punish these students. The most I could do was offer my help if they were struggling.

However, last summer I was in a very different sort of teaching environment. I worked as an instructor at iD Tech camp, where I taught game design to kids aged 8-18. These kids all learned how to make games in a week, and went home at the end of the week with a finished game they could show their friends.

Oftentimes, a student would come up with a cool way of doing a cutscene, or an enemy, and pretty soon I would find this element in every student’s game. Actually, the more I saw this happen, the better the games were at the end of the week.

In this environment, there were no strictures on copying; in fact, it was encouraged. What was the difference between these two situations?

The key difference between school and iD Tech camp is that in school, students copy VALUES. What is the capital of France? What is 2 + 7?

However, in iD Tech Camp, every student is working on a different type of game. Therefore, there are no real “values” to copy, as every game project is open-ended. Instead, these students are copying PROCEDURES. If one student does something cool, the student next to him will look at his game and put that element in his game. Therefore, the student learns to APPLY the procedure in a new environment.

As we have become college students, we recognize that while copying values is an easy way out, the only way to truly learn is to copy procedures. The students at iD Tech internalize this approach from a very early age. One of the main critiques of the American education system is that this focus on values, with a respective emphasis on standardized testing, results in an environment where the rewards of copying correct values are too difficult to resist. It may sound like wishful thinking, but I hope that our education system can figure out a way to reward effective procedural copying. Only then will the vision of students soar.