Software programs for social network analysis

I'm starting off on tools research for my workshop paper. It's been a couple of years (er, 10?) since I looked seriously into social network diagramming tools, and here's a nice looking list! In case you share the interest: Software programs for social network analysis.

Updated to add: And check out this cool online PDF text: Introduction to Social Network Methods.

Updated again (after this I'm going back to work): I found a nice site with a tool that's been applied in a bunch of domains and has links to articles on its application. Too bad the tool itself isn't available online and neither is the price. Site: Orgnet.com. See at the bottom the book chapter on voter turnout and voter choice analysed with social network tools: "It's the Conversations, Stupid! The Link Between Social Interaction and Political Choice," by Valdis Krebs, who seems to be the site owner and software author too. (He also has a bunch of white papers on organizational behavior, which look really fascinating.)

TiVo DVD burner review: Humax DRT-800

As some of you know, I used to work for TiVo. I follow their news on various sites (and occasionally get gossip from friends there), but I try to keep myself at a little bit of a safe emotional distance from it all these days. Here, I could post all day about TiVo if I wanted to really go to town, but I try to keep the restraints on. Nevertheless, I'm posting one good long review of the TiVo DVD burner from Humax, with lots of screen shots and detailed description of behavior and functionality. Since I was contracting while they were tuning this UI design, I was pleased to see how it turned out.

The reviewer, Levi Wallach, even finishes up with a note on the new TiVo-to-Go feature (allowing you to transfer content to your computer) compared to the all-in-one DVD burner unit. His comment there made a lot of sense to me: it's slowish to transfer files to your computer, and to replicate the Humax features you'd still have to do your DVD authoring -- which, if you've tried this, you know is NOT simple for the home consumer yet. (It's downright awful, unless you're on a Mac, perhaps.)

Humax DRT-800 review on Twelve Black Code Monkeys

That way sanity lies

From a friend on LJ, a nice piece in the Observer about a guy who is writing about what it means to be sane, instead of screwed up. I'm not a huge fan of psychotherapy, myself, so this one resonated: "He may well be the most sceptical psychoanalysts practising today, and has famously said that, 'for me, psychoanalysis is only one among many things you might do if you're feeling unwell - you might also try aromatherapy, knitting, hang-gliding. There are lots of things you can do with your distress."

Also, the bit about taking time to be bored and see what comes out of it is really nice. The Observer | Magazine | That way sanity lies.

Help Me Do Some Research: a Survey

I am preparing a conference workshop paper, and I need a little bit of fresh data on blogging and LiveJournal usage. It should only take about 15 minutes max.

I'll give out a random prize for every 30 responses I get. Your chance of getting a prize will increase if you pass the survey link along (I'll be weighting people when they get cited by others in the "where did you get this" question). Prizes will be matted photos of your choice from my photo collection (or possibly new ones, by arrangement, on non-people or non-body-part subject matter), or a small amount of cash if you really prefer.

Survey lasts till end of March... please pass it on and help me out! Go here to take the survey.

The old photo blog was taking too long to update, so I've broken off a new one for 2005. I duplicated the Jan posts for safe overlap. The new one is just like the old, only at http://www.ghostweather.com/Pics/Photoblog2005/.

Music behind the DNA

Found via boing_boing, Carl Frederick in Analog SF has an article describing how he converted fruit fly DNA to music. It's not bad, if you like tinkly tunes that don't quite deliver a punchline. But you can hear repetitions and patterns in it pretty well. (Note: My Bio class has made his procedure below sound almost sensible. Maybe I'll propose it as a lab to the teacher.)

To keep to 'the spirit of the genome', I did the conversion, not from the bases (adenine, cytosine, thymine, guanine), but from the 'codons'--the sets of three bases that code for an amino acid. There are 64 (4X4X4) possible codons and only 20 amino acids. Amino acids then, are represented by a variable number of codons--from six down to one. I associated those amino acids with the highest number of codon representations with the most common notes of the c-major scale. I also tried to code so that only the exons (the actual expressed gene sequences, as opposed to the introns, the noise) were used. For this, I needed to use methionine and the three codons that don't represent an amino acid, as start and stop indicators. And, in addition, I used them as musical codas (endings of a section of music). One particular amino acid, I used as a flag to indicate that the following codon represented a change of note duration, or a sharp or flat. These two-codon instructions, since they are comparatively rare, do not drive the music out of c-major, and don't change the tempo particularly often.

The Science Behind the Story

Shutterfly job: UI Designer

My former manager at TiVo is looking for a senior Interaction Designer in Redwood City. It's probably a good job, based on what she says and the job ad. Pass it on if you know anyone local to it who's looking: Shutterfly | Career opportunities: Senior Interaction Designer.

L'Anti-Americain

Here's the cover of the new tabloid in France, the Anti-American. Sigh.

L'Anti-Americain PRIMAIRE ! And here's Yahoo's news story on it.

MetroShed

Not sure what I make of this -- at first I flashed back on the old "Two Sheds" Monty Python sketch-- but anyway: the MetroShed is a shed that you can use for another room, wherever you want to put it. The pictures feature it in a yard or park. It looks neat, if you want a shed in your yard that people can see into while you're writing the great American Novel or watching TV.

Joel's Advice for Computer Science Students

I liked Joel's advice to students in Computer Science, especially the "work on big projects" and "learn to write" items. Not so sure that microeconomics is useful unless you want to run a company, but it's probably helpful to have that exposure so you can better understand the weather around you (and to prevent you from getting too bitter when customers don't automatically think your product is worth a million dollars and you deserve to retire at age 30). The bit about sticking out the boring classes is especially good advice; lots of jobs have boring parts that have to be done anyway when you're starting at the ground level, and it's a good character builder to learn to do well at that stuff even when you don't enjoy it.

Joel on Software: Advice for Computer Science College Students

TiVo & The Big Game!

For the most part I was playing with LEGOs instead of watching the game, but here are TiVo's stats on what commercials got watched during the Superbowl and what got ff'ed through: TiVo & The Big Game!. Guess what, it's all about flashes of skin.

How Much Does a SF/F Writer Make?

Off Tobias Buckell's site, survey results from 74 writers: How Much Does a Science Fiction or Fantasy Writer Make?.

Summary: The typical advance for a first novel is $5000. The typical advance for later novels, after a typical number of 5-7 years and 5-7 books is $12,500. Having an agent at any point increases your advance. There is some slight correlation between number of books and number of years spent writing as represented in the 5-12.5 thousand dollar advance shift of an average of 5-7 years. Charting individual author's progressions, which I will not release to keep anonymity, reveals a large number of upward lines at varying degrees of steepness for advances, some downward slides.

Some authors noted that they'd gotten large advances in the 90s but were being paid less now.

designboom: folding chairs through the ages

Another cool designboom item, this time an illustrated history of folding chairs. They go back to Egyptian times.

folding chairs through the ages

Modern design issues that weren't all touched on: portability to functions with cars or without, weather-related usage (I have garden chairs for summer I would never use anywhere else), size and height when unfolded (floor level is better for some activities), folded size, appearance and whether you can "fix" it with a cover or cushion, drink holder attachment, cost of course...

the kitchen is the heart of the home, the competition

But the heart is a little sterile looking, in the design competition winners from designboom. I love looking at these anyway, since this type of design is so far from anything I do daily. The entries feature concept mockups in gorgeous detail, philosophical position statements, and detail illustrations of the idea at work. The weirdest winner is the 2001 monolith style kitchen in which the entire kitchen is encased in a black block. Trendy types lounge in front of the block in plastic orange chairs and sunglasses. They aren't talking to each other. (Geez, I talk to my cats, when I lack humans, in my American kitchen where the appliances sit on the counter. And we're all pretty happy about it.)

The Black Block kitchen.

But all that said, the island design winner is pretty cool in concept. I just want to know why it all has to be chrome and black, instead of wood and bright paint.

kitchen is the heart of the home - designboom

UFOs in the Secret Files

More on the Freedom of Info Act files in the UK, this time 5 UFO sightings in west counties, and 88 total. Apparently the MoD's secret UFO department is called the S4F. I love the UK bureaucracy, when I don't live there.

Western Daily Press: Unidentified Fiery Object. And from another, less regionally-centric article: The area with the most frequent mysterious activity has been West Kilbride, on the southwest coast of Scotland. The MoD received a dozen reports during the year of increasingly dramatic visitations, from “one sphere” on April 2, “five bright spheres” on May 30 to “at least 25 yellow spheres flying in groups of five” on November 26.

The Times Online: How Britain's X-Files Said that UFOs Were Just a Waste of Time.

Social Science Simulations

I'm enchanted. I followed up a book reference on a game theory result on cooperative behavior to this: Robert Axelrod's Home Page. This fellow is an advocate of the use of simulation in social science research, and he's a lucid, intelligent writer. His "Advancing the Art of Simulation in the Social Sciences" discusses the issues of the "field's" dispersion across disciplines and research forums, lack of shared vocabulary, model description and replication difficulties, challenges in reporting of results; and it ends by describing some well-known social science models for the newbies among us.

I especially enjoyed this summary of the possibilities of "reporting" simulation results:

1. History can be told as "news," following a chronological order. For example, a simulation of international politics might describe the sequence of key events such as alliances and wars. This is the most straightforward type of storytelling, but often offers little in explanatory power.

2. History can be told from the point of view of a single actor. For example, one could select just one of the actors, and do the equivalent of telling the story of the "Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire." This is often the easiest kind of history to understand, and can be very revealing about the ways in which the model’s mechanisms have their effects over time.

3. History can also be told from a global point of view. For example, one would describe the distribution of wealth over time to analyze the extent of inequality among the agents. Although the global point of view is often the best for seeing large-scale patterns, the more detailed histories are often needed to determine the explanation for these large patterns.

I'm even now musing on how to use my corporate software resources for simulation of organizational social network behavior... Stay tuned.

Britain's 10 best-kept secrets

Entertaining mostly for the sheer silliness of calling some of them state secrets, and the annotations on the files-- including "the less said about this one the better" and "as the USA are always so reluctant to part with any of our criminals, let them keep this one" -- here is the BBC NEWS on Britain's 10 best-kept secrets, found in the files following the new Freedom of Information Act.

A9 Yellow Pages: A Photo Bug

Er, on the other hand, they seem to have a few bugs in their GPS data or database retrieval or something -- this fence is not Applewood 2 Go in Menlo Park, as I remember it: Amazon.com: Yellow Pages: Applewood 2 Go. It's kind of cool that you can simulate walking along it by moving your mouse over the sequential thumbnails, though.

Picture-full Yellow Pages

It looks like the thing the French did with their online yellow pages is now available on Amazon's yellow pages: Photos of the site you're looking up! It's only live in some cities, but everywhere I care about revisiting since living there is up (SF and Bay area, Seattle, NYC...) And I see they're using a technique I blogged before from intrepid Germans and South Africans: driving around with GPS and digital cameras.

Try it at the Yellow Pages on A9.com. (I got a little teary-eyed when I looked up my favorite Seattle bakery and saw it there in the cloudy gloom: Larsen's Bakery, 3 blocks from my old apartment. Now, do I dare try Applewood Pizza in Menlo Park and Los Altos, or will it be too much for me?)

Molvania: A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry

My friend Angus sent me this book, the cover of which had me howling this morning. I figure that makes it worth a pointer here, and it's well in the travel theme. The bios of the authors include this guy, whom many of us have met:

Philippe Miseree. A professional traveller since his youth, there is not a town or city Philippe has not been recently disappointed by. No matter how obscure the destination you can bet he has been there before you and found it was not half as good as it was in the 1970s. His earlier works include "Turkey Before it was Spoilt," "India the Hard Way," "South-East Asia on Less than You Need," and "Unnecessarily Rough Travel." Philippe helped compile our "Complaints" section.

The inside cover's sequel guides sound worthwhile too, like Surviving Moustaschistan: "Tucked away between the break-away Soviet state of Kalashnikov and the former Persian province of Carpetsan, this arid, inhospitable land will whet the appetite of the most heavily vaccinated traveller."

Check it out: Molvania (a Jetlag Travel Guide).