The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently published a report, Understanding the Participatory News Consumer, that contains some descriptive statistics about the prevalence of what I’ve been calling social filtering or link sharing. The data for this report were collected between December 28, 2009 and January 19, 2010. N=2259 English-speaking adults 18 or older [...]
Posts under ‘data’
large datasets and threats to validity
I just read “Limits of Predictability in Human Mobility” by Chaoming Song, et al. (Science, Vol. 327, 2010). The paper reports an analysis of a really amazing dataset: three months of cell phone records for ~10 million customers of a large European carrier (“anonymized by the data source”). These records include information about the cell [...]
google buzz
I am dismayed by the way Google has rolled out Buzz, and I am not alone. Many bloggers and news organizations have raised issues with Google’s misguided assumption that email contacts form the same kind of social network as users of Facebook and Twitter (etc.) have built up over time. For example, a NY Times [...]
productivity
well, the paper is submitted. but man, i NEVER want to do that again. and by “that” i mean write a single-author paper in about a week. i’d been working on analysis (along with all my other dissertation- and work-related stuff) for months, but when we returned from the holiday weekend — where i tried [...]
hierarchies and semantics
In my dissertation experiment, I asked ~60 people from two different graduate schools (or “communities”) on campus to label and organize a set of short documents into a hierarchy (tree structure). They used a web-based interface created specifically for the experiment, that closely resembled the file-and-folder metaphor everybody is used to in Microsoft Windows and [...]
