A couple weeks ago I wrote a story about some work related to the Boston Marathon bombings that network scientists in David Lazer’s lab are working on. They’re asking Android phone users to donate a little time as well as the data from the calls and texts they made in the hours following the attacks. Researchers ...
When disaster strikes, we rely on our social networks for support. During hurricane Sandy, neighbors helped neighbors by sharing electrical power with those who’d lost it or removing tree limbs from each other’s rooftops. In many cases, the help we get during emergencies comes from whomever happens to be nearby, but more and more our ...
Until yesterday, I hadn’t thought too much about the term “political science.” I probably first heard it in high school or college, when I accepted it as an item of potential academic study that I would not pursue and went on with my life (I consider politics to be the single most abstract and frustrating ...
Someone once told me that being a science writer is like being in school forever. Over the past year, my first at Northeastern, I have found that to be absolutely true. I have learned about the Higgs Boson from a particle physicist and the neurology of emotion from a psychologist. I have played video games ...
Debate season is an exciting time for professor David Lazer’s lab, and I’m delighted to be able to bring you more analysis from their team. This time, research assistant professor Yu-Ru Lin explains what their Twitter-meter had to say about Tuesday night’s presidential debate. Together with Drew Margolin, Lin led a team from the Lazer ...
As expected, last night’s VP debate was engaging, to say the least. David Lazer‘s lab was at it again, analyzing real-time Twitter data to gauge the public’s response to the event. Below, Lazer explains their Twitter “winning index,” which fluctuated across the two candidates’ performances. Twitter allows real-time calculation of audience responses to the debate. ...
Thursday night’s vice presidential debate is bound to be a good one. If it weren’t for the silence rules, I bet we’d be hearing lots of Hoorays and Boos from the crowd — those age-old auditory cues signaling sentiment. Those same cues accompany David Lazer’s newest visualization, which portrays the way money is spent by ...
Sixty million people are expected to tune in on Wednesday night to watch the first presidential debate of this election season. While the debates themselves may not determine the outcome of an election, the voters watching them do. So, wouldn’t it be nice if we could crawl into the minds of those voters and catch ...
In the coming months we will be inundated with political messaging from a host of sources. This is always what happens in the period leading up to a political election and this time it’s no different. Well…one thing is different actually: this time we can use new data visualizations from professor David Lazer’s lab to ...
I just met one of the coolest people at Northeastern. His name is Mauro Martino and he’s the man behind most of the data visualization coming out of the university’s various network science labs. After spending a couple years at the MIT media lab, he joined Albert-László Barabási’s Center for Complex Network Research and David ...
I spoke to yet another beneficiary of the provost’s tier 1 interdisciplinary research seed grant program yesterday. Elizabeth Dillon’s work is a bit different from most of the people I talk to these days — she’s an English professor. But she’s doing incredible things combining the humanities and computation, mining historical texts for the prevalence ...
Albert-László Barabasi is a world leader in the emerging field of network science. In his research, Barabasi seeks to understand the properties of various types of systems, be they biological, information-based, technological or even social. “There are some common organizing principles that describe these different types of networks, he says. “In many ways these networks ...