Month: September 2014

Symposium #10

Nathan

This unique and deep meaning of power laws perhaps explains our excitement when we first spotted them on the Web. It wasn’t only that they were unprecedented and unexpected in the context of networks. It was that they lifted complex networks out of the jungle of randomness where Erdős and Rényi had placed them forty years earlier and dropped them in the colorful and conceptually rich arena of self-organization.(p.77)

Power laws rarely emerge in systems complete dominated by a roll of the dice. Physicists have learned that most often they signal a transition from disorder to order. The emergence of them on the Internet signaled just such a change and laid groundwork for the establishment of more complex, but orderly, systems of networking.

 

The long tail theory has facilitated an abundances of niches. The internet and the incredibly vast amount of information available has led to outliers, normally forgotten in retail settings, to be capitalized on. This has also given consumers an abundance of choice and markedly lower prices.

Three Rules:

  1. Make everything available.
  2. Cut the price in half, not lower it.
  3. Help me find it.

Split Personalities

Nathan

“To be a realistic whole is not an undisputed starting point but the provisional achievement of a composite assemblage” -Latour.

Adrian took this to mean that people are not ‘entirely whole’. Simultaneously, people can be many things and fit many roles. Adrian used himself as an example and listed off all the things he saw himself as being in a classroom setting. He presumed that he could embody all of these different titles to different people, but do those titles extend to how others view us, or how we view others?

While Adrian may be a friend, employee, teacher, and many other things, I have only ever know him as my lecturer. That gives me a limited perception of him now that I just how many roles he fills, but to me that is all of him; he is a whole lecturer.

So I tried to imagine how different people in my life may view me. I get to experience all of my moods, thoughts and feelings. I see first hand how I interact with other people, my likes and dislikes, my inner thought. But all this is lost to on everyone. Could we be simultaneously be the same person yet viewed as completely different  by two separate persons?

For example, my mother would claim to know me very well; she’s known me my whole life and is there when I go to sleep and when I wake up, same could be said for my family. But do they get to see the same Nathan that my friends do? I know I act differently around my family and friends. There are things I do and tell my friends that I wouldn’t with my parents and vice versa. But they don’t know that. So which version of myself is then the real me? Me as a Friend or as a Son/Brother? Maybe its a little of both.

Either way, both my family and friends have a completely different perception of the person that I am, and probably neither of them are completely accurate. Does that then mean that we are never whole within our own minds (because we have these different personalities for different people), but are whole from their point of view because that’s all they’ve ever known of us?

80/20: A Real Life Application?

Nathan

Seems legit.

80% of profits come form 20% of employees, 80% of customer service complaints come from 20% of customers, 80% of your grades come from 20% of the work you do?

The more I thought about this the more it actually started to make sense. I know Barabasi said that applying the 80/20 rule to just about anything would be a “gross overstatement”, it does seem to fit for a lot of common, non-businness, situations.

The pessimist in me would infer from this that 4/5 of all my efforts would be largely irrelevant, yet it seems that this is not entirely untrue. If I take my academic work for example, for most classes 80% of my final mark comes from only about 20% of my time spent working for that class, whether that be essays or other assignments. Of all the work I do, only 20% will be marked towards my final grade. But does that mean that the other 80% of the work I did for that class becomes irrelevant?

What about all the readings and notes I took? I spent way more time in the semester reading and going to class or lectures than I did on my assignments. But without those readings and notes, would I have been able to complete my assignments? Doesn’t that mean that more of my efforts have contributed to my results, if indirectly?

Would this apply to business oriented models of the 80/20 rule? Would that 20% of the workforce have been able to produce that 80% of the profits for a company without the help of another percentage of the workforce?…

Symposium #8

Nathan
  • Nothing is neutral; on the other hand nothing is coercive either.
  • Technologies were created with an intended purpose, however that purpose may be lost as the technology is used for different purposes besides the one it was originally intended for.
  • In relation to gun violence: a key argument in relation to gun regulation is that it is not the technology that kills people, it is the person wielding the technology.
    • This can be applied to any technology. E.g. A hammer may have originally been intended as a tool, but it can be used as a weapon, or to destroy rather than build, or as a chew toy for a dog, dinner for a termite.. etc.
  • Networked media and technology follow this same logic with communications technologies in particular.
  • Networked technologies are intricate and complex ‘soups’ of histories, interlocking social reforms, social conditioning etc.
  • Nothing is isolated; everything exists in relation to something else.

Six Degrees of Facebook Separation

Nathan

I’ve heard the phrases “what a small world” and “six degrees of separation” so often that I had never really thought to deeply about them. I just accepted that fact that I would run into people with whom I had a mutual acquaintance, and by that logic, it seemed likely that by extension/association I would know a lot of people.

But when I sit down and try and think how, through only 6 relationships, that I would know the President of the USA, that seemed a bit of a stretch. Who would I know that would even have hopes of knowing someone who knew the President, and not just on some superficial level; “oh yeah! I sat on next to a guy on the bus who said he knew a guy who once went to school with Barack Obama”….come on now.

I mean real legitimate associations, a friendship or family relation; some kind of meaningful link. That notion of 6 degrees of separation seemed more unlikely to me. So I tried to map it out – how could I know the President? I turned to Facebook.

I had lived in America so that should have made it easier right? If I could keep going through mutual friends until I found someone who worked in the US government I would count that as a win. Turns out it was easier than I thought.. within 20 minutes I had found a few Congressmen’s Facebook pages and a couple of other people who have listed they worked in the White House. Another 15 minutes and I had trimmed it down to 7 links (more than 6 degrees but I’m chalking that up as a W). I could have probably found it in less links but Facebook isn’t the most reliable medium for this kind of research!

Maybe one day Facebook will have a “mutual friends of your mutual friends” option when looking through peoples’ profiles?

The Oscillated Jogger

Nathan

I’m a runner, anything from a lazy afternoon 5k around the park, a 10k training run, or a 21k half marathon, I love it all. I have my routines for each run and it varies depending on if I’m training for an upcoming event. A prep for anything over 10k usually involves some carbo-loading the night before (pasta, potatoes, or something like that) and heaps of water, a small breakfast of maybe a banana and a muesli bar, then about a 1k walk and light stretch to warm up (got to stay limber!). I also have running playlists on my Ipod, varying based on pace, distance, intervals etc. and have a BPM that is set to my footsteps.

Last night I went for a run after work, just around Jells Park for a couple of laps, it was about 6-7k. But I had lost my headphones so instead of focusing on my music, breathing and footsteps, I just kind of daydreamed. There were a few other runners out doing my loop and that reminded me of Watts’ analogy of joggers to explain synchronized systems.

None of the other joggers were paying attention to me or my pace (coupling strength) and we were by no means running as a pack (or in a synchronized state), our lap times (intrinsic frequencies) would have been different. But I started wondering how this would have been different if it was a race. Would we all be together, waiting for someone to break away or fall behind? Or would we still be spread out? Each runner just trying to maintain his or her best pace.

This was a weird feeling seeing myself acting out a theory from the readings. Maybe I can use my knowledge of complex systems to give myself an edge next time I’m running a race.

Mob Mentality

Nathan

Watts outlined a notion that by knowing about networks, systems and basic organizing principles of we can predict the behaviour of individuals within that system without knowing specifics about the individuals. He summarizes these complex systems interactions: “Fortunately, as capricious, confusing, and unpredictable as individual humans typically are, when many of them get together, it is sometimes the case that we can understand the basic organizing principles while ignoring many of the complicated details. This is the flip side of complex systems. While knowing the rules that govern the behavior of individuals does not necessaril help us to predict the behavior of the mob, we may be able to predict the very same mob behavior without knowing very much about the unique personalities and characteristics of the individuals that make it up”.

 Essendon

This essentially means that individuals within complex systems become uniform. They act according to a mob mentality rather than their own personalities. If by only knowing a few choice facts about a person, and placing them in the midst of a crowd, we can predict the behavior of the mob and that individual.

Sports’ crowds are the example that spring to mind. By only knowing which team a spectator supports, and ignoring almost all other personal details about them, you can predict how they and the mob will react. We can predict when they will cheer, boo, yell, complain. We can track their emotions because we know which team they play for. Given understanding of the context of the system, say the AFL Grand Final, we could also predict behaviors more precisely: what they will do after of before the game, what they will be talking about during halftime, if they are having a few extra drink.

Does this concept of complex systems abolish individuality? Are we not really the special little flower we were told we were when placed in a crowd of 100,000 other flowers?