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

The network in the garden

Online harassment on social media platforms is a pressing matter for which users are not well equipped to handle or avoid. Twitter users can take advantage of third-party websites to get more detailed metrics about the health of another users account, or they can make reports to Twitter after experiencing abuse, but neither option easily allows them to avoid abusive users. We present Tweety Holmes, which analyzes the word usage of Twitter profiles, detects potentially abusive behavior and then warns users visually. It follows principles of algorithmic transparency by visually indicating which words or tweets flagged the profile as abusive so users can better understand the context and also alerts users when they are mentioned or messages by a potentially abusive user with the hopes that this early warning can prevent unhealthy interactions from taking place in the future.

Tweety Holmes: A Browser Extension for Abusive Twitter Profile Detection

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.

"Analyzing gossip in workplace email" by Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert, with Ching-man Au Yeung as coordinator

We present the findings of an in situ field study conducted using our assisted living system, I-Living, that aims to enable seniors to live in a cost-effective manner independently. Basing the study on both interviews and diaries provided valuable and well-rounded data. Some of the main findings revealed that seniors will wear small health sensors if designed carefully. The study further reveals that delicate and complicated social structures influence the design space in such communities. The primary contribution of this paper is the pilot study conducted at an assisted living facility. It paints a compelling picture of day-to-day life in a healthcare institution and uncovers broad design implications that apply to a wide range of technologies.

/pdf/the-social-implications-of-an-assisted-living-reminder-3urbsuvjs9.pdf

The social implications of an assisted living reminder system

An increasing number of American adults are consuming news on social media platforms. However, these digital platforms employ personalized recommendation algorithms to increase user engagement. This selective exposure to information leads to the formation of filter bubbles where the users are constantly fed information in line with their ideological views. In this paper, we aim at bursting these filter bubbles through diverse exposure. We discuss the design of a Google Chrome extension, Pop, which augments user's Twitter feeds with news tweets from agencies of different ideological standings.

Eric Gilbert

Papers

The network in the garden

Tweety Holmes: A Browser Extension for Abusive Twitter Profile Detection

"Analyzing gossip in workplace email" by Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert, with Ching-man Au Yeung as coordinator

The social implications of an assisted living reminder system

Pop: Bursting News Filter Bubbles on Twitter Through Diverse Exposure