21,122 research outputs found
Global Patterns of Synchronization in Human Communications
Social media are transforming global communication and coordination. The data
derived from social media can reveal patterns of human behavior at all levels
and scales of society. Using geolocated Twitter data, we have quantified
collective behaviors across multiple scales, ranging from the commutes of
individuals, to the daily pulse of 50 major urban areas and global patterns of
human coordination. Human activity and mobility patterns manifest the synchrony
required for contingency of actions between individuals. Urban areas show
regular cycles of contraction and expansion that resembles heartbeats linked
primarily to social rather than natural cycles. Business hours and circadian
rhythms influence daily cycles of work, recreation, and sleep. Different urban
areas have characteristic signatures of daily collective activities. The
differences are consistent with a new emergent global synchrony that couples
behavior in distant regions across the world. A globally synchronized peak that
includes exchange of ideas and information across Europe, Africa, Asia and
Australasia. We propose a dynamical model to explain the emergence of global
synchrony in the context of increasing global communication and reproduce the
observed behavior. The collective patterns we observe show how social
interactions lead to interdependence of behavior manifest in the
synchronization of communication. The creation and maintenance of temporally
sensitive social relationships results in the emergence of complexity of the
larger scale behavior of the social system.Comment: 20 pages, 12 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with
arXiv:1602.0621
Fostering collective intelligence education
New educational models are necessary to update learning environments to the digitally shared communication and information. Collective intelligence is an emerging field that already has a significant impact in many areas and will have great implications in education, not only from the side of new methodologies but also as a challenge for education. This paper proposes an approach to a collective intelligence model of teaching using Internet to combine two strategies: idea management and real time assessment in the class. A digital tool named Fabricius has been created supporting these two elements to foster the collaboration and engagement of students in the learning process. As a result of the research we propose a list of KPI trying to measure individual and collective performance. We are conscious that this is just a first approach to define which aspects of a class following a course can be qualified and quantified.Postprint (published version
Symmetric Synchronous Collaborative Navigation
Synchronous collaborative navigation is a form of social navigation where users virtually share a web browser. In this paper, we present a symmetric, proxy-based architecture where each user can take the lead and guide others in visiting web sites, without the need for a special browser or other software. We show how we have applied this scheme to a problem-solving-oriented e-learning system
A Typology of Virtual Teams: Implications for Effective Leadership
As the nature of work in today\u27s organizations becomes more complex, dynamic, and global, there has been an increasing emphasis on far-flung, distributed, virtual teams as organizing units of work. Despite their growing prevalence, relatively little is known about this new form of work unit. The purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical framework to focus research toward understanding virtual teams and, in particular, to identify implications for effective leadership. Specifically, we focus on delineating the dimensions of a typology to characterize different types of virtual teams. First, we distinguish virtual teams from conventional teams to identify where current knowledge applies and new research needs to be developed. Second, we distinguish among different types of virtual teams, considering the critical role of task complexity in determining the underlying characteristics of virtual teams and leadership challenges the different types entail. Propositions addressing leadership implications for the effective management of virtual teams are proposed and discussed
Coordination Matters : Interpersonal Synchrony Influences Collaborative Problem-Solving
The authors thank Martha von Werthern and Caitlin Taylor for their assistance with data collection, Cathy Macpherson for her assistance with the preparation of the manuscript, and Mike Richardson, Alex Paxton, and Rick Dale for providing MATLAB code to assist with data analysis. The research was funded by the British Academy (SG131613).Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Encounters on the social web: Everyday life and emotions online
Encounters also happen online nowadays and, yes, they are still difficult to describe, even though it is sometimes easier to observe them-and obtain data about them- than in the past. The internet is crucially 'shaping the interactions people have with one another' (Johns 2010: 499). With the recent explosion and popularity of Web 2.0 services and the social web, such as Facebook (FB), Twitter, and various other types of social media, internet users now have at their disposal an unprecedented collection of tools to interact with others. These modes of online sociability allow users to pursue social encounters with variable levels of involvement, attention, and activity (Papacharissi and Mendelson 2010). For many of us it is now difficult to imagine our social relationships without access to the internet. The social web plays an important role in relationships among internet users (Boyd 2006), with the expression, management and experience of emotions being key to the maintenance of these relationships
Locally embedded presages of global network bursts
Spontaneous, synchronous bursting of neural population is a widely observed
phenomenon in nervous networks, which is considered important for functions and
dysfunctions of the brain. However, how the global synchrony across a large
number of neurons emerges from an initially non-bursting network state is not
fully understood. In this study, we develop a new state-space reconstruction
method combined with high-resolution recordings of cultured neurons. This
method extracts deterministic signatures of upcoming global bursts in "local"
dynamics of individual neurons during non-bursting periods. We find that local
information within a single-cell time series can compare with or even
outperform the global mean field activity for predicting future global bursts.
Moreover, the inter-cell variability in the burst predictability is found to
reflect the network structure realized in the non-bursting periods. These
findings demonstrate the deterministic mechanisms underlying the locally
concentrated early-warnings of the global state transition in self-organized
networks
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