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Using Metadata to find Paul Revere - Kieran Healy. London, 1772. I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the discussion of the role of “metadata” in certain recent events and the assurances of various respectable parties that the government was merely “sifting through this so-called metadata” and that the “information acquired does not include the content of any communications”.

I will show how we can use this “metadata” to find key persons involved in terrorist groups operating within the Colonies at the present time. I shall also endeavour to show how these methods work in what might be called a relational manner. Rest assured that we only collected metadata on these people, and no actual conversations were recorded or meetings transcribed. Here is what the data look like. How to Use the “Network Density” Formula to Measure the Health of a Community. How can you determine the health of a community? A lot of community managers just go with their gut on this one, or use proxy metrics like signups, posts per day, klout scores, retweets or some other metric that is fairly hollow, but there are better ways. This is very much a work in progress, so I’d love to collaborate. If anyone has any thoughts, please jump in the comments sections and let’s discuss. That being said, most of this isn’t new, it’s just stolen, adapted and generally simplified from concepts like Network Theory, Affinity Groups, Clustering Coefficients, Small World Networks, and other things I will never fully understand or convince people to invest tech into.

Let’s dig in… What is Network Density? First off, Network Density (ND for short) isn’t one number, it’s more like blood pressure where they say “80 over 120″. Average Distance Between Users : Number of Paths : Frequency of Interactions or simply put… Lets break each part down… Average Distance Between Users (AD): The Density of a Network is Independent of its Size | networkscience. I spent the last three years writing my PhD thesis. Since my thesis is about networks, I have used network datasets for research. Experimental results are more significant when done using multiple datasets and therefore I started collected network datasets. At first, I collected bipartite rating graphs such as MovieLens, Epinions and Netflix. Later I added social networks such as the Slashdot Zoo, Facebook and Flickr, hyperlink networks from Google, Wikipedia and TREC.

Before my thesis was done, I noticed that I had collected over a hundred network datasets! My PhD thesis is about the spectral evolution model, but such a large collection of network datasets is much too interesting to use it just for that. Let me explain that: A network such as Facebook consist of nodes and links. In other words, the larger the number of nodes in a network, the larger the density. Network size vs density for all networks The result is: Network size and density do not correlate! Here’s my PhD thesis:

New Networks Potential Untapped Until Services Shrink Units, Strip Hierarchy « Breaking Defense. Sitting in the cockpit of her A-10 Warthog somewhere over Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base on Jan. 10, Maj. Olivia Elliott flipped a switch. In an instant her blunt, twin-engine warplane with the 30-millimeter cannon in the nose was transformed. No longer just the Air Force’s most heavily-armed attack jet, now the A-10 was also a flying wireless router, providing Internet connectivity to anyone in range — and with the right password. The final test of the Network-Tactical, or Net-T, upgrade to the Northrop Grumman LITENING and Lockheed Martin Sniper targeting pods, carried by A-10s and other warplanes, is the latest in a long chain of communications breakthroughs by the U.S. military and the defense industry.

But the services have not changed how they are organized to make use of the new ways of sharing information. Arquilla literally wrote the book on netcentric warfare. That means organizational changes must come first. Net-T is only the latest entry. Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 112, No. 4 (August 2004), pp. 754-778. Rypple's Daniel Debow on the Corporate Shift from Hierarchy to Social Network. Daniel Debow, co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, describes how the old hierarchal model of business is being replaced by a model that resembles the social graph, the networking model popularized by Facebook that describes how people, places, trends, and other factors relate to each other. Also appearing in this video: Deborah Hopkins, Chief Innovation Officer, Citi. Debow: The model that is embedded in a lot of business software today is not an accurate model anymore of what a company is. I think that’s why the graph is a powerful tool.

So before Rypple, I was part of building a company called Workbrain, it was a traditional enterprise software company, Citigroup used it, Walmart, Target, Best Buy. And we used to track time for millions of employees, figure out how to pay them, schedule them and things like that. And at the core of one of the things that we had to do was to build a model of this business, that’s what the software’s trying to do.