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 ...
Earlier this month, the Obama administration announced its plan to put $100 million toward building a network map of the human brain. World leading network scientist and Northeastern Distinguished Professor Albert-László Barabási is excited about the new project, but says the so-called “connectome” of neural interactions in the brain is but one network of many ...
When economists talk about producers and consumers—the people that make stuff and the people that use it—they’re usually thinking about commodities like coffee, wheat, or oil. Not knowledge. That’s because knowledge hasn’t really been quantifiable before. But today, in this era of the “data deluge,” it is. For the first time in history, we can ...
Here are two things that shouldn’t surprise you: Our past experiences determine our future behaviors and our social interactions are constantly changing. When it comes to humans operating in the world, these are just facts and we don’t think about them that much. But they are deeply connected to the way information spreads. Right now ...
In late February, something happened to the Italian government that had never happened before: a hung parliament. After 75 percent of the population turned out to vote, it took two days to tally the results. Now, almost three weeks later, the center right and center left parties remain in a steadfast gridlock. A third party–the ...
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 ...
The other day I starred the following headline in my RSS feed: “Any Two Pages on the Web Are Connected By 19 Clicks or Less.” I didn’t read it immediately because it sounded like vaguely familiar old news that I could probably return to later. But this morning in our office’s daily editorial meeting, I ...
If you’ve driven on the highway, you’ve seen it: The traffic jam appears out of nowhere and disappears just as mysteriously. We blame the cars around us for their poor driving skills, and slam on our own breaks. During an AAAS annual meeting session hosted by Northeastern professor Albert-László Barabási, Northwestern professor Dirk Helbing showed ...
On Friday I got to pretend I was a student again. I sat in on Auroop Ganguly’s graduate class, Applied Time Series and Spatial Statistics for the second of two guest lectures on the subject of forecasting. Last time, it had to do with forecasting the financial impacts of natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy, which I ...
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 ...