Interlocking politics

The Research Group on Power and Privilege (EPP) has announced a two-day meeting on Politics & Interlocking Directorates, to be held at the University of Barcelona September 28-29 September 2006.

Work on interlocking directorates focuses on the social networks of business executives and corporate directors. However, EPP is interested in understanding networks of political players, and in collaborating with scholars outside of Spain.

For more information, contact Joseph Rodriguez

Info of Mass Destruction?

Avni Patel has reported in the ABC News blog The Blotter that the Energy Department has now disclosed that a hacker was able to copy 1,500 files from a National Nuclear Security Administration computer in July 2004.

The files reportedly included the names, SSN, security clearances, and work locations for contractors and employees.

Two years ago. Good thing it's not anything important, like national security.

Addendum: CBS News is reporting that the NNSA found out about the theft last September; they notified Congress last Friday, and began contacting those whose information was compromised yesterday.

SNA@APSA06

Doing my part to get the ball rolling (in Political Science), I'll be coordinating the "Working Group on Social Network Analysis" at this year's APSA Convention in Philadelphia (Aug 31-Sept 3).

This group will discuss the application of social network analytics (SNA) to issues and theories common to political science. What is the current state of the art? How well have political scientists begun to move beyond 'network as metaphor' to more formal structural models? Which SNA techniques and tools are more readily applicable to political questions, and which need to be further developed? What are the strengths and weaknesses of SNA, relative to other commonly used analytical techniques in political science?

Working group participants will attend panels that include papers that use SNA (as well as poster sessions), then meet to discuss those presentations.

Also of interest: the "Working Group on Automated Content Analysis and Computer Annotation," coordinated by Stephen Purpura (Harvard). Follow the top link (this posting) for a more detailed description.

Humanities visualisation

Okay, so the humanities aren't social science - but there are a lot of parallels in the forms of data used by scholars in both fields. This Thursday (June 8th) at 10:30am, Stan Ruecker (U Alberta) will be giving an overview of his research at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities here in College Park.

Ruecker is a member of the Nora Text Mining and Visualization project, and an expert in interface and visualization design for the humanities.

Open to the public and held in the basement level of McKeldin library.

Identify theft

Yahoo! News is reporting that a laptop containing the personal information (e.g., names, social security numbers, birth dates) of over 20,000 active duty National Guard and Reservists, as well as 30,000 Navy personnel, was stolen from a Veterans Administration employee on May 3rd.

Beyond the crime itself, veterans are upset that the VA waited three weeks to inform them.

I've posted about ID theft before (and here and here), as well as the need for Congress to enact real privacy protections.

Addendum: According to today's Washington Post, the theft actually affected 2.2 million military personnel - up to 80 percent of those in active duty.

I wonder whether it should be considered a national security issue?

(Again) When will Congress act?

Networks of law

In a project parallel to our own, a team of scholars from UC Davis, U Minn, and Georgetown recently announced an update to their work on legal citation networks:

Fowler, James, Timothy Johnson, James F Spriggs II, Sangick Jeon, and Paul J Wahlbeck. "Network Analysis and the Law: Measuring the Legal Importance of Supreme Court Precedents." 44, 2006.

"We construct the complete network of 28,951 majority opinions written by the U.S. Supreme Court and the cases they cite from 1792 to 2005. We illustrate some basic properties of this network and then describe a method for creating importance scores using the data to identify the most important Court precedents at any point in time. This method yields dynamic rankings that can be used to predict the future citation behavior of state courts, the U.S. Courts of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court, and these rankings outperform several commonly used alternative measures of case importance."

It's not enormously different from their recent conference papers, but still - fascinating work. An excellent example of how technology can transform social science research.

eDemocracy

Those interested in learning and sharing more about best practices and current research on eGovernance may want to attend the upcoming International e-Participation and Local Democracy Symposium, "Promoting Social Inclusion via e-Participation."

Scheduled for July 26-28 (Budapest) and August 3 (Baltimore), the symposium is sponsored by the UN, the British government, and others.

Participants can register for either or both meetings.

Digital pedagogy, too

The June-July issue of Innovate: Journal of Online Education (2:5) includes several articles that may be of interest:

From Digital Divide to Digital Dividend (Daniel and West)
Uses and Potentials of Wikis in the Classroom (Ferris and Wilder)
Synchronous Discussion in Online Courses (Smith)
Teaching Students about Plagiarism (Snow)

Videopedagogy

Over the past year or so, there have been several efforts to improve understanding of real-life politics through video games. Here are a couple of recent examples:

Peace Maker is a Java-based game that simulates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to "promote peaceful resolution." As the Israeli PM or the Palestinian President, players react to attacks, other political leaders, and social groups while trying to craft diplomatic solutions.

Supported by Reebok and the Internation Crisis Group, Darfur is Dying seeks to make that reality more real. Online users hide from the Janjaweed while foraging for water or water.

And of course, there are the old-school simulations like the International Communication and Negotiation Simulations (ICONS) here at UM.

Dangers of little knowledge

In mid-May, one of the blogs on Daily Kos posted on The dangers of Social Network Analysis, arguing that the field of SNA is a direct threat to democracy. There's even an online poll.

The gist of the argument is that being able to identify important actors (i.e., critical nodes) in society is a powerful political tool. This is certainly true, but really - it's nothing new. What appears to be new is the wholesale data mining of domestic phonecalls, which the NSA is using SNA to allegedly identify meaningful (and threatening) patterns.

Whether this is a good idea or not is a separate issue - but the idea that democracy is threatened by knowledge of society seems a bit absurd to me. But that's just me, I guess.

Online surveys

There was a brief back-and-forth on the SOCNET listserv yesterday on the question of web-based surveys. Alvin Chin (U Toronto) suggested a couple of useful tools: SurveyMonkey and PHPSurveyor.

Both can be used for FREE, though SurveyMonkey (the easiest to use) charges for more than 100 responses per survey.