This is a 1728 Geometry text.

Geometry was the network science of its day, with its richly visual mathematical aesthetic. This is the sort of beautiful abstraction that would drive someone to spend years of life teasing out the endless permutations of a set of axioms. 1728 was the height of the Age of Enlightenment, long before Godel came and tread on the dreams of the humble mathematical ascetic.

Today, researchers of all stripes learn an unspoken rule: beautiful visualization of data makes for “sexy” science. In other words, cool information graphics lead to tenure. It’s partly because visual communication is simply more compelling and has a wider mass appeal. That’s why networks research shows up in the New York times: because it has sexy graphics, not because it’s going to catch terrorists.

It’s no wonder that someone like Edward Tufte, an authority on the visual display of quantitative information, is a kind of cult hero. His books are the Kama Sutra of information graphics.

“Americans have one third fewer close friends and confidants than two decades ago, and the number of people who have none has more than doubled.”

Are Americans more disconnected now than they were twenty years ago? Have they retreated into their selves? (or their cells? (or their cell ph.s?)) Has the connection dwindled? We know people can and do form intense and authentic emotional bonds over digital media like IRC, the web and World of Warcrack. Have the close confidants of a large segment of the population (teens and younger, mostly) moved to a “virtual” category that didn’t have a bubble on the General Social Survey?

Probably.

While the data showed a drop in confidants who are friends or who are family members, there was a far greater drop-off in friends. So close friendships are dwindling — or is it consolidating? All we know is: networks of trust and kinship have grown more sparse.

What are the ramifications of such dramatic social change? Bradley Heinz suggests

We’re becoming more self-referential by relying more on family. In our growing isolation, I see a genetic analogy: our waning social exposure is like inbreeding…

To take the analogy further, fewer social contacts equal a reduced mutation rate of family belief and value systems. Children more closely resemble their parents sociologically. Back into the family fold.

But if the real reason for this anomaly in the GSS data is due to the rise of virtual confidantes, then the mutation rate might actually be on the rise due to globally expanded social exposure. Children raised from birth with internet access whisper secrets into ears thousands of miles away.

So where do you fall? Who and where are your confidants?

The official story

U.S. President George W. Bush intended to visit the Stanford University campus yesterday to meet with members of the Hoover Institution, a neo-con think tank in Hoover Tower. But Mr. Bush never made it to Hoover Tower. Why? I was there and I’ll tell you why.

The mainstream press is reporting that Stanford protesters blocked the only road leading to Bush’s meeting so that it had to be re-located, and that three Stanford students were arrested. This is simply not true. Grassroots journalism by people who were actually there is giving a different and much more revealing account of what really happened. I’ll give you my own summary of what occurred based on being there myself, interviewing others who were there, knowing the protest organizers and being acquainted with the students who were arrested.

The “real” story

The presence of one thousand and more protesters, accompanied by the Stanford Band, caused Bush to relocate his private meeting at Hoover Tower to former Secretary of State Shultz’s house on Delores Street (about a block from where I live). However, contrary to what the press is reporting (see “How the secret was spread“, below), the road to Hoover Tower was not blocked by protesters. Law enforcement had set up barriers to ensure clear passage long before the protest began, and these barriers were respected by the crowd. However, around 4pm, police in riot gear appeared and attempted to move the crowd by force from its position on Serra Street, East of Hoover Tower. Strangely, they did not attempt to inform the crowd of the reason why.

Students resisted this move and sat down in the street. That’s when law enforcement pulled a very strange maneuver of questionable legality. They brought in a fire truck with sirens wailing and claimed (falsely) that there was a medical emergency at Hoover. After a lot of verbal abuse from police and firemen, only three protesters remained blocking the truck and these were dragged off (as shown prominently in the photo coverage), arrested, and taken away in a paddy wagon. They’ve since been released on misdemeanor charges. Absurdly, the fire truck then turned around and drove unhurriedly away, sirens off, and the protesters were allowed to fill the street again. Presumably, it had been during this confrontation that Bush’s meeting was re-located.

In summary: One of the top three universities in the United States spurned President Bush from coming on to campus; three Stanford students were arrested for disobeying a lie and obstructing a misappropriation of emergency services personnel. That part of the story has yet to ripple out to the mainstream press. You read it hear first.

Now let’s back up to see how this all unfolded and how the news is now being spread by mass media and digitally-mediated grassroots journalists.

How the secret was spilled

Until a few days ago, Bush’s visit was totally unexpected here at Stanford. That’s true even for the University administration, who had scheduled many important events for next-year’s freshmen visiting for Stanford Admit weekend. The single biggest event was scheduled to happen on the same day as Bush’s visit, in Memorial Auditorium across the street from Hoover Tower, but this was suddenly scrapped due to Bush’s sudden imposition.

In the couple of days leading up to Bush’s arrival, it was fascinating to witness how rapidly this potent local news meme spread through the student population over social and digital networks. On a college campus, these networks are so closely intermingled that a meme moves seamlessly through and between each. Someone reads an email who tells a friend who tells another friend who emails a group list, etc. I received five emails in three hours from different sources. All were forwards that already had a long lineage.

The earliest signs I heard of came over the Stanford Band’s email list two days before the visit. The Band immediately started preparing a musical protest, choosing tunes that reflected political sentiments, like “American Idiot” by Greenday and “Hey, Big Brother” by Rare Earth. I overheard the news in class the next day (one day before the visit). That night, campus email lists were abuzz with info about the president’s schedule and plans for a large-scale protest: meet in White Plaza at 1:30 to rally and make signs; march to Hoover Tower at 2:00. The campus newspaper didn’t carry the story till the day of Bush’s visit, but had some interesting details about snipers being posted in Hoover Tower.

On the big day, I just happened to be tabling in White Plaza from 12 – 1:30, promoting the campus Cooperative Community with flyers and musical instruments. I also set up a sound system there to be used by student groups for a sustainability event from 12 -1. After that, I “accidentally” left the equipment set up so that when the protest rally started at 1:30, there happened to be a sound system turned on and turned up, with a microphone plugged in and ready to go. I’m no activist, but I do understand the power of technology to shape collective action.

How the secret was spread

Also interesting, now that the momentous event has now passed, is to witness the ripple of news about it propagate outward to media outlets of varying proximity (Stanford Daily, Palo Alto Weekly, San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press, New York Times), and grassroots journalism sources like videos on YouTube, photos on Flickr, and coverage on blogs. The chart below shows the number of posts that contain ‘Bush + Stanford + Protest’ in recent history.

Rachelle Marshall, a senior citizen member of the Raging Grannies protest group, said “It’s the greatest thing since I’ve been at Stanford. I’ve been here 50 years.” Perhaps with the rise of densely connected online communities at college campuses everywhere, digital tools for communication and coordination are going to be figuring more and more prominently in student activism efforts. Similarly, while the power of protest has seemed to dwindle in recent times due to lack of mass media attention, the rise into legitimacy of grassroots online journalism may be giving the punch back to protest. Interesting times, indeed.

So go try out the new Giant Component model. (Java applet)

Imagine dumping a box of buttons (as in shirt buttons) onto your floor. Now pick up two buttons at random, tie them together with thread, and put them back down. You now have one connected component of two buttons and N-2 singleton buttons. Repeat. Over time, when you pick up a random button it will become more likely that it will lift up a small group of others with it. The interesting thing is, as the number of threads approaches one-half the number of buttons, a single, massive connected component will suddenly emerge such that when you pick up a random button, it is very likely to lift the vast majority of the other buttons. In other words, there is a critical phase transition as the system suddenly shifts from a collection of many, small, isolated groups to a single monolithic group, plus a few outliers.

To demonstrate this phenomenon, I just created a NetLogo simulation of Random Button Networks (Java applet), after following an introductory tutorial at the Complexity Workshop. Enjoy.

Random Button Network Simulation (Java applet)

Network analysts use random networks as the standard by which to measure order in the networks they study. That’s because a random network is the graph-theoretic way of saying structure doesn’t matter. If the network structure you’re studying is significantly different from the random net, most likely it can’t be explained by chance alone; it has order, pattern, maybe even complexity. In other words, for the purposes of studying whatever system produced that structure, the network matters, i.e. it’s worth paying attention to.

And in the games of life and science, what matters most is knowing what is worthy of your thought and attention, and what is not.

Broadly speaking, I’m looking at the question of “why is society structured the way it is?” Of the vast structural possibilities, we see only a few general types in the world. Is there some evolutionary pressure that selects some social structures as being more successful than others? If so, what are possible criteria for structural fitness? This paper puts forth the hypothesis that searchability is a plausible fitness test: that a successful structure is one that facilitates the finding of important or knowledgeable actors with minimal effort. This theory of mine, and its accompanying simulation study, shed light on the search and structure of human networks and of socially-constructed networks like the world wide web.

For this reason and more, I have high hopes for the work Marko Rodriguez is doing around the scholarly communication process:

The general purpose of the scholarly communication process is to support the creation and dissemination of ideas within the scientific community. [...] This paper describes an associative network composed of multiple scholarly artifacts that can be used as a medium for supporting the scholarly communication process.

- A Multi-Graph to Support the Scholarly Communication Process

My hope is that emerging scientific research tools such as these will help support a shift to a more meritocratic social system in science, where the incentives to research and publish are more closely aligned to the “true aims of science”. Specifically, I would hope that the future network structure of the scientific communication process will represent more a knowledge structure than a social structure.

A paper’s authors, acknowledgements and references are all relational data which point to people or artifacts which gave some contribution to the finished product. It’s for inconsistent, socially-constructed reasons that we separate and prioritize these resources. Like when decisions about who gets the first author slot are based on seniority instead of contribution.

Authors, references and acknowledgements are rightly distinguished as different types of resources but they all share the value of being a relational input to a paper. It seems to me that the network created by, for example, a single ranked list of each paper’s human and artifactual inputs, would more faithfully represent the living knowledge network instead of merely the social structure of the authors (coauthorship net) or the relatedness of topics (citation net). For instance, a reference may have been more valuable to the paper’s creation than one of the five co-authors, or an acknowledged party could have been more informative than many of the thirty references.

If the true aim of science is the quest for knowledge, not the quest for tenure, then it makes sense to give credit where credit is due, and accurately weight the importance of all information inputs to a given paper.