Brains, politics, and PhDs

According to this study, liberals more easily handle change than conservatives. I'm not on campus, but I'm not sure that CMU gets that journal anyway. I'd be interested to read the study, because I'd like to know if they controlled for education, or if they ran the same study varying educational levels while keeping political bent constant. I would assume that to get approved for publication they would have at least controlled for age.

My curiousity re: education is because awhile back I read something (sorry, forgot source) saying that people who had PhDs had less "mature" brains because they had to constantly learn new things, or something. Which would explain why it seems a lot of professors tend to retain childlike qualities. And how most of us go to grad school to avoid growing up.

The many faces of Milgram

In the networks seminar class, we are currently discussing Milgram's small world experiment, and the various papers written about it. The small world experiment being that a bunch of people across the U.S. were selected to have a big packet sent to them. This packet directs them to send the packet through a chain of "handshakes" (people acquainted on a first-name basis) to get to a stockbroker in Boston.

What I had forgotten was that this character is the same guy who did the obedience to authority studies. The rather disturbing study that suggested that people don't mind causing pain to other beings, so long as a guy in a lab coat says it's OK. The funny thing is that the authority studies took place in 1963, four years before the small world experiment. Obviously, "Milgram studies" wasn't enough of a household name by 1967 to get people who received the folder to immediately toss it, saying "Whatever, this guy may say he wants me to get this packet to some dude in Boston, but really he's just going to kill my family."
The small-world study, of course, has some holes in it, but our conclusion was "pretty good for a sociologist in the 60's". They didn't have the resources available to us data-mining folk (according to [2], the Nebraska portion of the study had a budget of $680), and they weren't really interested in the statistics as much.

Dodds et. al [1] replicated the experiment on a much larger scale. I'm sure they had to go to a lot of IRB red tape to get that sort of permission, too. Thanks in part to Milgram, of course.


[1] P. Dodds, et al. An Experimental Study of Search in Global Social
Networks. Science 301, 827 (2003).

[2] J. Kleinfeld, The Small World Problem, Society, 39(2), 61-66 (2002)

Seminars and semester

I'm in two seminars now, which I intend to use for blog fodder. We'll see how long that lasts, since I obviously have bursty blogging habits. The first seminar is Statistical Models and Methods for Networks, taught by Steve Fienberg, and the second is Analysis of Social Media, led by William Cohen and Natalie Glance (of Google Pittsburgh). Both seem very promising, as the syllibi list a number of papers that are in my embarrassingly large "should read but haven't gotten around to" pile. Plus, since grades are based on class participation (and perhaps a one-hour presentation), they should be low-stress, compared to other courses I've taken.

This semester Christos and I will be putting together a tutorial on graph mining for ICWSM 2008. (We're currently putting together the abstract/bios, so the actual tutorial page will be up soon!) I also have a number of research projects going on, including putting together a paper from my summer work at PricewaterhouseCoopers, actually looking toward a thesis topic, and getting some new datasets. In my spare time I'm compiling into social-network-form election campaign donation data, as my good deed to the machine learning community (and out of personal curiousity). As of now I just need to get it into MATLAB readable format and get about half a gig of webspace so I can post the compressed files. Also this semester I will be continuing my involvement in Dec/5, helping run the first few TG's as the torch is passed to new members.

Talking college students out of drinking

This study involved different punishments for drug/alcohol violations at a college campus. It compared the effectiveness of motivational discussions vs. a $300 fine for a violation. Both were pretty effective in the short term (4 months). But a little more surprisingly, the discussions were more effective in the longer term (15 months).

Frankly I'm surprised the little interventions worked that well. I would think the short-term effects would happen because it's embarrassing, but I find it hard to believe they're convincing. All the alcohol education seminars I heard about in college were kind of a joke.

Of course, this would depend on the type of violation we're talking about. A violation where other people are put at risk (hazing at frats, drunk driving) is something that somebody can be guilted into not doing again. Offenses for loud parties or possession, where the most the motivators can argue for is the hallmate's study habits or the offender's own health, are a little harder to use guilt against.

Now, if part of this "motivational discussion" included them saying to the offender "Next time we're turning you over to the cops", I would understand.

Google data miners have come across a scientific breakthrough.

They have proved that GTalk users are very, very lonely, and are probably about 16 years old.

Fiction as an exaggeration of inner fiction

An interesting post in Overcoming Bias. It suggests that our bias toward reality tends toward the direction of fiction. That is, (successful) fiction is simply a further exaggeration of things we already tend to overestimate. I think it's suggested that biases cause such fiction to be well-written and well-received, not that exposure to fiction causes this. Hanson then suggests to "Find ways in which fiction tends to deviate from reality, and then move your estimates of reality in the other direction."

A few possible human biases that this "fix" would identify.
-Your boss at the office probably isn't as socially inept and ignorant as you think.
-Your adversaries or competitors are not as evil and immoral as you think.
-Solutions cannot be wrapped up as quickly as you think.
-Serial killers are not as interesting as you think.
-People don't have nearly as much sex as you think.

This is related to the idea that everybody is their own protagonist.

Oh dear. I found a new (to me) toy, STEM: Spatio-Temporal Epidemological/Event Modeler. It comes built-in with a simulation of what would happen if the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak happened in 2000, with various starting points. You can create your own SIR/SIS/SIER virus and set them loose, while they infect the entire world by way of bird migratory patterns, air traffic, etc. What's more, they've released the source code, allowing a whole new level of tinkering.

Full press release here.

For some background on the mathematics, see The Mathematics of Infectious Disease, by Herbert Hethcote.