As students head to college at the beginning of the year, the formation of friendships becomes important. A story on NPR discusses the proximity effect in the creation of friendship ties.

“Several sociology studies, some going back decades, point to this proximity or “distance” effect. In Sacerdote’s own research, he studied e-mail exchanges among students on his campus. The e-mails were stripped of personal identification and content, as he was only looking to analyze the volume of e-mails.”

To see the full story, click here.

“Communication Power“, the latest book of USC Annenberg professor Manuel Castells has been published this month by the Oxford University Press.

From the publisher’s  description:

Manuel Castells

We live in the midst of a revolution in communication technologies that affects the way in which people feel, think, and behave. The mass media (including web-based media), Manuel Castells argues, has become the space where political and business power strategies are played out; power now lies in the hands of those who understand or control communication.

Over the last thirty years, Castells has emerged as one of the world’s leading communications theorists. In this, his most far-reaching book for a decade, he explores the nature of power itself, in the new communications environment.

His vision encompasses business, media, neuroscience, technology, and, above all, politics. His case histories include global media deregulation, the misinformation that surrounded the invasion of Iraq, environmental movements, the role of the internet in the Obama presidential campaign, and media control in Russia and China.

In the new network society of instant messaging, social networking, and blogging – “mass self-communication” – politics is fundamentally media politics. This fact is behind a worldwide crisis of political legitimacy that challenges the meaning of democracy in much of the world. Deeply researched, far-reaching in scope, and incisively argued, this is a book for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics and character of the modern world. Read the rest of this entry »

American Politics Research has a special issue on “Social Networks and American Politics”. The issue contains articles presented a Harvard University political science networks conference.

Harvard Networked Governance

“The idea for this special issue arose in conjunction with the first conference on “Networks in Political Science,” held at Harvard University, June 13-14, 2008. The conference was cochaired by David Lazer of Harvard University and James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and supported with a grant from the National Science Foundation, with John Scholz of Florida State University as the principal investigator. [...] This special issue publishes eight of the best articles from the conference that focused on American politics.”

The economy needs agent-based modelling

Doyne Farmer, Duncan Foley (2009), Nature

From the article :

Image: Nature

” The best models they have are of two types, both with fatal flaws. Type one is econometric: empirical statistical models that are fitted to past data. These successfully forecast a few quarters ahead as long as things stay more or less the same, but fail in the face of great change. Type two goes by the name of ‘dynamic stochastic general equilibrium’. These models assume a perfect world, and by their very nature rule out crises of the type we are experiencing now.”

“There is a better way: agent-based models. An agent-based model is a computerized simulation of a number of decision-makers (agents) and institutions, which interact through prescribed rules. The agents can be as diverse as needed — from consumers to policy-makers and Wall Street professionals — and the institutional structure can include everything from banks to the government. Such models do not rely on the assumption that the economy will move towards a predetermined equilibrium state, as other models do. Instead, at any given time, each agent acts according to its current situation, the state of the world around it and the rules governing its behaviour.”

Opening the black box of link formation: Social factors underlying the structure of the web

Sandra Gonzalez-Bailona (2009), Social networks

Links play a twofold role on the web: they open the channels through which users access information, and they determine the centrality of sites and their visibility. This paper adds two factors to the analysis of links that aim to draw a parallel between the web and other offline interorganisational networks: the resources that the organisations publishing online are able to mobilise, and the status or public recognition of those organisations. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are used to analyse a sample of the web of about one thousand sites, showing that both the economic resources of the producers of the sites (a proxy to their wider pool of resources) and their presence in traditional news media (a proxy to their status) significantly increase their probability of receiving more links, and therefore, their centrality. This adds a sociologically relevant dimension to the analysis of the web that has been disregarded so far but that is crucial to understand the way it distributes visibility.