Slashdot Mirror
Wolfram Alpha Drills Deep Into Facebook Data
Nerval's Lobster writes "Back in January, when Wolfram Alpha launched an updated version of its Personal Analytics for Facebook module, the self-billed 'computational knowledge engine' asked users to contribute their detailed Facebook data for research purposes. The researchers at Wolfram Alpha, having crunched all that information, are now offering some data on how users interact with Facebook. For starters, the median number of 'friends' is 342, with the average number of friends peaking for those in their late teens before declining at a steady rate. Younger people also have a tendency to largely add Facebook friends around their own age — for example, someone who's 20 might have lots of friends in the twenty-something range, and comparatively few in other decades of life—while middle-aged people tend to have friends across the age spectrum. Beyond that, the Wolfram Alpha blog offers up some interesting information about friend counts (and 'friend of friend' counts), how friends' networks tend to 'cluster' around life events such as school and sports teams, and even how peoples' postings tend to evolve as they get older — as people age, for example, they tend to talk less about video games and more about politics. 'It feels like we're starting to be able to train a serious "computational telescope" on the "social universe,"' the blog concluded. 'And it's letting us discover all sorts of phenomena.'"
Just wait till we train that telescope on the social phenomenon that's slashdot.
This should replace elections. And elected officials. Measure the real people's publicly-stated opinions and rule from that.
Replace all corrupted clowns chosen by rigged popularity contests with math. Math can be trusted. Public data can be verified. Anything short of "free to know for everyone everywhere forever" has no place in public policy space.
That is all.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
I don't know what's dumber to post about, politics or games.
Games are at least fun for its own sake?
All my liberal friends here in NYC don't have to interact with conservatives IRL, but conservative schoolmates and family from back in Iowa are their major gripe about Facebook.
I guess that's half the reason I stopped Facebook, political cheerleading.
Wisdom of the crowd.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
'And it's letting us discover all sorts of phenomena.'
Uhh no. You haven't "discovered" anything. In fact you've discovered nothing. All of this is - COMMON FUCKING SENSE -. You don't need wolfram alpha to tell us as people age they talk less about video and more about politics, because PEOPLE BECOME ADULTS, DURRRRRRRRRR. You don't need wolfram alpha to tell us that "Friends' networks tend to cluster around life events".. ITS COMMON FUCKING SENSE.
Why am I wasting my time typing this?
For starters, the median number of 'friends' is 342
It appears Douglas Adams was off by 300.
Duh!
and that needed "drilling deep" into facebook data?
As previously noted, "Slashdot Editor" Nick Kolakowski is once again promoting his own "Business Intelligence" opinion pieces under the guise of the fake user Nerval's Lobster.
That's not to say that the data is without merit or interest. The issue here is that Slashdot's publication of the April 24 post on Wolfram's blog had to wait until after Kolakowski had offered his summary of it on April 26. Why did slashdot readers have to wait a few days for Kolakowski to write his own summary of the blog posting? What value did he add?
I agree in theory. We definitely should demand this level of transparency.
Maybe reaching with that idea. 'elections' in the US are basically a big survey. You know this. The thing is, if you are asking a citizen who they want as their leader, it's an 'election'...so your idea really wouldn't 'replace' as much as 'improve' the current system.
Pedantics aside, I like where you're coming from.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Good luck trying to get a report like this from facebook.com or the like...too bad, that...this data is very useful.
This is real research. Rigorous, cleanly factorized, unbiased, work shown for others to check.
In companies today, this kind of thing doesn't happen often. Usually, there is an 'economic' pressure on the results. Everything is filtered through a 'context' of who will see the report and what they will do after they see it. People's jobs are on the line.
If companies want to **truly** use 'big data' to make better business decisions, they have to start with work like this, then know how to use it. That comes with experience ;)
Thank you Dave Raggett
'And it's letting us discover all sorts of phenomena.'
That no one, except people trying to make money off of it, gives two shits about.
This is real research. Rigorous, cleanly factorized, unbiased, work shown for others to check.
Real, yes. Open for checking, yes. Rigorous, maybe. Ceanly factorized, not so much. Unbiased, it is to laugh.
Just from the summary I see two classic issues: Selection bias and confusing generational samples with age effects.
Selection bias is cascaded. First, it's sampling only people who joined facebook. Second, it's only sampling the subset who both heard about and chose to download and use the tool and let it watch their activity. I see close to a dozen classes of selection bias here.
Confusing generational samples with aging effects is a classic flaw. Of course when you're first doing a study looking for age effects, about all you CAN do is use generational cohort as a proxy for aging. But people from different generations have a host of differences besides age: Nutrition, nurturing fads, stress from wars and other disasters, disesae exposure, educational variations, and the list goes on.
One of the classic errors that arose from this is the belief among psychologists that intelligence ramps up nearly linearly until early adulthood, knees over, and then slowly drops with age. That lasted until standardized tests had been administered to the same groups over several decades, so the trajectories of the scores from particular individuals and groups could be tracked. It turns out that intelligence does rise and knee-out as described, but the gradual slope with age is UPWARD (even before discounting the higher incidence of specific brain-damaging disease processes with advanced age). The effect had been masked by another: People educated in earlier decades did less well on the things the tests scored.
You can see that this work - or at least those attempting to interpret it - has the same problem:
Are today's older people more interested in politics because they've aged and have more understanding of them and/or are more affected by them? Or are they more interested because they grew up during or in the aftermath of WW II, Korea, the Cold War, and the mass movements and political suppression surrounding Vietnam and the clampdown on "recreational" drugs.
Are they less interested in video games because they're older or because video games DIDN'T EXIST YET when they had time to practice enough to become skilled?
Conflating age with cohort membership can lead to problems when you try to use the results of such research to predict how people will change with age. For instance: If video game interest is a symptom of low age you can expect people to "grow out of it" and current users to fade out as they find other interests, but if it's a symptom of cohort membership they may become MORE active as they mature further. If political activity is a symptom of age you can expect the young to become more active as they age, but if it's a symptom of life experience you might see new generations becoming active young (as with the Antiwar movement in the '60s and '70s and the Liberty movement today) and people of all ages suddenly becoming politically active after being "radicalized" by the stress of political events.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Because it leads to politics later in life.
Sounds like Wolfram Alpha and Facebook are making a porno.
All in the same sentence, I would never have believed it.
I didn't RTFA, but it seems like the summary, I could have told you everything that the team at wolfram alpha "discovered"
killed it.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
oh boy, these results are surprising! Not...
In related news, I just finished drilling deep... ...IN YOUR MOM!!!!!!
@Ungrounded Lightning: What did you study and what do you do now?
Just curious. My background is in electronics, databases, and network engineering. I taught briefly as an adjunct at WSU, but now I'm starting my own business.
I did most of my research work in my graduate program. I ran a survey of the entire state for the Indiana Dept of Health about the effectiveness of their 'abstinence-only' education...haha...3 guesses as to what I found.
I also did some work correlating GIS data with user interface and usability data.
Thank you Dave Raggett
whether Belgium is in fact two countries or one?
i noticed when i go out here anywhere on the street people i converse with range from like 14 to 74 while facebook would have me stuck with people 5 down or up around my own. Not that i'm interested in fb in anyway anymore since a long time but it's not really realistic. The part where it forces me to un-check people who did not accept my request i.o. just letting it go one they decline (like about any other social network i have been on after fb) is very annoying so last time i decided on getting a fb accout, just for research and free bitcoins purposes mostly it kinda got stuck on this bit where this fascist type of page tells me i can't come in unless i do what they say. Now if a nightclub requires me to not wear the shoes i like i tell the bouncer to go fuck himself and pick one the 500 others in the same street, ya know, ya hear? ya dig ?
?
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?