In an article recently published by PNAS, Shahar Ronen et al. “introduce a metric of a language’s global influence based on its position in the network” of co-spoken languages. They show that the “connectivity of a language in this network … remains a strong predictor of a language’s influence”.… Read the rest
How was your holiday travel? A recent New York Times article “Pumpkin Pie in Miami” shows flight pattern networks in the US over thanksgiving holiday, using search data from Google Flights revealing the movements of over 3.6 million Americans during the Thanksgiving holiday.… Read the restSix Degrees of Francis Bacon is a collaboration between Georgetown University and Carnegie Mellon University to map out social networks in the 16th and 17th centuries. After data-mining the entire Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Professor Daniel Shore of Georgetown and Jessica Otis of CMU were able to digitize the social networks of the period between 1500-1700, and now the project is accepting contributions from the public.… Read the rest
A two-year long field study recently provided a large data set consisting of several trail networks built by the Australian meat ant to connect different nests spread over a wide territory.
By studying these networks, researchers at Uppsala University, Fordham University, and the University of Sydney, have found the basic rules that allow ants to build efficient and low cost transport networks that can scale to larger networks.… Read the rest
“One more step along the long road towards brain-to-brain interfaces” (PLOS Neuro blog)
http://blogs.plos.org/neuro/2015/09/24/one-more-step-along-the-long-road-towards-brain-to-brain-interfaces/… Read the rest
OpenStreetMap is an open-sourced mapping website, which is a website where anyone, anywhere can edit and add infrastructure, stores, traffic jams, and more. These different map layers can be taken off and on by an individual user depending on what they are looking for.… Read the rest
Letter from Silicon Valley about LinkedIn’s the founder and executive chairman, Reid Hoffman. In 2003, Hoffman and Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive of the gaming site Zynga, bought the Six Degrees patent, a methodology for constructing social networks. When he started LinkedIn, “the most popular social-networking sites, like Friendster and MySpace, didn’t focus on business; and the most popular employment sites, like Monster.com, didn’t focus on social networks.”
LinkedIn currently has more than three hundred and eighty million members, and it is working on creating “the economic graph, which would track all employment activity in the world, for the 3.3 billion people who work, with LinkedIn as the platform”.… Read the rest
WIRED correspondent Nick Stockton claims that all 10 scientists receiving a 2015 MacArthur Genius Grant have one important unifying trait: network thinking. Thought the MacArthur Foundation claims to have no systematic bias beyond “exceptional creativity”, Stockton argues that, from policy to programming, each recipient’s work demonstrates “how individual parts affect a whole system, or how a network affects its nodes”, claiming “that’s where most of the big work in science is headed.… Read the rest
The Onion Router or “Tor” Network is a free web browser that allows for seemingly anonymous communication across the web. It does this by directing one’s traffic through numerous relays (nodes) all over the world, making it difficult to pinpoint the original user.… Read the rest