Last week I was part of a panel discussion about technology and business. Forty or fifty accomplished businesswomen attended--I was the only man in the room. In hindsight, this was a perfect opportunity for me to focus on Bion's three pillars of group behavior (or at least the first of those three pillars, having the mating partner ratio so heavily in my favor); however, I confess I occasionally let my thoughts drift from that #1 priority and instead contemplated the diverse perspectives on technology represented in in the room.

The audience was predominantly business-savvy and ranged from the tech-curious to the tech-confused. It was not the most receptive setting for preaching a Taoist bliss of ignorance, but that's what I pitched, with lines like "the best technology is whatever you're using now"; "reading email when you receive it lowers your IQ more than chronic pot-smoking"; and "technology is implemented to benefit its creators, not its users, so look for technology where the users and the creators are the same."

The room was filled with questions about LinkedIn and Twitter. I realized that LinkedIn has taken hold of a much wider business audience than it had when I last disparaged it on these pages 2-3 years ago. Sensible successful business people speak with complete earnestness about the 500,000 people in their LinkedIn network, and I am speechless.

I have some hope. My LinkedIn network has 2,850,200 people, including 16,927 new connections in just the last 4 days. Before I leverage all of them, however, I sense that LinkedIn is giving me an opportunity to update this old joke:

A museum guide leads a group of tourists through a dinosaur exhibit. Stopping at an impressively scary skeleton baring its fossilized teeth, he says, "This T-Rex is 70 million and 3 years old." One of the tourists responds, "Wow! How do they figure that out so precisely?" The guide responds, "Well, when I started working here, this skeleton was 70 million years old, and that was 3 years ago."

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Nine Imperatives for Leadership of 311-Enabled Government November 13, 2008: 2:30 - 4:30 pm (EST) ~Online event. Registration required, and free of charge.~ Join us for this free, interactive discussion outlining the findings and discoveries of a report about the... Alexander Schellong http://www.citizen-relationship-management.de

Did Obama win by mobilizing groups who have supported Democrats in the past, or converting new people to support him? Below is a plot of the support various demographic groups provided Obama in 2008 to the support they provided Kerry... David Lazer

This is, at best, tangentially related to the mission of this blog. The thing is that I am not only a political scientist but I am also a political junkie. And you can always just not read this if you... David Lazer

Interesting piece in CQ on the manipulation of intrade. Two excerpts: An internal investigation by the popular online market Intrade has revealed that an investor's purchases prompted "unusual" price swings that boosted the prediction that Sen. John McCain will become... David Lazer

I previously blogged about how environmental sensors could transform how we think about architecture and how this data could be combined with wearable sensors. At the Media Lab's Awareness event, held last Thursday, myself and other Media Lab researchers explored this in more detail. At this event, over 150 sponsors, students, and faculty wore Sociometric Badges for the entire day so that we could show how interactions and behavior varied across different areas of the lab during different parts of the day, as well as give people insights into how different companies behaved. Ben Waber http://www.media.mit.edu/~bwaber/

Interesting piece on fivethirtyeight comparing polls that included cell phones and those that did not. The takeaway: "Obama leads by an average of 10.0 points in the cellphone polls, versus 5.1 in the landline-only's." For a more thorough look, go... David Lazer

Democracy takes place at the doorway. The doorways of our homes represents the literal and metaphorical threshold between our private lives and society. From the perspective of our democracy, the doorway is the place where our private interests and perspectives... David Lazer

Are you in favour of more efficient and effective government? Of course you are. If one counted the reasons given most often for any type of government reform, these two would score the highest marks. It is widely recognised that... Alexander Schellong http://www.citizen-relationship-management.de

My colleague, Archon Fung, in conjunction with ABC news, has launched a "crowd sourcing" initiative to identify problems at polling places, called MyFairElection. A full description is below. Please do forward on this information, and contribute information to the project.... David Lazer

If you are looking for a colorful example of "social capital" check out ">article in sports section of today's New York Times, examining the flow of "intelligence" among NFL teams. It is an interesting study in the ethics of sharing... David Lazer

The following event PNG is sponsoring might be of interest to readers of this blog: Marc Smith--Online tutorial for Excel .NetMap October 27, 2008: 12-2 pm (EDT) ~Online event. Registration required, and free of charge.~ Note that there is a... David Lazer

Interesting blog posting from techPresident comparing Obama's "Neighbor to Neighbor" tool to McCain's "Voter to Voter". Some key observations: If you do a Google search for the words Obama and "neighbor to neighbor," Google returns 479,000 hits. A search for... David Lazer

What happens to the Obama "network" after the election? It's an intriguing question. The capacity that has been built to mobilize people's time and money greatly exceeds that of the parties. Think about it: Obama's campaign has mobilized on the... David Lazer

Today I received an invitation from Harvard's Program on Networked Governance to watch Marc Smith demonstrate the powers of .NetMap --- a network visualization tool that runs inside Excel 2007. Maybe I will upgrade my MS Office and check it out; the screen shots look good.

On a more personal note, my BU faculty site is up. The site demonstrates what any monkey can do after enough time hanging with my students.

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A just released Pew report, Networked Families (by Tracy Kennedy, Aaron Smith, Amy Tracy Wells, and Barry Wellman), may be of interest to some readers of the blog. To quote from the abstract: The internet and cell phones have become... David Lazer

Please see the remaining schedule for Cambridge Colloquium on Complexity and Social Networks for the Fall, 2008. Please note that a light lunch will be served at events. If you would like to be added to the e-mail list for... David Lazer

Before there was "crowd sourcing" there was the "madness of crowds." The current economic crisis raises an interesting question: how does one "regulate away" the madness of crowds? While there was likely a degree of moral hazard in the behavior... David Lazer

This conference, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the Watts and Strogatz paper, might be of interest to some on this list: BCNetWORKSHOP 2008 Physics Department, University of Barcelona, Spain, from Wednesday 10 to Friday 12 December 2008. Important... David Lazer

In my "Holy Trinity of Network Power," structural equivalence is conceptually the most obscure. But practically speaking, it is easy to use. For example, searching for "sna" with the social bookmarking engine delicious provides the following:

I have enlarged and highlighted the "Related Tags" provided by delicious. This sort of information helps people find and learn from others with shared interests, using structural equivalence, regardless of how many degrees of separation they have on Facebook or LinkedIn. I'll expand more on this idea soon.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License and is copyrighted (c) 2008 by Connective Associates LLC except where otherwise noted.




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