On Universality in Human Correspondence Activity

Identifying and modeling patterns of human activity has important ramifications in applications ranging from predicting disease spread to optimizing resource allocation. Because of its relevance and availability, written correspondence provides a powerful proxy for studying human activity. One school of thought is that human correspondence is driven by responses to received correspondence, a view that requires distinct response mechanism to explain e-mail and letter correspondence observations. Here, we demonstrate that, like e-mail correspondence, the letter correspondence patterns of 16 writers, performers, politicians, and scientists are well-described by the circadian cycle, task repetition and changing communication needs. We confirm the universality of these mechanisms by properly rescaling letter and e-mail correspondence statistics to reveal their underlying similarity.Comment: 17 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl

Scaling laws of human interaction activity

Even though people in our contemporary, technological society are depending on communication, our understanding of the underlying laws of human communicational behavior continues to be poorly understood. Here we investigate the communication patterns in two social Internet communities in search of statistical laws in human interaction activity. This research reveals that human communication networks dynamically follow scaling laws that may also explain the observed trends in economic growth. Specifically, we identify a generalized version of Gibrat's law of social activity expressed as a scaling law between the fluctuations in the number of messages sent by members and their level of activity. Gibrat's law has been essential in understanding economic growth patterns, yet without an underlying general principle for its origin. We attribute this scaling law to long-term correlation patterns in human activity, which surprisingly span from days to the entire period of the available data of more than one year. Further, we provide a mathematical framework that relates the generalized version of Gibrat's law to the long-term correlated dynamics, which suggests that the same underlying mechanism could be the source of Gibrat's law in economics, ranging from large firms, research and development expenditures, gross domestic product of countries, to city population growth. These findings are also of importance for designing communication networks and for the understanding of the dynamics of social systems in which communication plays a role, such as economic markets and political systems.Comment: 20+7 pages, 4+2 figure

Sense-it: A Smartphone Toolkit for Citizen Inquiry Learning

We describe a toolkit for Android smartphones and tablets that enables a user to access all the sensors available on the device. Data from individual sensors can be viewed as dynamic graphs. Output from one or more sensors can be recorded to a spreadsheet, with the sampling rate set by the learner. As a tool for inquiry learning, the sensors can be linked to ‘missions’ on the nQuire-it website, allowing learners to sample and share data for collaborative crowd-sourced investigations. Four nQuire-it missions have employed the sensor toolkit for investigating environmental noise, sunlight levels, air pressure and rainfall, and the speed of lifts (elevators). These four investigations represent a variety of methods to initiate, orchestrate and conclude inquiry science learning. Two of the missions are in the context of a study to develop a community of inquiry around weather and meteorology. The others are intended to engage members of the public in practical science activities. Analysis of the missions and the associated online discussions reveals that the Sense-it toolkit can be adopted for practical and engaging science investigations, though the issue of calibrating sensors on personal devices needs to be addressed

Sandpile model on an optimized scale-free network on Euclidean space

Deterministic sandpile models are studied on a cost optimized Barab\'asi-Albert (BA) scale-free network whose nodes are the sites of a square lattice. For the optimized BA network, the sandpile model has the same critical behaviour as the BTW sandpile, whereas for the un-optimized BA network the critical behaviour is mean-field like.Comment: Five pages, four figure

Mediating boundaries between knowledge and knowing: ICT and R4D praxis

Research for development (R4D) praxis (theory-informed practical action) can be underpinned by the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) which, it is claimed, provide opportunities for knowledge working and sharing. Such a framing implicitly or explicitly constructs a boundary around knowledge as reified, or commodified – or at least able to be stabilized for a period of time (first order knowledge). In contrast ‘third-generation knowledge’ emphasizes the social nature of learning and knowledge-making; this reframes knowledge as a negotiated social practice, thus constructing a different system boundary. This paper offers critical reflections on the use of a wiki as a data repository and mediating technical platform as part of innovating in R4D praxis. A sustainable social learning process was sought that fostered an emergent community of practice among biophysical and social researchers acting for the first time as R4D co-researchers. Over time the technologically mediated element of the learning system was judged to have failed. This inquiry asks: How can learning system design cultivate learning opportunities and respond to learning challenges in an online environment to support R4D practice? Confining critical reflection to the online learning experience alone ignores the wider context in which knowledge work took place; therefore the institutional setting is also considered

Fostering 21st Century Skill Development by Engaging Students in Authentic Game Design Projects in a High School Computer Programming Class

This study used technology-rich ethnography (TRE) to examine the use of game development in a high school computer programming class for the development of 21st century skills. High school students created games for elementary school students while obtaining formative feedback from their younger clients. Our experience suggests that in the teaching of computer science in high schools, the development of games that include common game features such as dynamic feedback systems, backstory, levels, cheats, and compelling graphics challenges students and engages them in learning. Incorporating real client feedback is also useful for improving their work and connecting it to the “real” world. This article reports findings from the second year of a research project with a high school computer programming class. The authors argue that such approaches that leverage video games, design, programming, authenticity, and cooperation mobilize multiple 21st century skills that must be nurtured among contemporary young people so that they may grow to be part of a productive citizenry.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

A case study analysis of a constructionist knowledge building community with activity theory

This article investigates how activity theory can help research a constructionist community. We present a constructionist activity model called CONstructionism Through ACtivity Theory (CONTACT) model and explain how it can be used to analyse the constructionist activity in knowledge building communities. We then illustrate the model through its application to analysing the Wiki-supported community associated with a computer game. Our analysis focuses mainly on two perspectives: individual and collective actions, as well as individual and collective mediations. Experiences and challenges from the analysis are reported to demonstrate how CONTACT is helpful in analysing such communities

Dispensability of Escherichia coli's latent pathways

Gene-knockout experiments on single-cell organisms have established that expression of a substantial fraction of genes is not needed for optimal growth. This problem acquired a new dimension with the recent discovery that environmental and genetic perturbations of the bacterium Escherichia coli are followed by the temporary activation of a large number of latent metabolic pathways, which suggests the hypothesis that temporarily activated reactions impact growth and hence facilitate adaptation in the presence of perturbations. Here we test this hypothesis computationally and find, surprisingly, that the availability of latent pathways consistently offers no growth advantage, and tends in fact to inhibit growth after genetic perturbations. This is shown to be true even for latent pathways with a known function in alternate conditions, thus extending the significance of this adverse effect beyond apparently nonessential genes. These findings raise the possibility that latent pathway activation is in fact derivative of another, potentially suboptimal, adaptive response

Inheritance patterns in citation networks reveal scientific memes

Memes are the cultural equivalent of genes that spread across human culture by means of imitation. What makes a meme and what distinguishes it from other forms of information, however, is still poorly understood. Our analysis of memes in the scientific literature reveals that they are governed by a surprisingly simple relationship between frequency of occurrence and the degree to which they propagate along the citation graph. We propose a simple formalization of this pattern and we validate it with data from close to 50 million publication records from the Web of Science, PubMed Central, and the American Physical Society. Evaluations relying on human annotators, citation network randomizations, and comparisons with several alternative approaches confirm that our formula is accurate and effective, without a dependence on linguistic or ontological knowledge and without the application of arbitrary thresholds or filters.Comment: 8 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Physical Review