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.'"

Comments

True Democracy

[Corwn of Amber]

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.

Re:True Democracy

[Dogtanian]

Replace all corrupted clowns chosen by rigged popularity contests with math. Math can be trusted.

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

I talk about open data, not manipulated results of undisclosed calculations.

The parent poster said exactly what I was going to.

If you think that the famous comment "lies, damned lies and statistics" refers only to concealed and rigged calculations, then you're wrong.

But back to what you said originally; your "math can be trusted" comment struck me as blinkered idealism meets dangerously inexperienced naivity. It's quite possible (and common) to use and abuse publicly-available data- via technically-correct use of statistics- to argue many different cases. Unemployment has gone down? Yes, because the definition of "unemployed" has been changed, and people (say) choosing to accept another benefit are no longer counted as unemployed. Or maybe lots of people have part time jobs for five hours a week, but they're not "unemployed".

Maths is perfect, in itself? Yes, we know that. It doesn't solve all the problems if you're proposing running the real world that way. Opinion is not mathematical. How exactly do you propose to correlate and translate people's opinions into a mathematical system? That in itself is subject to interpretation of some sort, whether via manual means or automatic.

Wolfram's system might be useful and insightful, but how do you translate that into democratic representation? And politicians- or their equivalents- will find a way to manipulate people's perceived or stated opinions if it suits them. And they'll find a way to manipulate the opinion-based system.

Maybe it's realised that by convincing a small number of people to feel very strongly about something, or talk about it more, that their opinion carries more weight. Let's radicalise some people and/or foster extremist opinion and behaviour to achieve our ends.

So, the current opinion-translated-into-pseudo-maths system is being manipulated and needs changed? Who decides if it's to be changed? The people? Ah... the measure of the people's opinion says that they don't want the system changed. Of course, that "measure" is via the current, manipulable system, so it supports itself. Unfortunately.

Democracy and voting are- to some extent- already attempts to translate opinion into a solid mathematical representation. The vote is- essentially- a translation of an opinion into a mathematical entity. Of course, it's not perfect, but at least the person making it gets to decide how their opinion translates.

Your system- abandoning voting for more "direct" means- would actually be less direct, because it would be imposing someone else's chosen interpretation of that person's opinion. Well, I say "your system", but actually, you didn't propose a system at all beyond using mathematics. Which we're doing anyway; the hard bit is choosing the most appropriate mathematical system to represent people as a whole, and translating people's opinions into input for that system.

Politics or Video Games.

[Anonymatt]

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.

Re:Politics or Video Games.

[Razgorov Prikazka]

It is politics that made me not take a FB account in the first place.
This is why: In the 1930's Adolf Hitler was ELECTED into government. A couple of years later he invaded a lot of countries, including mine. The nazi's took control of all the files the government had on its citizens. People who had (for example) Rosenbaum or Levi as a family name were 'visited'. Police files on 'crimes' like homosexuality were examined as well and although the original government wasn't actively prosecuting gay people, the nazi's turned out to be slightly more active in that regard. People who had checked the box 'Jehova's Witness' also got to stare down the business end of a rifle. And the list goes on. All straight out of the paper files, with compliments of the former government.
If the nazi's had FB tough, they would have their hands on far, far, far more explicit and far more detailed information, searchable with a mouse click. And people provide those bits of information without hesitation, without complaining and out of free will. The idiots!
And for anyone thinking... nah, that 1940's business would never happen again... You are probably among the first one's rounded up.

Also, politics may change. What is legal now, might not be legal tomorrow (because the elected government puts new laws in place), and the elected government will set their constitutional instruments (aka police, intelligence agencies) on FB to monitor offenders.
Social media and politicians are as dangerous as a box of nitroglycerin. In a roller coaster. Doing 100mph. On square wheels...
No thank you, not for me!

Re:Politics or Video Games.

[Anonymatt]

Yeah, though I'm all for gay marriage, I'm also like "You guys used to be practically illegal and now you want to be put on the official list of gays?" I know that people publicly proclaiming their rights is an important step for ending persecution for all time, but obviously others are much more optimistic and less cynical than me. (This is also a funny idea to bring up at parties or on the Internet.) And it's way off topic.

True Wisdom

[Ostracus]

Wisdom of the crowd.

The Answer to the Ultimate Question...

[Anonymous Coward]

For starters, the median number of 'friends' is 342

It appears Douglas Adams was off by 300.

Nick Kolakowski Strikes Again!

[guttentag]

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?

Selection bias, generation/aging falacy.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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:

... and even how peoples' postings tend to evolve as they get older â" as people age, for example, they tend to talk less about video games and more about politics.

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.