IC2S2 - Saturday Roundup
Saturday started off with a fascinating keynote from Damon Centola on How Behavior Spreads. He talked about how weak and strong ties affect the spread of both simple and complex
IC2S2 - Friday Roundup
The SAGE Ocean team are currently at IC2S2 - the 4th Annual International Conference on Computational Social Science, which is taking place at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
Here's a round up of the action on Friday.
SAGE Ocean Speaker Series #3 - How technology fails us, and what we can do about it
SAGE Ocean Speaker Series #3
How technology fails us, and what we can do about it with Keith Porcaro.
Nesta to set up new Centre for Collective Intelligence Design
Nesta confirmed they are to launch a new Centre for Collective Intelligence Design this summer. The centre will seek to harness the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with a particular focus on the combination of human and machine intelligence.
SAGE Ocean Speaker Series #2 - Violence, VR & video data. Experimental research into violent events
SAGE Ocean Speaker Series #2 saw Mark Levine discussing his recent work which includes the use of virtual reality to study the behavior of bystanders in violent emergencies.
Humans broke the internet, understanding them better might help fix it
By Timo Hannay
Here's a multiple-choice question: Is the internet (a) the most open, egalitarian and empowering means of communication ever devised, or (b) a dystopian nightmare populated by hucksters, trolls and miscellaneous abusers of human rights? The answer is, of course, (c) all of the above and much else besides. This stark contrast between the internet's light and dark sides has become a defining characteristic of the digital age, but is not an inevitable consequence of the mostly innocuous technologies on which it's built. Rather, it is the product of their bewilderingly diverse and eccentric user base – otherwise known as humanity.
SSRC launches Social Data Initiative & Facebook provides academics with access to data
Last week marked a milestone for social science and industry partnerships, with Facebook announcing an initiative to give scholars access to its data in order to help them assess social media’s impact on elections.
What is The Relationship Between Research and Policy?
Christina Boswell and Katherine Smith set out four different approaches to theorizing the relationship between knowledge and policy and consider what each of these suggests about approaches to incentivising and measuring research impact.
SAGE Ocean Speaker Series: Kimberly A. Houser
We were extremely lucky to kick off the first edition of the SAGE Ocean Speaker Series last week with a talk from tech attorney and social media law professor, Kimberly A. Houser.
Ignorance and interdisciplinary work: field notes from the Social Science Foo Camp
The first-ever “Social Science FOO Camp” was held a couple of weeks ago at the headquarters of Facebook in Menlo Park, California
The first ever Soc Sci Foo: social media, fake news, AI & much more
The first ever Social Science Foo Camp took place earlier this month, co-hosted by SAGE, O’Reilly Media and Facebook.
Bev Skeggs on social media siloing
"Basically 90 percent of Facebook profit is made from advertising — selling your data to advertising companies so that they can place an advert on your browser..." says Bev Skeggs in a new interview with Social Science Bites. Bev Skeggs joins the podcast in order to reveal interesting new findings in her research that studies how social networks were structuring or restructuring friendships.
Big data rich and big data poor
Data is being created faster than ever before however without access to these data-sets or the expertise to analyse them, research is confronted with a replication crisis and is vulnerable to commercial motivations. The problem is growing as Katie Metzler points out, "Firstly, because replication is the engine of science, and irreproducible research slows progress... secondly the motivations of industry researchers and social scientists may differ in ways that may really matter."
Gary King: Do we need a big data treaty?
For years political scientist Gary King has argued and preached for a restructuring of the social sciences that would include “larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams” with big data analysis in their DNA. "The key reasons social sciences are moving from studying problems individually… to the scientific model where we’re actually solving problems, is because of the community. It is much easier to fool ourselves than it is to fool our community.” - Gary King
Putting big data to good use
"Big data and mathematical models aren’t inherently bad... it depends on the way it’s used, by whom, and in service of what outcomes." says Katie Metzler. Against backdrop of media stories warning us about big data and its dangers, SAGE Publishing hosted a panel debate as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science panel entitled “Putting big data to good use” at the British Academy in London where Katie Metzler leads the discussion.
How social media stymies social science
Getting data is becoming more and more of an issue and is unfortunately leading to consequences in academia. Disagreements that were usually solved with data are now getting lost due to the the little publicly available data on social media sites. This is a significant change to how social science researchers are gathering their data that professor Henry Farrell says is "badly understood."