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arXiv2014

Towards a comparative science of cities: using mobile traffic records in New York, London and Hong Kong

This chapter examines the possibility to analyze and compare human activities in an urban environment based on the detection of mobile phone usage patterns. Thanks to an unprecedented collection of counter data recording the number of calls, SMS, and data transfers resolved both in time and space, we confirm the connection between temporal activity profile and land usage in three global cities: New York, London and Hong Kong. By comparing whole cities typical patterns, we provide insights on how cultural, technological and economical factors shape human dynamics. At a more local scale, we use clustering analysis to identify locations with similar patterns within a city. Our research reveals a universal structure of cities, with core financial centers all sharing similar activity patterns and commercial or residential areas with more city-specific patterns. These findings hint that as the economy becomes more global, common patterns emerge in business areas of different cities across the globe, while the impact of local conditions still remains recognizable on the level of routine people activity.

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arXiv2014

Is Spanish time schedule really weird? // De verdad son tan anómalos los horarios españoles? Una comparación con Italia y Reino Unido

There are currently a vivid debate in Spain on the time zone which should follow the country. In this context this paper analyses Time Use surveys in Spain, Italy and United Kingdom and compares data extracted from them. The paper focus on universal activities like: sleeping, eating, working and the location "at home". Data are analysed on the regional basis provided by the surveys. Regional distributions of first and last occurrences of the activities are described by median values. Median values are then compared to each other by considering longitude and latitude. Within the interval of half a time zone, data show a good agreement. Which is to say, Spanish time schedules are not really weird if geographical position is taken into account. That includes also latitude. It is shown that midlatitude regions may undergo earlier time tables in the morning. ---- En el contexto de la discusión actual que se vive en España sobre la pertinencia de sus horarios y sobre el huso horario que ha de regir en el país este estudio analiza las encuestas de Empleo de Tiempo de Reino Unido, Italia y España. Los datos de las encuestas se analizan en base regional. Dentro del intervalo de medio huso horario los datos disponibles parecen concordar bastante bien. Es decir, aparentemente, los horarios españoles no son especialmente extraños si tenemos en cuenta la posición geográfica. Esto incluye no solo la longitud sino también la latitud. Los datos sugieren que las regiones de latitudes medias pueden desarrollar horarios más tempranos por la mañana, en comparación con regiones con latitud más extrema.

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arXiv2014

Laser pointer prohibition: improving safety or driving misclassification

It is well known that since 2008 Australia has had some of the world's most restrictive laws regarding the possession and importation of "laser pointers" with powers exceeding 1 mW. Now four years on Australia is used as a test case and question whether this has actually improved safety for those wishing to purchase these devices or if it has impacted on the availability of prohibited devices. Results from the analysis of over 40 laser pointers legitimately purchased in Australia from local and International suppliers are presented. Specifically lasers that are readily available to everyday consumers through the simple on-line search "laser pointer 1mw" are targeted. The parameters investigated are quoted power versus measured power, correct representation in advertising and adherence to laser standards as related to specified use and purchase price. The analysis indicates that the suppliers in this market have learnt how to bypass the prohibition and the impact on general safety in these cases is detrimental.

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arXiv2014

Twitter and Polls: Analyzing and estimating political orientation of Twitter users in India General #Elections2014

This year (2014) in the month of May, the tenure of the 15th Lok Sabha was to end and the elections to the 543 parliamentary seats were to be held. A whooping $5 billion were spent on these elections, which made us stand second only to the US Presidential elections in terms of money spent. Swelling number of Internet users and Online Social Media (OSM) users could effect 3-4% of urban population votes as per a report of IAMAI (Internet & Mobile Association of India). Our count of tweets related to elections from September 2013 to May 2014, was close to 18.21 million. We analyzed the complete dataset and found that the activity on Twitter peaked during important events. It was evident from our data that the political behavior of the politicians affected their followers count. Yet another aim of our work was to find an efficient way to classify the political orientation of the users on Twitter. We used four different techniques: two were based on the content of the tweets, one on the user based features and another based on community detection algorithm on the retweet and user mention networks. We found that the community detection algorithm worked best. We built a portal to show the analysis of the tweets of the last 24 hours. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first academic pursuit to analyze the elections data and classify the users in the India General Elections 2014.

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arXiv2014

Modeling and Measuring Graph Similarity: The Case for Centrality Distance

The study of the topological structure of complex networks has fascinated researchers for several decades, and today we have a fairly good understanding of the types and reoccurring characteristics of many different complex networks. However, surprisingly little is known today about models to compare complex graphs, and quantitatively measure their similarity. This paper proposes a natural similarity measure for complex networks: centrality distance, the difference between two graphs with respect to a given node centrality. Centrality distances allow to take into account the specific roles of the different nodes in the network, and have many interesting applications. As a case study, we consider the closeness centrality in more detail, and show that closeness centrality distance can be used to effectively distinguish between randomly generated and actual evolutionary paths of two dynamic social networks.

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arXiv2014

Speculative Physics: the Ontology of Theory and Experiment in High Energy Particle Physics and Science Fiction

The dissertation brings together approaches across the fields of physics, critical theory, literary studies, philosophy of physics, sociology of science, and history of science to synthesize a hybrid approach for instigating more rigorous and intense cross-disciplinary interrogations between the sciences and the humanities. There are two levels of conversations going on in the dissertation; at the first level, the discussion is centered on a critical historiography and philosophical implications of the discovery Higgs boson in relation to its position at the intersection of old (current) and the potential for new possibilities in quantum physics; I then position my findings on the Higgs boson in connection to the double-slit experiment that represents foundational inquiries into quantum physics, to demonstrate the bridge between fundamental physics and high energy particle physics. The conceptualization of the variants of the double-slit experiment informs the aforementioned critical comparisons. At the second level of the conversation, theories are produced from a close study of the physics objects as speculative engine for new knowledge generation that are then reconceptualized and re-articulated for extrapolation into the speculative ontology of hard science fiction, particularly the hard science fiction written with the double intent of speaking to the science while producing imaginative and socially conscious science through the literary affordances of science fiction. The works of science fiction examined here demonstrate the tension between the internal values of physics in the practice of theory and experiment and questions on ethics, culture, and morality.

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arXiv2014

Probabilistic flows of inhabitants in urban areas and self-organization in housing markets

We propose a simple probabilistic model to explain the spatial structure of the rent distribution of housing market in city of Sapporo. Here we modify the mathematical model proposed by Gauvin et. al. Especially, we consider the competition between two distances, namely, the distance between house and center, and the distance between house and office. Computer simulations are carried out to reveal the self-organized spatial structure appearing in the rent distribution. We also compare the resulting distribution with empirical rent distribution in Sapporo as an example of cities designated by ordinance. We find that the lowest ranking agents (from the viewpoint of the lowest `willing to pay') are swept away from relatively attractive regions and make several their own `communities' at low offering price locations in the city.

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arXiv2014

Sociophysics in the mexican case (Sociofísica en el caso mexicano)

The availability of electoral data in electronic format allowed to physicist and mathematicians their own analysis. Beyond theoretical models for electoral processes, new regularities had been found in the data analysis of many countries and many elections. Here, we discuss some of the statistical regularities found for México, from power laws Daisy models linked in corporate vote. The methods used are those from standard statistics and statistical mechanics. As a particular application we discuss an entropic approach to the distribution of votes for the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and we demonstrate that this kind of method DOES NOT allow to discover a massive buy of vote. The argument is that such a distribution has been amazingly consistent in the last two decades elections. Other methods have been unsuccessful to discover signal of fraud. RESUMEN: Con la disponibilidad de datos electorales en formato electrónico los físicos y matemáticos iniciaron sus propios análisis de los datos. Más allá de los modelos teóricos desarrollados para los procesos electorales, nuevas regularidades empezaron a surgir de los datos en muchas elecciones y en muchos países. Aquí discutimos algunas de las regularidades estadísticas encontradas para México. En particular, la aparición de leyes de potencia y modelos Margarita (Daisy models) que se pueden asociar al voto corporativo. Los métodos utilizados son de estadística y física estadística estándar. Como una aplicación particular, discutimos una aproximación entrópica a la distribución de votos del Partido Revolucionario Institucional y demostramos que éste método NO permite diferenciar una compra masiva de votos pues su comportamiento ha sido sorprendentemente consistente. De igual forma otros métodos han resultado infructuosos en determinar signos de fraude.

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arXiv2014

Strong Regularities in Growth and Decline of Popularity of Social Media Services

We analyze general trends and pattern in time series that characterize the dynamics of collective attention to social media services and Web-based businesses. Our study is based on search frequency data available from Google Trends and considers 175 different services. For each service, we collect data from 45 different countries as well as global averages. This way, we obtain more than 8,000 time series which we analyze using diffusion models from the economic sciences. We find that these models accurately characterize the empirical data and our analysis reveals that collective attention to social media grows and subsides in a highly regular and predictable manner. Regularities persist across regions, cultures, and topics and thus hint at general mechanisms that govern the adoption of Web-based services. We discuss several cases in detail to highlight interesting findings. Our methods are of economic interest as they may inform investment decisions and can help assessing at what stage of the general life-cycle a Web service is at.

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arXiv2014

Overlapping Community Detection Optimization and Nash Equilibrium

Community detection using both graphs and social networks is the focus of many algorithms. Recent methods aimed at optimizing the so-called modularity function proceed by maximizing relations within communities while minimizing inter-community relations. However, given the NP-completeness of the problem, these algorithms are heuristics that do not guarantee an optimum. In this paper, we introduce a new algorithm along with a function that takes an approximate solution and modifies it in order to reach an optimum. This reassignment function is considered a 'potential function' and becomes a necessary condition to asserting that the computed optimum is indeed a Nash Equilibrium. We also use this function to simultaneously show partitioning and overlapping communities, two detection and visualization modes of great value in revealing interesting features of a social network. Our approach is successfully illustrated through several experiments on either real unipartite, multipartite or directed graphs of medium and large-sized datasets.

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arXiv2014

Mandala Networks: ultra-robust, ultra-small-world and highly sparse graphs

The increasing demands in security and reliability of infrastructures call for the optimal design of their embedded complex networks topologies. The following question then arises: what is the optimal layout to fulfill best all the demands? Here we present a general solution for this problem with scale-free networks, like the Internet and airline networks. Precisely, we disclose a way to systematically construct networks which are 100$\%$ robust against random failures as well as to malicious attacks. Furthermore, as the sizes of these networks increase, their shortest paths become asymptotically invariant and densities of links go to zero, making them ultra-small worlds and highly sparse, respectively. The first property is ideal for communication and navigation purposes, while the second is interesting economically.

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arXiv2014

Does Offline Political Segregation Affect the Filter Bubble? An Empirical Analysis of Information Diversity for Dutch and Turkish Twitter Users

From a liberal perspective, pluralism and viewpoint diversity are seen as a necessary condition for a well-functioning democracy. Recently, there have been claims that viewpoint diversity is diminishing in online social networks, putting users in a "bubble", where they receive political information which they agree with. The contributions from our investigations are fivefold: (1) we introduce different dimensions of the highly complex value viewpoint diversity using political theory; (2) we provide an overview of the metrics used in the literature of viewpoint diversity analysis; (3) we operationalize new metrics using the theory and provide a framework to analyze viewpoint diversity in Twitter for different political cultures; (4) we share our results for a case study on minorities we performed for Turkish and Dutch Twitter users; (5) we show that minority users cannot reach a large percentage of Turkish Twitter users. With the last of these contributions, using theory from communication scholars and philosophers, we show how minority access is missing from the typical dimensions of viewpoint diversity studied by computer scientists and the impact it has on viewpoint diversity analysis.

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arXiv2014

Effect of Group Means on the Probability of Consensus

In this study, groups who could not reach a consensus were investigated using the group polarization paradigm. The purpose was to explore the conditions leading to intragroup disagreement and attitude change following disagreement among 269 participants. Analysis indicated that the probability of consensus was low when the group means differed from the grand mean of the entire sample. When small differences among group members were found, depolarization (reverse direction of polarization) followed disagreement. These results suggested the groups which deviated most from the population tendency were the most likely to cause within-group disagreement, while within-group variances determined the direction of attitude change following disagreement within the group.

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arXiv2014

Information Spread in a Connected World

In the following work, we compare the spread of information by word-of-mouth (WOM) to the spread of information through search engines. We assume that the initial acknowledgement of new information derives from social interactions but that solid opinions are only formed after further evaluation through search engines. Search engines can be viewed as central hubs that connect information presented in relevant websites to searchers. Since they construct new connections between searchers and information in every query performed, the network structure is less relevant. Although models of viral spread of ideas have been inspected in many previous works [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], only few assume the acceptance of a novel concept to be solely based on the evaluation of the opinions of others [8], [5]. Following this approach, combined with that of models of information spread with threshold [1] that claim the propagation in a network to occur only if a threshold of neighbors hold an opinion, the proposed work adds a new theoretical perspective that is relevant to the daily use of search engines as a major information search tool. We continue by presenting some justifications based on experimentations. Last we discuss possible outcomes of over use of search engines vs. WOM, and suggest an hypothesis that such overuse might actually narrow the collective information set.

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arXiv2014

Architectures of Virtual Decision-Making: The Emergence of Gender Discrimination on a Crowdfunding Website

The increasing relevance of Internet-based markets requires a sustained investigation into the relationship between design and user behavior. This research begins within the sociology of quantification and markets to investigate the impacts of basic design decisions on user behavior and individual success on a widely used crowdfunding website. This study looks at one common design feature, publishing recipients' sex, on the probability of receiving funding. Following research in the sociology of gender, these effects are defined along individual, behavioral, and structural dimensions. The results reveal that before teachers' sex was published, gender discrimination was weak and inconsistent. However, afterward gender discrimination increases by an order of magnitude and becomes systematized. Contrary to expectation, donors did not discriminate by sex category, but by teachers' structural position and the kinds of language they used. Implications for research on gender discrimination, priming, and online behavior are discussed.

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arXiv2014

Collective Intelligence in Citizen Science -- A Study of Performers and Talkers

The recent emergence of online citizen science is illustrative of an efficient and effective means to harness the crowd in order to achieve a range of scientific discoveries. Fundamentally, citizen science projects draw upon crowds of non-expert volunteers to complete short Tasks, which can vary in domain and complexity. However, unlike most human-computational systems, participants in these systems, the `citizen scientists' are volunteers, whereby no incentives, financial or otherwise, are offered. Furthermore, encouraged by citizen science platforms such as Zooniverse, online communities have emerged, providing them with an environment to discuss, share ideas, and solve problems. In fact, it is the result of these forums that has enabled a number of scientific discoveries to be made. In this paper we explore the phenomenon of collective intelligence via the relationship between the activities of online citizen science communities and the discovery of scientific knowledge. We perform a cross-project analysis of ten Zooniverse citizen science projects and analyse the behaviour of users with regards to their Task completion activity and participation in discussion and discover collective behaviour amongst highly active users. Whilst our findings have implications for future citizen science design, we also consider the wider implications for understanding collective intelligence research in general.

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arXiv2014

Human Communication Systems Evolve by Cultural Selection

Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as 'drift') models, are used to explain the evolution of human communication systems, and cultural evolution more generally. Under this account, cultural change is unbiased: for instance, vocabulary, baby names and pottery designs have been found to spread through random copying. While drift is the null hypothesis for models of cultural evolution it does not always adequately explain empirical results. Alternative models include cultural selection, which assumes variant adoption is biased. Theoretical models of human communication argue that during conversation interlocutors are biased to adopt the same labels and other aspects of linguistic representation (including prosody and syntax). This basic alignment mechanism has been extended by computer simulation to account for the emergence of linguistic conventions. When agents are biased to match the linguistic behavior of their interlocutor, a single variant can propagate across an entire population of interacting computer agents. This behavior-matching account operates at the level of the individual. We call it the Conformity-biased model. Under a different selection account, called content-biased selection, functional selection or replicator selection, variant adoption depends upon the intrinsic value of the particular variant (e.g., ease of learning or use). This second alternative account operates at the level of the cultural variant. Following Boyd and Richerson we call it the Content-biased model. The present paper tests the drift model and the two biased selection models' ability to explain the spread of communicative signal variants in an experimental micro-society.

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arXiv2014

Collective intelligence in Massive Online Dialogues

The emergence and ongoing development of Web 2.0 technologies have enabled new and advanced forms of collective intelligence at unprecedented scales, allowing large numbers of individuals to act collectively and create high quality intellectual artifacts. However, little is known about how and when they indeed promote collective intelligence. In this manuscript, we provide a survey of the automated tools developed to analyze discourse-centric collective intelligence. By conducting a thematic analysis of the current research direction, a set of gaps and limitations are identified.

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