As we leave our series on network centrality and begin an exploration of network clustering, who better to help us bridge the gap than Ron Burt. Burt is perhaps best known for his amazing network-based research on innovation and the source of good ideas, which brought "structural holes" to the world's attention. In Brokerage & Closure he expands these ideas into book form and brings additional attention to "closure," a key trait related to network clustering.

Very briefly, closure refers to the interconnectedness of one's contacts: When my contacts don't know each other, my network is "open," and when they do know each other, my network is "closed." Assuming that I am #1 (naturally), two extremes of open (left) and closed (right) are pictured below:"Open" and "closed" are pretty much the same as bridging and bonding, as I have discussed before:


For more discussion of network closure, I recommend Burt's online notes for his executive MBA course, "Strategic Leadership," specifically the chapter on Closure, which I would sum up with these two points:

1. The peer pressure created by closed networks builds commitment and productivity
   
2. The peer pressure created by closed networks reinforces groupthink and promotes mindless stereotypes
   

Click on the image below and you can read what Burt himself says:

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As many readers of this blog know, the political science meetings come to Boston the week after next. As I have mentioned before, there is an emerging interest in networks in political science. My co-conspirator in leading the "Political Networks"... David Lazer

The NSF has just published Fostering Learning in the Networked World: The Cyberlearning Opportunity and Challenge. Reading it reminds me of why I bailed out of academia. The introduction starts: "To address the global problems of war and peace, economics, poverty, health, and the environment, we need a world citizenry with ready access to knowledge about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics."

Wow. Another thing the world citizenry needs is a ban on vapid topic sentences whose only purpose is to inflate the perceived importance of the author's pet project.

In the NSF-funded land of cyberlearning, there is a five-tiered hierarchy of human interaction, represented by the cool picture below: The report explains the picture thus: "[The figure above] depicts historical advances in the communication and information resources available for human interaction. Basic face-to-face interaction at the bottom level requires no resources to mediate communication. The second wave of resources offered symbol systems such as written language, graphics, and mathematics but introduced a mediating layer between people. The communication revolution of radio, telephony, television, and satellites was the third wave. The outcomes of the fourth wave—networked personal computers, web publishing, and global search—set the stage for the fifth wave of cyberinfrastructure and participatory technologies that are reviewed in our report."

So, we are going to solve the "global problems of war and peace" with a framework that explicitly omits mediation from the realm of face-to-face communication. I wonder how much cyberinfrastructure South Ossetia would need to put this framework to use.

Next time I will get back on my network clustering thread again...

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I recently picked up my oldest daughter from immersion Chinese camp in Vermont (an interesting statement in itself about global networks). It was striking to me that as soon as she got home, she got on Facebook to friend many... David Lazer

Having finished our series on network centrality, we now approach its most natural complement: network clustering.

An easy way to appreciate the usefulness of network clustering is to try search engines that (unlike Google) are not centrality-driven. There are quite a few such search engines out there. They are great at providing a sense of direction within a previously unknown field --- when you're not yet sure exactly what question you're asking. In contrast, Google is better when your query is more specific, or when you just don't care about the rest of the forest, dammit, and want to find the biggest most popular tree ASAP.

Below are two examples of how non-centrality-based search engines display the WWW of "organizational network analysis". Click on either image to go to the search engine pictured.



There are dozens more search engines listed here by search engine junkie Bill Sebald.

I hope you enjoy the Un-Google world. Soon I'll say more about understanding this world with the help of network clustering.

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Link of the week: Network Mapping as a Diagnostic Tool, by Louise Clark. This is the best NetDraw user's guide I have seen. Thanks to Cai Kjaer at www.onasurveys.com (via his helpful wiki) for alerting me to this resource.


A few weeks ago I got an anonymous email with nothing but this quote:
"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."
--Immanuel KantThat is some interesting spam. It got me thinking: Is "organized" really the fundamental property of science and wisdom? No, I decided; it's just a word making a pithy quote. I then forgot the matter, only to remember it today, when I read "Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale," by Meg Wheatley and Debbie Frieze of The Berkana Institute. They say:
"Networks are the only form of organization on this planet used by living systems."True enough, but I claim their statement is too weak. I would rephrase it "Networks = Organization." If you disagree, please send me a counterexample in the form of an organizing principle that does not invoke things (i.e., nodes) and relationships (i.e., links). And feel free to consider other planets, non-living systems, dark matter, alternate universes, etc. You must also agree to let me use confusing mathematical machinery in order to refute your counterexample. The best "counterexamples" I have so far are organizing by space and time. For example, jellyfish organize by drifting near the surface of the ocean, and people organize by sleeping when it's dark.

Once you accept that Networks = Organization, Wheatley and Frieze's assertion becomes somewhat less interesting; however, it does (somehow) lead to the Berkana-esque question: Isn't it odd that the words "organization" and "organic" have the same root? Doubters like myself can verify right here the etymological network connecting "organization" with "organic." The root is the Greek organon, literally "that with which one works," and which since the 12th century has described not only tools but also musical instruments and body parts.

Putting all our quotes and equations together, we have:
"Science is knowing tools, musical instruments, and body parts. Wisdom is living tools, musical instruments, and body parts."And that, dear reader, is an org chart that really counts.

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I recently made an effort to track down the data from Theodore Newcomb's classic work on The Acquaintance Process. These were network and attitudinal data he collected from incoming students at the University of Michigan in the 1950s. These were... David Lazer

Over 3 billion people carry mobile telephones, which automatically capture behavioral data and store it in service provider databases around the world. The different types of captured data can provide insight into different cultures. I have an upcoming article in... Nathan Eagle http://web.media.mit.edu/~nathan

A follow-up on my previous entry: Thanks to some very attentive folks I noticed that it's rather cumbersome to access our paper from the publisher's website, so now you can download a copy here.... Maria Binz-Scharf

Ines Mergel, David Lazer and I have a paper out in the International Journal of Learning and Change on voluntary engagement in knowledge sharing. Based on data from our study of forensic scientists in government crime labs, we investigated why... Maria Binz-Scharf

Just in time for my last installment on network centrality, I have learned that Google now ranks Connectedness the #1 site on the Web for "pros and cons of male enhancement." It's tempting to take credit and say that this honor was the result of long, hard work on my part; but it was endowed upon me more by the fates of centrality than by anything I did. (Those who doubt my boast and are not afraid to look, click here: http://www.google.com/search?q=pros+and+cons+of+male+enhancement.)

Without taking anything away from the experts who have filled my blog with their thoughts on the topic, I now want to make perfectly clear my position on male enhancement: The field of collective leadership needs it bad, especially the non-profit/social-change sector.

I love working with collective leadership programs, and I am fortunate to do so regularly. The recipe for this work adapts to the participants, but it almost always involves something like the picture at right. See W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Collective Leadership Framework and the D.C. Leadership Learning Community's Nature of Collective Leadership for more.

In other sectors, collective leadership draws less with crayons and uses other more dangerous sticks. Speaking of collective leadership in the field of science, John Ziman says that each individual's contribution is "merely a tiny tentative step forward, through the jungles of ignorance." I don't think his savage choice of setting --- where only the fittest survive, thanks to teeth, claws, and other weapons --- was any accident.

My Introduction to Web Programming class has filled up again for this fall. It's my personal collective leadership learning lab. How can I equip 75 computer-illiterate college kids with the wherewithal to make their own websites (like these)? I can't. But together, they can. I facilitate my students' learning by dropping them into the Internet jungle and encouraging them to trust their own most primitive hacking instincts.

In the spirit of crayons and group hugs, my first gift to my students each term is an online discussion forum where they are encouraged to share anything relevant to the class. Speaking to a ballroom-full of faculty about his experience, Will Mundel noted first and foremost that "Thanks to the online forum we used in CS-103, students stop being individuals in a class. Rather, they are all in it together."

I am honored by Will's comment, but that's not the whole story of how my students learn to build their own websites. Underlying the experience of the class is a curriculum I have modeled on the traditional male rite of passage: (1) Throw a boy out of society into the wilderness; (2) Let him suffer and learn; and (3) Welcome the transformed man back into society. (That's my paraphrasing. Here's what the American Psychological Association says about this method of transformational learning.) If you look closely at this gallery of student projects, you'll see a quote from another student that speaks directly to her painful but ultimately victorious journey alone through the wilderness.

After subjecting my students to this webified passage of suffering, I top it off with a month-long tournament of hand-to-hand combat. Within the cage of this special-built wiki, the students compete for Google-rank supremacy. This part of the class evolved from my desire to translate the inner workings of the Google centrality algorithm into the real-life experience of the kids.

Inviting students into this kind of centrality-based competition is not easy. My first attempt provoked class revolt because students perceived the rankings as an unfair system of grading their work. (The fact that the competition had no impact on actual grades was irrelevant to this revolt.) My second attempt went smoothly: I was careful to provide a fair system for peer reviews in parallel with the same centrality-based competition. With fair peer reviews in hand, the students no longer were bothered by the arbitrariness of centrality rankings.

Last spring was my third and by far most successful use of the centrality competition. Not only was there no resentment at the arbitrariness of centrality rankings, but there was a positive embracing of the system. Students discovered how to form alliances and deliberately manipulate the Google algorithm into boosting their own rankings. A flurry of new links and surprise defections preceded the day of our awards ceremony. Three alliances shared top honors. When I refused to award a prize to one of the alliances because their team leader had skipped class that day, his teammates/co-conspirators texted him and made him show up, 20 minutes late, so that they could receive their prize: a one-half of one percent boost in final course grade.

Technical postscript: For those wondering how it's possible to share top honors in a Google centrality competition, the answer is quite technical. From this more-or-less readable description of the Google algorithm, you can discover a "damping factor" that Google does not allow users to see or edit. I provide my students with a Google centrality calculator that allows them to edit this damping factor to whatever they want. Changing the damping factor can sometimes change the winner of the rankings; I award first prize to anyone who can find a damping factor value that puts them atop the rankings. In the following network, every single node with a label can win the Google centrality contest with the right damping factor:

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In David Carr's column "The Media Equation" in today's (7/21/08) New York Times, he writes about the amazing growth of Facebook usage and visits. Facebook does indeed have its social — and business — prerogatives. The network platform is on... Stan Wasserman

[Ed note: This is the last tangent before we really finally close the network centrality thread with a positive note, coming soon.]

The NSF reports today: "The Internet gives scientists and researchers instant access to an astonishing number of academic journals. So what is the impact of having such a wealth of information at their fingertips? The answer, according to new research released today in the journal Science, is surprising--scholars are actually citing fewer papers in their own work, and the papers they do cite tend to be more recent publications. This trend may be limiting the creation of new ideas and theories."

This is an argument for Google-induced stupidity that I can agree with (unlike last week's).

My only beef with the NSF blurb is the notion that anything "surprising" is happening here. There is plenty of evidence of our lemming-like ways in other contexts; we should expect a human tendency to dive over the cliff of the web's dark side. Here's a first-person demonstration. By doing a bit of Googling I can share the first decent link that pops up to support the claim that humans are lemmings: Conversation, Information, and Herd Behavior, in the American Economic Review, 1995. Using Google in this way, I can feel myself regressing into a rodent even now.

One of the first, most famous and shocking demonstrations of human lemmingness was devised by Solomon Asch in the 1950's. Most people after reading this story find it hard to believe that it could happen to them. I had the "good fortune" to be tricked by my college psychology professor into Asch's trap, exposing my irrational lemmingness for all my 200 classmates to see. I have no doubt that I am a weak-willed conformist.

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This is a rather clever diffusion experiment, courtesy Matthieu Latapy. If you have a website, you can participate-- you just need to click "spread it" below, enter your url, retrieve the code that will put the image you see below... David Lazer

Interesting article in today's New York Times regarding the resistance Obama is experiencing from his supporters regarding his support of legislation to give immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the Bush administration's wiretapping program. Notably, supporters are using the... David Lazer

It is my pleasure to announce that "Citizen Relationship Management - A Study of CRM in Government" is now available. Just follow the link to Peter Lang Publishing Group. Here is a brief description of the book: This study explores... Alexander Schellong www.citizen-relationship-management.de

In the late 1990s everything connected to the Internet got an "e"–say eGovernment or eCommerce. With the evolution of mobile technology we saw the "m" appear by 2002–say mGovernment. Eventually we also saw the rise of "i" a little later.... Alexander Schellong www.citizen-relationship-management.de

"Is Google Making Us Stupid?" asks Nicholas Carr on the cover of this month's Atlantic Monthly. In a nutshell, Carr laments the decline of "deep reading" and suspects that we are losing "deep thinking" as well. I would not argue the "deep reading" point, but the connection to "deep thinking" is debatable and surely this excellent rebuttal is not the last blog post that will take Carr to task.

Here I will argue Carr on a different point. About two-thirds into his essay, he says:
"Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the men who founded Google, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence. 'The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,' Page said in a speech a few years back. 'For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.' In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, 'Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.' ....

[Carr continues] "Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ.... Still, their easy assumption that we’d all 'be better off' if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized."Two counterarguments immediately come to mind in response to the above:

1. For many of us, it is quite natural to believe that intelligence can be the output of a mechanical process. I suspect I am in a minority on this point, so for those who are curious to consider intelligence outside the stuff of brains, I simply recommend the book, The Mind's Eye, a collection of essays around this topic edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett.
2. In the passage above, there is a belief espoused explicitly by Brin and implicitly by Carr that is even more unsettling (at least to me) than the notion of mechanized intelligence: That we'd be "better off" if we were smarter. Read Carr's entire essay and you'll see that, just like his essay title suggests, he is very pro-smart and anti-dumb. I'll grant that with more intelligence, we have a way to boast of being "better than..."; but being "better off" is another question altogether.
   

In short, Carr's passion for intelligence combined with his strict accounting of its boundaries are a recipe for fundamentalism.

...

My regular readers may be wondering what happened to the "celebration of competitiveness" that I promised last time. Or maybe, what does any of this have to do with networks? Good questions. I beg your patience, dear reader-- I just could not resist this tangent, and I promise to celebrate centrality, measurement, and competitiveness soon. Meanwhile, I close with this chapter from the Tao Te Ching, which comments on the consequences of increasing intelligence:


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I read an interesting op-ed in todays NYT. The basic argument is that the basic notion of Web 2.0 counters the terrorist group's overall communication strategy and philosophy. An additional argument is that the empowernment of the online community through... Alexander Schellong www.citizen-relationship-management.de

Last week we kicked off our "Separation of Network Power" series in honor of the June 12 Supreme Court ruling on hearings for Guantanamo Bay detainees.

This week we'll continue the series, inspired by Congressional action of June 19 to let the White House and phone companies off the hook for warrantless tapping of domestic US communications since 2001.

Showing how far one branch of government can implicitly subjugate itself to another, Congressional Democrats claimed victory for including a special clause in the law that prohibits the White House from breaking it. In the words of the NY Times:
The most important [White House] concession that Democratic leaders claimed was an affirmation that the intelligence restrictions were the “exclusive” means for the executive branch to conduct wiretapping operations in terrorism and espionage cases. Speaker Nancy Pelosi had insisted on that element, and Democratic staff members asserted that the language would prevent Mr. Bush, or any future president, from circumventing the law. The proposal asserts “that the law is the exclusive authority and not the whim of the president of the United States,” Ms. Pelosi said.

In the wiretapping program approved by Mr. Bush after the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House asserted that the president had the constitutional authority to act outside the courts in allowing the National Security Agency to focus on the international communications of Americans with suspected ties to terrorists and that Congress had implicitly authorized that power when it voted to use military force against Al Qaeda.

Network centrality and the executive branch make for tough competitors in the struggle not only to separate but also to balance the powers of the collective. Last time I lamented the dark side of centrality and competition. Next time I'll celebrate the good side.

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