Scraping the Social? Issues in live social research

What makes scraping methodologically interesting for social and cultural research? This paper seeks to contribute to debates about digital social research by exploring how a ‘medium-specific’ technique for online data capture may be rendered analytically productive for social research. As a device that is currently being imported into social research, scraping has the capacity to re-structure social research, and this in at least two ways. Firstly, as a technique that is not native to social research, scraping risks to introduce ‘alien’ methodological assumptions into social research (such as an pre-occupation with freshness). Secondly, to scrape is to risk importing into our inquiry categories that are prevalent in the social practices enabled by the media: scraping makes available already formatted data for social research. Scraped data, and online social data more generally, tend to come with ‘external’ analytics already built-in. This circumstance is often approached as a ‘problem’ with online data capture, but we propose it may be turned into virtue, insofar as data formats that have currency in the areas under scrutiny may serve as a source of social data themselves. Scraping, we propose, makes it possible to render traffic between the object and process of social research analytically productive. It enables a form of ‘real-time’ social research, in which the formats and life cycles of online data may lend structure to the analytic objects and findings of social research. By way of a conclusion, we demonstrate this point in an exercise of online issue profiling, and more particularly, by relying on Twitter to profile the issue of ‘austerity’. Here we distinguish between two forms of real-time research, those dedicated to monitoring live content (which terms are current?) and those concerned with analysing the liveliness of issues (which topics are happening?)

Reproductive competition between polygynous parasite queens in ant colonies

BACKGROUND: Evaluation of percutaneous tracheostomy (PT) with the guide wire dilating forceps (GWDF) technique. METHODS: Prospective study of perioperative complications, retrospective analysis of early and late complications in an ICU in a teaching university hospital. RESULTS: The success rate of the procedure was 96.5%. The average procedure time in 171 consecutive patients was 5.0 min. Perioperative complications requiring surgical or medical intervention occurred in 6.4% of 171 patients. This included conversion to surgical tracheostomy, which was necessary in six patients (3.5%). Major complications while being cannulated occurred in 2.4% of 164 patients but seemed mostly unrelated with the GWDF technique itself. Late complications (after decannulation) were mostly minor and occurred in 22.6% of 106 patients. Only one patient (0.9%) had a symptomatic tracheal stenosis developed. CONCLUSION: Percutaneous tracheostomy with the guide wire dilating forceps technique is easy to perform at the bedside with few late complications. However, in our study, perioperative and immediate postoperative bleeding complications (minor and major) occur quite often

Seeing the smart city on Twitter: Colour and the affective territories of becoming smart

This paper pays attention to the immense and febrile field of digital image files which picture the smart city as they circulate on the social media platform Twitter. The paper considers tweeted images as an affective field in which flow and colour are especially generative. This luminescent field is territorialised into different, emergent forms of becoming ‘smart’. The paper identifies these territorialisations in two ways: firstly, by using the data visualisation software ImagePlot to create a visualisation of 9030 tweeted images related to smart cities; and secondly, by responding to the affective pushes of the image files thus visualised. It identifies two colours and three ways of affectively becoming smart: participating in smart, learning about smart, and anticipating smart, which are enacted with different distributions of mostly orange and blue images. The paper thus argues that debates about the power relations embedded in the smart city should consider the particular affective enactment of being smart that happens via social media. More generally, the paper concludes that geographers must pay more attention to the diverse and productive vitalities of social media platforms in urban life and that this will require experiment with methods that are responsive to specific digital qualities

Review of "Ludica" by Riccardo Pelizzo and Mark Nowacki

From December 1999 until July 2001, a phase I dose escalation study was performed with (186)Re-labeled bivatuzumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody against CD44v6, on patients with inoperable recurrent or metastatic head and neck cancer. The aim of the trial was to assess the safety and tolerability of intravenously administered (186)Re-bivatuzumab and to determine the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) of (186)Re-bivatuzumab. The data were also used for dosimetric analysis of the treated patients. Dosimetry is used to estimate the absorbed doses by nontarget organs, as well as by tumors. It can also help to explain toxicity that is observed and to predict organs at risk because of the therapy given. METHODS: Whole-body scintigraphy was used to draw regions around sites or organs of interest. Residence times in these organs and sites were calculated and entered into the MIRDOSE3 program, to obtain absorbed doses in all target organs except for red marrow. The red marrow dose was calculated using a blood-derived method. Twenty-one studies on 18 patients, 5 female and 16 male, were used for dosimetry. RESULTS: The mean red marrow doses were 0.49 +/- 0.03 mGy/MBq for men and 0.64 +/- 0.03 mGy/MBq for women. The normal organ with the highest absorbed dose appeared to be the kidney (mean dose, 1.61 +/- 0.75 mGy/MBq in men and 2.15 +/- 0.95 mGy/MBq in women; maximum kidney dose in all patients, 11 Gy), but the doses absorbed are not expected to lead to renal toxicity. Other organs with doses exceeding 0.5 mGy/MBq were the lungs, the spleen, the heart, the liver, the bones, and the testes. The doses delivered to the tumor, recalculated to the MTD level of 1.85 GBq/m(2), ranged from 3.8 to 76.4 Gy, with a median of 12.4 Gy. A good correlation was found between platelet and white blood cell counts and the administered amount of activity per kilogram of body weight (r = -0.79). CONCLUSION: Dosimetric analysis of the data revealed that the range of doses to normal organs seems to be well within acceptable and safe limits. Tumor doses ranged from 4 to 76 Gy. Given the acceptable tumor doses, (186)Re-labeled bivatuzumab could be a good candidate for future adjuvant radioimmunotherapy in patients with minimal residual disease

Interface Methods: Renegotiating relations between digital social research, STS and sociology

This paper introduces a distinctive approach to methods development in digital social research called “interface methods.” We begin by discussing various methodological confluences between digital media, social studies of science and technology (STS) and sociology. Some authors have posited significant overlap between, on the one hand, sociological and STS concepts, and on the other hand, the ontologies of digital media. Others have emphasised the significant differences between prominent methods built into digital media and those of STS and sociology. This paper advocates a third approach, one that a) highlights the dynamism and relative under-determinacy of digital methods, and b) affirms that multiple methodological traditions intersect in digital devices and research. We argue that these two circumstances enable a distinctive approach to methodology in digital social research – thinking methods as ‘interface methods’ - and the paper contextualizes this approach in two different ways. First, we show how the proliferation of online data tools or ‘digital analytics’ opens up distinctive opportunities for critical and creative engagement with methods development at the intersection of sociology, STS and digital research. Second, we discuss a digital research project in which we investigated a specific ‘interface method’, namely co-occurrence analysis. In this digital pilot study we implemented this method in a critical and creative way to analyse and visualise ‘issue dynamics’ in the area of climate change on Twitter. We evaluate this project in the light of our principal objective, which was to test the possibilities for the modification of methods through experimental implementation and interfacing of various methodological traditions. To conclude, we discuss a major obstacle to the development of ‘interface methods’: digital media are marked by particular quantitative dynamics that seem adverse to the methodological commitments of sociology and STS. To address this, we argue in favour of a methodological approach in digital social research that affirms its mal-adjustment to the research methods that are prevalent in the medium

Research Report 2008–2009

The NHMRC Clinical Trials Centre at the University of Sydney runs large multicentre investigator-initiated clinical trials, takes part in trials of national and international collaborative trial groups and contributes expertise to trials run by others. It also: • undertakes research into trial methods and is recognised through publications as a leader in trial methodology • reviews and synthesises evidence from completed trials, and is at the forefront of developments in methods, such as prospective meta-analysis • advises on trial design and operation, and randomises patients and analyses data for other groups conducting trials, particularly through its Outreach program • takes a lead in proposing new directions for trial research in Australia, particularly with regard to integrating clinical trials with national policy and clinical practice • offers placements for postgraduate students in all of these areas • runs short courses in the design and conduct of clinical trials as part of its undertaking to train people for Australian medical research. Core funding is provided by the NHMRC, and specific projects are funded by government, public and private institutions and the pharmaceutical industry. The CTC is at two sites in Camperdown in inner Sydney — the Medical Foundation Building on Parramatta Road and on Mallett Street. This report covers the CTC’s achievements for the biennium 2008–200

Five sepharose-bound ligands for the chromatographic purification of Clostridium collagenase and clostripain

Social media data have provoked a mixed response from researchers. While there is great enthusiasm for this new source of social data – Twitter data in particular – concerns are also expressed about their biases and unknown provenance and, consequently, their credibility for social research. This article seeks a middle path, arguing that we must develop better understanding of the construction and circulation of social media data to evaluate their appropriate uses and the claims that might be made from them. Building on sociotechnical approaches, we propose a high-level abstraction of the ‘pipeline’ through which social media data are constructed and circulated. In turn, we explore how this shapes the populations and samples that are present in social media data and the methods that generate data about them. We conclude with some broad principles for supporting methodologically informed social media research in the future