Data Mining - Concepts and Techniques.

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

From the Publisher: 
A Question of Identity 
Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." 
Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. 
This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

http://cfile28.uf.tistory.com/attach/23159E3D57117DF7107077

Twitter mood predicts the stock market.

Following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, many have expressed concern about the effects of false stories (“fake news”), circulated largely through social media. We discuss the economics of fake news and present new data on its consumption prior to the election. Drawing on web browsing data, archives of fact-checking websites, and results from a new online survey, we find: (i) social media was an important but not dominant source of election news, with 14 percent of Americans calling social media their “most important” source; (ii) of the known false news stories that appeared in the three months before the election, those favoring Trump were shared a total of 30 million times on Facebook, while those favoring Clinton were shared 8 million times; (iii) the average American adult saw on the order of one or perhaps several fake news stories in the months around the election, with just over half of those who recalled seeing them believing them; and (iv) people are much more likely to believe stories that favor their preferred candidate, especially if they have ideologically segregated social media networks.

/pdf/social-media-and-fake-news-in-the-2016-election-1m4ttkb5mo.pdf

Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election

We spend a significant part of our lives chatting about other people. In other words, we all gossip. Although sometimes a contentious topic, various researchers have shown gossip to be fundamental to social life—from small groups to large, formal organizations. Adopting the Enron email dataset and natural language techniques, we present the first study of gossip in a large CMC corpus. We find that workplace gossip is common at all levels of the organizational hierarchy, with people most likely to gossip with their peers and that it is more likely for an email to contain gossip if targeted to a smaller audience.. Also, gossip appears as often in personal exchanges as it does in formal business communication. Exploring the sentiment of gossip, we observe that gossip is in fact quite often negative. Our study provides empirical evidence of an under-researched yet important societal phenomenon and provides empirical insights by testing existing gossip theories originating from anthropology, on a real world large email dataset.

http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers//gossip-sigweb12.pdf

Analyzing Gossip in Workplace Email

Many social media platforms provide features for commenting, which often provide affordances for people to give feedback to others. Around the theme of advancing research about online comments, this workshop aims to bring together a diverse range of researchers for cross-discipline community building and especially dedicated time for productive, early mixed-methods research. The workshop is structured around a research "hackathon," where participants actively work on producing initial stages of research, theory, and design related to a central dataset (in the case of this workshop, public comments from a historical reddit.com corpus). Participants will form collaborative teams to tackle questions of interest that move forward current thinking around online comment behaviors, participants, quality, and design. The one-day workshop is led by 5 researchers, and it will accommodate up to 32 participants.

Conceptualizing, Creating, & Controlling Constructive and Controversial Comments: A CSCW Research-athon

Both governments and corporations routinely surveil computer-mediated communication (CMC). Technologists often suggest widespread encryption as a defense mechanism, but CMC encryption schemes have historically faced significant usability and adoption problems. Here, we introduce a novel technique called Open Book designed to address these two problems. Inspired by how people deal with eavesdroppers offline, Open Book uses data mining and natural language processing to transform CMC messages into ones that are vaguer than the original. Specifically, we present: 1) a greedy Open Book algorithm that cloaks messages by transforming them to resemble the average Internet message; 2) an open-source, browser-based instantiation of it called Read Me, designed for Gmail; and, 3) a set of experiments showing that intended recipients can decode Open Book messages, but that unintended human- and machine-recipients cannot. Finally, we reflect on some open questions raised by this approach, such as recognizability and future side-channel attacks.

Open Book: A Socially-inspired Cloaking Technique that Uses Lexical Abstraction to Transform Messages

Relationships make social media social. But, not all relationships are created equal. We have colleagues with whom we correspond intensely, but not deeply; we have childhood friends we consider close, even if we fell out of touch. Social media, however, treats everybody the same: someone is either a completely trusted friend or a total stranger, with little or nothing in between. In reality, relationships fall everywhere along this spectrum, a topic social science has investigated for decades under the name tie strength, a term for the strength of a relationship between two people. Despite many compelling findings along this line of research, social media does not incorporate tie strength or its lessons. Neither does most research on large-scale social phenomena.Simply put, we do not understand a basic property of relationships expressed online. This monograph takes a wide view of the problem, merging the theories behind tie strength with the data from social media. We show how to reconstruct tie strength from digital traces in online social media, and how to apply it as a tool in design and analysis. Specifically, this article makes two core contributions. First, it offers a rich, high-accuracy and general way to reconstruct tie strength from digital traces, traces like recency and a message's emotional content. For example, the model can split users into strong and weak ties with nearly 89% accuracy. We argue that it also offers us a chance to rethink many of social media's most fundamental design elements. Next, we showcase an example of how we can redesign social media using tie strength: a Twitter application open to anyone on the internet which puts tie strength at the heart of its design. Through this application, called We Meddle, we show that the tie strength model generalizes to a new online community, and that it can solve real people's practical problems with social media. It may be fair to see this monograph as linking the online to the offline; that is, it connects the traces we leave in social media to how we feel about relationships in real life. We conclude the article by reflecting on other ways design might appropriate ideas like tie strength in social computing.

/pdf/computing-and-building-around-tie-strength-in-social-media-20j069817z.pdf

Computing and Building around Tie Strength in Social Media

We describe a case study that uses grid computing techniques to support the collaborative learning of high school students investigating cosmic rays. Students gather and upload science data to our e-Lab portal They explore those data using techniques from the GriPhyN collaboration. These techniques include virtual data transformations, workflows, metadata cataloging and indexing, data product provenance and persistence, as well as job planners. Students use Web browsers and a custom interface that extends the GriPhyN Chiron portal to perform all of these tasks. They share results in the form of online posters and ask each other questions in this asynchronous environment. Students can discover and extend the research of other students, modeling the processes of modern large-scale scientific collaborations. Also, the e-Lab portal (http://quarknet.uchicago.edu/elab/cosmic) provides tools for teachers to guide student work throughout an investigation.

/pdf/the-quarknet-grid-collaborative-learning-e-lab-3tzv4hbmw9.pdf

Eric Gilbert

Papers

Analyzing Gossip in Workplace Email

Conceptualizing, Creating, & Controlling Constructive and Controversial Comments: A CSCW Research-athon

Open Book: A Socially-inspired Cloaking Technique that Uses Lexical Abstraction to Transform Messages

Computing and Building around Tie Strength in Social Media

The QuarkNet/grid collaborative learning e-Lab