Attention and Visibility in an Information Rich World

As the rate of content production grows, we must make a staggering number of daily decisions about what information is worth acting on. For any flourishing online social media system, users can barely keep up with the new content shared by friends. How does the user-interface design help or hinder users' ability to find interesting content? We analyze the choices people make about which information to propagate on the social media sites Twitter and Digg. We observe regularities in behavior which can be attributed directly to cognitive limitations of humans, resulting from the different visibility policies of each site. We quantify how people divide their limited attention among competing sources of information, and we show how the user-interface design can mediate information spread.Comment: Appearing in 2nd International Workshop on Social Multimedia Research 2013, in conjunction with IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2013

Network Weirdness: Exploring the Origins of Network Paradoxes

Social networks have many counter-intuitive properties, including the "friendship paradox" that states, on average, your friends have more friends than you do. Recently, a variety of other paradoxes were demonstrated in online social networks. This paper explores the origins of these network paradoxes. Specifically, we ask whether they arise from mathematical properties of the networks or whether they have a behavioral origin. We show that sampling from heavy-tailed distributions always gives rise to a paradox in the mean, but not the median. We propose a strong form of network paradoxes, based on utilizing the median, and validate it empirically using data from two online social networks. Specifically, we show that for any user the majority of user's friends and followers have more friends, followers, etc. than the user, and that this cannot be explained by statistical properties of sampling. Next, we explore the behavioral origins of the paradoxes by using the shuffle test to remove correlations between node degrees and attributes. We find that paradoxes for the mean persist in the shuffled network, but not for the median. We demonstrate that strong paradoxes arise due to the assortativity of user attributes, including degree, and correlation between degree and attribute.Comment: Accepted to ICWSM 201

Technology Refusal

Analyses of the deployment of technology in schools usually note its lack of impact on the day-to-day values and practices of teachers, administrators, and students. This is generally construed as an implementation failure, or as resulting from a temperamental shortcoming on the part of teachers or technologists. It is predicated on the tacit assumption that the technology itself is value-free. This paper proposes that technology is never neutral: that its values and practices must always either support or subvert those of the organization into which it is placed; and that the failures of technology to alter the look-and-feel of schools more generally results from a mismatch between the values of school organization and those embedded within the contested technology

State Law Responses to Global Warming: Is It Constitutional to Think Globally and Act Locally?

The author explores the constitutionality of state actions to address global warming in an effort to fill the void left by the federal government\u27s failure to act