Category Archives: thesis

Phil 10.1.18

7:00 – 8:30 ASRC MKT?

  • Last Friday, Aaron was told by division leadership (Mike M) that R&D is being terminated as of Jan 1st and to get on billable projects. This is going against our impression of how things were going, so it’s unclear what will actually happen. So I’m not looking for a job just yet… Personally, I blame putting a deposit down on this: Tesla3
  • This looks interesting:
    • Launched in October 2015 by founding editor Robert Kadar with support from Joe Brewer, David Sloan Wilson, The Evolution Institute, and Steve Roth — who now serves as publisher — Evonomics has emerged as a powerful voice for the sea change that is sweeping through economics.
  • Working my way through At Home in the Universe
    • Fontana Lab
      • Molecular biology offers breathtaking views of the parts and processes that undergird life and its evolution. It is vexing, then, that we seem unable to analytically grasp the principles that would make the nature of cellular phenotypes more intelligible and their control more deliberate. One can always blame insufficient knowledge, but we also entertain the idea that physics and chemistry need formal and conceptual enrichment from computer science to become an appropriate foundation for systems biology. This view arises from the belief that computation is a natural phenomenon, like gravity or boiling water. We need adequate formalisms and models to reason about computation in the wild.This view guides many of our lab’s interests, which span the development and application of rule-based formalisms for modeling complex systems of molecular interaction, causality in concurrent systems, the interplay between network growth and network dynamics, phenotypic plasticity and evolvability, learning, and aging. Our approach is computational and theoretical. In the past we also conducted experimental work using C. elegans as a model system. Outside collaborations are essential to our group. The size of our team can fluctuate considerably, as we chase grants in pursuit of our passions, not opportunistically. Read more about our research.
  • Due date for the iConference Paper. Submitted last night just to be safe, but I expect to tweak today.
    • incorporating Wayne’s changes
    • Final push with Wayne on campus
    • Done! Submitted
    • Need to upload to ArXive (try multiple tex files)
  • From The Atlantic – stampede end condition:
    • It is impossible at this moment to envisage the Republican Party coming back. Like a brontosaurus with some brain-eating disorder it might lumber forward in the direction dictated by its past, favoring deregulation of businesses here and standing up to a rising China there, but there will be no higher mental functioning at work. And so it will plod into a future in which it is detested in a general way by women, African Americans, recent immigrants, and the educated young as well as progressives pure and simple. It might stumble into a political tar pit and cease to exist or it might survive as a curious, decaying relic of more savage times and more primitive instincts, lashing out and crushing things but incapable of much else.

Phil 9.28.18

7:30 – 4:00 ASRC MKT

  • Stumbled on this podcast this morning: How Small Problems Snowball Into Big Disasters
  • How to Prepare for a Crisis You Couldn’t Possibly Predict
  • I’m trying to think about how this should be applied to human/machine ecologies. I think that simulation is really important because it lets one model patch compare itself against another model without real-world impacts. This has something to do with a shared, multi-instance environment simulation as well. The environment provides one level of transparent interaction, but there also needs to be some level of inadvertent social information that shows some insight into how a particular system is working.
    • When the simulation and the real world start to diverge for a system, that needs to be signaled
    • Systems need to be able to “look into” other simulations and compare like with like. So a tagged item (bicycle) in one sim is the same in another.
    • Is there an OS that hands out environments?
    • How does a decentralized system coordinate? Is there an answer in MMOGs?
  • Kate Starbird’s presentation was interesting as always. We had a chance to talk afterwards, and she’d like to see our work, so I’ve sent her links to the last two papers.
    I also met Bill Braniff, who is the director of the UMD Study of Terrorism and responses to Terrorism. He got papers too, with a brief description about how mapping could aid in the detection of radicalization patterns
    Then at lunch, I had a chance to meet with Roger Bostelman from NIST. He’s interested in writing standards for fleet and swarm vehicles, and is interested in making sure that standards mitigate the chance of stampeding autonomous vehicles, so I sent him the Blue Sky draft.
    And lastly, I got a phone call from Aaron who says that our project will be terminated December 31, after which there will be no more IR&D at ASRC. It was a nice run while it lasted. And they may change their minds, but I doubt it.

Phil 9.27.18

7:00 – 6:00 ASRC MKT

  • Writing your own LaTex class
  • Multiple facets of biodiversity drive the diversity–stability relationship
    • A substantial body of evidence has demonstrated that biodiversity stabilizes ecosystem functioning over time in grassland ecosystems. However, the relative importance of different facets of biodiversity underlying the diversity–stability relationship remains unclear. Here we use data from 39 grassland biodiversity experiments and structural equation modelling to investigate the roles of species richness, phylogenetic diversity and both the diversity and community-weighted mean of functional traits representing the ‘fast–slow’ leaf economics spectrum in driving the diversity–stability relationship. We found that high species richness and phylogenetic diversity stabilize biomass production via enhanced asynchrony in the performance of co-occurring species. Contrary to expectations, low phylogenetic diversity enhances ecosystem stability directly, albeit weakly. While the diversity of fast–slow functional traits has a weak effect on ecosystem stability, communities dominated by slow species enhance ecosystem stability by increasing mean biomass production relative to the standard deviation of biomass over time. Our in-depth, integrative assessment of factors influencing the diversity–stability relationship demonstrates a more multicausal relationship than has been previously acknowledged.
  • Computer Algorithms, Market Manipulation and the Institutionalization of High Frequency Trading (adversarial herding?)
    • The article discusses the use of algorithmic models in finance (algo or high frequency trading). Algo trading is widespread but also somewhat controversial in modern financial markets. It is a form of automated trading technology, which critics claim can, among other things, lead to market manipulation. Drawing on three cases, this article shows that manipulation also can happen in the reverse way, meaning that human traders attempt to make algorithms ‘make mistakes’ by ‘misleading’ them. These attempts to manipulate are very simple and immediately transparent to humans. Nevertheless, financial regulators increasingly penalize such attempts to manipulate algos. The article explains this as an institutionalization of algo trading, a trading practice which is vulnerable enough to need regulatory protection.
  • Karin Knorr Cetina is interested in financial markets, knowledge and information, as well as in globalization, theory and culture. Her current projects include a book on global foreign exchange markets and on post-social knowledge societies. She continues to do research on the information architecture of financial markets, on their “global microstructures” (the global social and cultural form these markets take) and on trader markets in contrast to producer markets. She also studies globalization from a microsociological perspective, using an ethnographic approach, and she continues to be interested in “laboratory studies,” the study of science, technology and information at the site of knowledge production – particularly in the life sciences and in particle physics.
  • Reading A Sociology of Algorithms: High-Frequency Trading and the Shaping of Markets
    • “Markets are politics,” (pg 8). I’d reverse that and say that politics are a market for power/influence, though that may be too glib.
    • three main types of algorithm discussed here (trading venues’ matching engines, which consummate trades; execution algorithms used by institutional investors to buy or sell large blocks of shares; and HFT algorithms), (pg 11)
    • a “lit” venue is one in which the electronic order book is visible to the humans and algorithms that trade on the venue; in a “dark” venue it is not visible.  (pg 11)
  • Meeting with USPTO folks. I went over their heads, but Aaron found the right level.

Phil 9.21.18

7:00 – 4:00 ASRC MKT

  • “Who’s idea was it to connect every idiot on the internet with every other idiot” PJ O’Rourke, Commonwealth Club, 2018
  • “Running Programs In Reverse for Deeper A.I.” by Zenna Tavares
    • In this talk I show that inverse simulation, i.e., running programs in reverse from output to input, lies at the heart of the hardest problems in both human cognition and artificial intelligence. How humans are able to reconstruct the rich 3D structure of the world from 2D images; how we predict that it is safe to cross a street just by watching others walk, and even how we play, and sometimes win at Jenga, are all solvable by running programs backwards. The idea of program inversion is old, but I will present one of the first approaches to take it literally. Our tool ReverseFlow combines deep-learning and our theory of parametric inversion to compile the source code of a program (e.g., a TensorFlow graph) into its inverse, even when it is not conventionally invertible. This framework offers a unified and practical approach to both understand and solve the aforementioned problems in vision, planning and inference for both humans and machines.
  • Bot-ivistm: Assessing Information Manipulation in Social Media Using Network Analytics
    • Matthew Benigni 
    • Kenneth Joseph
    • Kathleen M. Carley (Scholar)
    • Social influence bot networks are used to effect discussions in social media. While traditional social network methods have been used in assessing social media data, they are insufficient to identify and characterize social influence bots, the networks in which they reside and their behavior. However, these bots can be identified, their prevalence assessed, and their impact on groups assessed using high dimensional network analytics. This is illustrated using data from three different activist communities on Twitter—the “alt-right,” ISIS sympathizers in the Syrian revolution, and activists of the Euromaidan movement. We observe a new kind of behavior that social influence bots engage in—repetitive @mentions of each other. This behavior is used to manipulate complex network metrics, artificially inflating the influence of particular users and specific agendas. We show that this bot behavior can affect network measures by as much as 60% for accounts that are promoted by these bots. This requires a new method to differentiate “promoted accounts” from actual influencers. We present this method. We also present a method to identify social influence bot “sub-communities.” We show how an array of sub-communities across our datasets are used to promote different agendas, from more traditional foci (e.g., influence marketing) to more nefarious goals (e.g., promoting particular political ideologies).
  • Pinged Aaron M. about writing an article
  • More iConf paper. Got a first draft on everything but the discussion section

Phil 9.20.18

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

  • Submit pre-approval for school – done!
  • Call bank – done!
  • Tried to do stuff on the Lufthansa site but couldn’t log in
  • Read through the USPTO RFI and realized it was a good fit for the Research Browser. Sent the RB white paper to those in the decision loop.
  • Updated the JuryRoom white paper to include an appendix on self-governance and handling hate speech, etc.
  • Introducing Cloud Inference API: uncover insights from large scale, typed time-series data
    • Today, we’re announcing the Cloud Inference API to address this need. Cloud Inference API is a simple, highly efficient and scalable system that makes it easier for businesses and developers to quickly gather insights from typed time series datasets. It’s fully integrated with Google Cloud Storage and can handle datasets as large as tens of billions of event records. If you store any time series data in Cloud Storage, you can use the Cloud Inference API to begin generating predictions.
    • Thread by Jeff Dean
  • Realized that there are additional matrices that can post-multiply the Laplacian. That way we can break down the individual components that contribute to “stiffness”. The reason for this is that only identical oscillators will synchronize. Similarity is a type of implicit coordination
    • Leave the Master matrix [M]: as degree on the diagonal, with “1” for a connection, “0” for no connection
    • =Bandwidth matrix [B]: has a value (0, 1) for each connection
    • Alignment matrix [A]: calculates the direction cosine between each connected node. Completely aligned nodes get an edge value of 1.0
    • There can also be a Weight vector W: which contains the “mass” of the node. A high mass node will be more influential in the network.
  • Had a few thoughts about JuryRoom self governance. The major social networks seem to be a mess with respect to what rights users have, and what constitutes a violation of terms of service. The solutions seem pretty brittle (Radiolab podcast on facebook rule making). JuryRoom has built in a mechanism for deliberation. Can that be used to create an online legal framework for crowdsourcing the rules and the interpretation? Roughly, I think that this requires the following:
    • A constitution – a simple document that lays out how JuryRoom will be goverened.
    • A bill of rights. What are users entitled to?
    • The concept of petition, trial, binding decisions, and precedent.
    • Is there a concept of testifying under oath?
    • The addition of “evidence” attachments that can be linked to posts. This could be existing documents, commissioned expert opinion, etc.
    • A special location for the “legal decisions”. These will become the basis for the precedent in future deliberations. Links to these prior decisions are done as attachments? Or as something else?
    • Localization. Since what is acceptable (within the bounds of the constitution and the bill of rights) changes as a function of culture, there needs to be a way that groups can split off from the main group to construct and use their own legal history. Voting/membership may need to be a part of this.
      • What is visible to non-members?
      • What are the requirements to be a member?
      • How are legal decisions implemented in software?
      • What are the duties of a “citizen”?
  • More iConf paper
  • I wanted to make figures align on the bottom. Turns out that the way that you do this is to set top alignment [t] for each minipage. Here’s my example: 
    \begin{figure}[h]
	\centering
	\begin{minipage}[t]{.5\textwidth}
		\centering
		\fbox{\includegraphics[width=20em]{Nomad-Flocking-Stampede2.png}}
		\caption{\label{fig:N-F-S} Evolved systems}
	\end{minipage}%
	\begin{minipage}[t]{.5\textwidth}
		\centering
		\fbox{\includegraphics[width=20em]{Nomad-Stampede.png}}
		\caption{\label{fig:Monolithic_complex_nomad} Designed systems}
	\end{minipage}%
\end{figure}

     

Phil 9.19.18

7:00 – 5:30 ASRC MKT

  • More iConf paper
  • GSS Meeting?
  • Meeting with Wayne? No, he’s out till Thursday
  • Pinged Don about Aaron Mannes. He’s OOO as well
  • Understanding the interplay between social and spatial behaviour
    • Laura Alessandretti
    • Sune Lehmann
    • Andrea Baronchelli
    • According to personality psychology, personality traits determine many aspects of human behaviour. However, validating this insight in large groups has been challenging so far, due to the scarcity of multi-channel data. Here, we focus on the relationship between mobility and social behaviour by analysing trajectories and mobile phone interactions of ∼1000 individuals from two high-resolution longitudinal datasets. We identify a connection between the way in which individuals explore new resources and exploit known assets in the social and spatial spheres. We show that different individuals balance the exploration-exploitation trade-off in different ways and we explain part of the variability in the data by the big five personality traits. We point out that, in both realms, extraversion correlates with the attitude towards exploration and routine diversity, while neuroticism and openness account for the tendency to evolve routine over long time-scales. We find no evidence for the existence of classes of individuals across the spatio-social domains. Our results bridge the fields of human geography, sociology and personality psychology and can help improve current models of mobility and tie formation.
    • This looks to be a missing link paper that I can use to connect animal behavior in physical space and human behavior in belief space
  • A Sociology of Algorithms: High-Frequency Trading and the Shaping of Markets
    • Donald MacKenzie
      • My current research is on the sociology of markets, focusing on automated trading. I’ve worked in the past on topics ranging from the sociology of nuclear weapons to the meaning of proof in the context of computer systems critical to safety or security.
    • Computer algorithms are playing an ever more important role in financial markets. This paper proposes and exemplifies a sociology of algorithms that is (i) historical, in that it demonstrates path-dependence in the development of automated markets; (ii) ecological (in Abbott’s sense), in that it shows how automated high-frequency trading (HFT) is both itself an ecology and also is shaped by other linked ecologies (especially those of trading venues and of regulation); and (iii) “Zelizerian,” in that it highlights the importance of boundary work, especially of efforts to distinguish between (in effect) “good” and “bad” actors and algorithms. Empirically, the paper draws on interviews with 43 practitioners of HFT, and on a wider historical-sociology study (including interviews with a further 44 people) of the development of trading venues. The paper investigates the practices of HFT and analyses (in historical, ecological, and “Zelizerian” terms) how these differ in three different contexts (two types of share trading and foreign exchange).
  • A2P marketing meeting in Greenbelt
  • Long discussion on networks and the stiffness of links

Phil 9.17.18

7:00 – ASRC MKT

  • Dan Ariely Professor of psychology and behavioral economics, Duke University (Scholar)
    • Controlling the Information Flow: Effects on Consumers’ Decision Making and Preferences
      • One of the main objectives facing marketers is to present consumers with information on which to base their decisions. In doing so, marketers have to select the type of information system they want to utilize in order to deliver the most appropriate information to their consumers. One of the most interesting and distinguishing dimensions of such information systems is the level of control the consumer has over the information system. The current work presents and tests a general model for understanding the advantages and disadvantages of information control on consumers’ decision quality, memory, knowledge, and confidence. The results show that controlling the information flow can help consumers better match their preferences, have better memory and knowledge about the domain they are examining, and be more confident in their judgments. However, it is also shown that controlling the information flow creates demands on processing resources and therefore under some circumstances can have detrimental effects on consumers’ ability to utilize information. The article concludes with a summary of the findings, discussion of their application for electronic commerce, and suggestions for future research avenues.
      • This may be a good example of work that relates to socio-cultural interfaces.
  • Democracy’s Wisdom: An Aristotelian Middle Way for Collective Judgment
    • Josiah Ober (Scholar)
    •  The Greeks had experts determine choices, and the public vote between the expert choices
    • A satisfactory model of decision-making in an epistemic democracy must respect democratic values, while advancing citizens’ interests, by taking account of relevant knowledge about the world. Analysis of passages in Aristotle and legislative process in classical Athens points to a “middle way” between independent-guess aggregation and deliberation: an epistemic approach to decision-making that offers a satisfactory model of collective judgment that is both time-sensitive and capable of setting agendas endogenously. By aggregating expertise across multiple domains, Relevant Expertise Aggregation (REA) enables a body of minimally competent voters to make superior choices among multiple options, on matters of common interest. REA differs from a standard Condorcet jury in combining deliberation with voting based on judgments about the reputations and arguments of domain-experts.
  • NESTA Center for Collective Intelligence Design
    • The Centre for Collective Intelligence Design will explore how human and machine intelligence can be combined to make the most of our collective knowledge and develop innovative and effective solutions to social challenges.
    • Call for ideas (JuryRoom!)
      • Nesta is offering grants of up to £20,000 for projects that generate new knowledge on how to advance collective intelligence (combining human and machine intelligence) to solve social problems.
  • Synchronize gdrive, subversion
  • Finish abstract review
  • Organize iConf paper into something more coherent
    • Created folder for lit review
  • Start putting together notes on At Home in the Universe?
  • Ping folks from SASO
    • Graph Laplacian paper
    • Cycling stuff
  • Fika?
  • Meeting with Wayne?

Phil 9.8.18

How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence

  • Many human endeavors—from teams and organizations to crowds and democracies—rely on solving problems collectively. Prior research has shown that when people interact and influence each other while solving complex problems, the average problem-solving performance of the group increases, but the best solution of the group actually decreases in quality. We find that when such influence is intermittent it improves the average while maintaining a high maximum performance. We also show that storing solutions for quick recall is similar to constant social influence. Instead of supporting more transparency, the results imply that technologies and organizations should be redesigned to intermittently isolate people from each other’s work for best collective performance in solving complex problems.

Will Foreign Agents Rig the U.S. Midterm Elections Through Social Media?

  • Samantha Bradshaw, an expert on computational propaganda, weighs in on whether Facebook, Twitter, and others are doing enough to curb political social media bots.

Detecting signs of dementia using word vector representations

  • Recent approaches to word vector representations, e.g., ‘w2vec’ and ‘GloVe’, have been shown to be powerful methods for capturing the semantics and syntax of words in a text. The approaches model the co-occurrences of words and recent successful applications on written text have shown how the vector representations and their interrelations represent the meaning or sentiment in the text. Most applications have targeted written language, however, in this paper, we investigate how these models port to the spoken language domain where the text is the result of (erroneous) automatic speech transcription. In particular, we are interested in the task of detecting signs of dementia in a person’s spoken language. This is motivated by the fact that early signs of dementia are known to affect a person’s ability to express meaning articulately for example when they engage in a conversation – something which is known to be cognitively very demanding. We analyse conversations designed to probe people’s short and long-term memory and propose three different methods for how word vectors may be used in a classification setup. We show that it is possible to identify dementia from the output of a speech recognizer despite a high occurrence of recognition errors.

Phil 8.31.18

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

  • The lightning round slides are in!
  • Get Speaker – done
  • Get posters – done
  • Haircut – done
  • drop off DME/KLR – done
  • Under Pressure response – done, I think?
  • upload ML excel files (done) to play around with graph laplacians some more – done
  • Print out two travel packets – done
  • create shared itinerary document – started. Aaron needs to finish his part
  • From KQED Silicon Valley Conversations The Future of Music: Computer or Composer
    • Ge Wang is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He specializes in the art of computer music design — researching programming languages and interactive software design for music, interaction design, expressive mobile music, new performance ensembles (laptop orchestra and mobile phone orchestra), human-computer interaction, visualization (sndpeek), music game design, aesthetics of technology-mediated design, and methodologies for education at the intersection of art, engineering, and design.
    • Doug Eck is a research scientist working on Magenta, a research project exploring the role of machine learning in the process of creating art and music. Primarily this involves developing new deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms for generating songs, images, drawings, and other materials. But it’s also an exploration in building smart tools and interfaces that allow artists and musicians to extend (not replace!) their processes using these models. Started by me in 2016, Magenta now involves several researchers and engineers from the Google Brain team as well as many others collaborating via open source. Aside from Magenta, I’m working on sequence learning models for summarization and text generation as well new ways to improve AI-generated content based on user feedback.
    • Amy X Newburg has been developing her own brand of irreverently genre-crossing works for voice, live electronics and chamber ensembles for over 25 years, known for her innovative use of live looping technology with electronic percussion, her 4-octave vocal range and her colorful — often humorous — lyrics. One of the earliest performers to work with live digital looping, Amy has presented her solo “avant-cabaret” songs at such diverse venues as the Other Minds and Bang on a Can new music festivals, the Berlin International Poetry Festival, the Wellington and Christchurch Jazz Festivals (New Zealand), the Warsaw Philharmonic Hall, electronic music festivals, colleges, rock clubs and concert halls throughout the U.S. and abroad.
  • Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018
    • YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat are the most popular online platforms among teens. Fully 95% of teens have access to a smartphone, and 45% say they are online ‘almost constantly’
  • Aaron found this: Density-functional fluctuation theory of crowds
    • A primary goal of collective population behavior studies is to determine the rules governing crowd distributions in order to predict future behaviors in new environments. Current top-down modeling approaches describe, instead of predict, specific emergent behaviors, whereas bottom-up approaches must postulate, instead of directly determine, rules for individual behaviors. Here, we employ classical density functional theory (DFT) to quantify, directly from observations of local crowd density, the rules that predict mass behaviors under new circumstances. To demonstrate our theory-based, data-driven approach, we use a model crowd consisting of walking fruit flies and extract two functions that separately describe spatial and social preferences. The resulting theory accurately predicts experimental fly distributions in new environments and provides quantification of the crowd “mood”. Should this approach generalize beyond milling crowds, it may find powerful applications in fields ranging from spatial ecology and active matter to demography and economics.
    • Here’s an interesting part: The DFFT analysis that we present is particularly powerful because it separates the influence of the environment on agents from interactions among those agents. 
      • This implies that it should (could? might?) be possible to calculate a social/environmental ratio for individual agents. High environmental are nomadic. High social are stampede-prone. Need to dig in further.
  • Mechanical Vibrations and Waves » Lecture 4: Coupled Oscillators, Normal Modes
    Lecture 4: Coupled Oscillators, Normal Modes (MIT opencourseware)

    • Prof. Lee analyzes a highly symmetric system which contains multiple objects. By physics intuition, one could identify a special kind of motion – the normal modes. He shows that there is a general strategy for solving the normal modes.
      • Every part of the system is oscillating at the same frequency and the same phase
      • Stopped at 42:07 to take a break. I think this is the right track though. Download this for the plane?
  • Chapter on normal modes

Phil 8.30.18

7:00 – 5:00  ASRC MKT

  • Target Blue Sky paper for iSchool/iConference 2019: The chairs are particularly looking for “Blue Sky Ideas” that are open-ended, possibly even “outrageous” or “wacky,” and present new problems, new application domains, or new methodologies that are likely to stimulate significant new research. 
  • I’m thinking that a paper that works through the ramifications of this diagram as it relates to people and machines. With humans that are slow responding with spongy, switched networks the flocking area is large. With a monolithic densely connected system it’s going to be a straight line from nomadic to stampede. Nomad-Flocking-Stampede2
    • Length: Up to 4 pages (excluding references)
    • Submission deadline: October 1, 2018
    • Notification date: mid-November, 2018
    • Final versions due: December 14, 2018
    • First versions will be submitted using .pdf. Final versions must be submitted in .doc, .docx or La Tex.
  • More good stuff on BBC Business Daily Trolling for Cash
    • Anger and animosity is prevalent online, with some people even seeking it out. It’s present on social media of course as well as many online forums. But now outrage has spread to mainstream media outlets and even the advertising industry. So why is it so lucrative? Bonny Brooks, a writer and researcher at Newcastle University explains who is making money from outrage. Neuroscientist Dr Dean Burnett describes what happens to our brains when we see a comment designed to provoke us. And Curtis Silver, a tech writer for KnowTechie and ForbesTech, gives his thoughts on what we need to do to defend ourselves from this onslaught of outrage.
  • Exposure to Opposing Views can Increase Political Polarization: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment on Social Media
    • Christopher Bail (Scholar)
    • There is mounting concern that social media sites contribute to political polarization by creating “echo chambers” that insulate people from opposing views about current events. We surveyed a large sample of Democrats and Republicans who visit Twitter at least three times each week about a range of social policy issues. One week later, we randomly assigned respondents to a treatment condition in which they were offered financial incentives to follow a Twitter bot for one month that exposed them to messages produced by elected officials, organizations, and other opinion leaders with opposing political ideologies. Respondents were re-surveyed at the end of the month to measure the effect of this treatment, and at regular intervals throughout the study period to monitor treatment compliance. We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative post-treatment, and Democrats who followed a conservative Twitter bot became slightly more liberal post-treatment. These findings have important implications for the interdisciplinary literature on political polarization as well as the emerging field of computational social science.
  • Setup gcloud tools on laptop – done
  • Setup Tensorflow on laptop. Gave up un using CUDA 9.1, but got tf doing ‘hello, tensorflow’
  • Marcom meeting – 2:00
  • Get the concept of behaviors being a more scalable, dependable way of vetting information.
    • Eg Watching the DISI of outrage as manifested in trolling
      • “Uh. . . . not to be nitpicky,,,,,but…the past tense of drag is dragged, not drug.”: An overview of trolling strategies
        • Dr Claire Hardaker (Scholar) (Blog)
          • I primarily research aggression, deception, and manipulation in computer-mediated communication (CMC), including phenomena such as flaming, trolling, cyberbullying, and online grooming. I tend to take a forensic linguistic approach, based on a corpus linguistic methodology, but due to the multidisciplinary nature of my research, I also inevitably branch out into areas such as psychology, law, and computer science.
        • This paper investigates the phenomenon known as trolling — the behaviour of being deliberately antagonistic or offensive via computer-mediated communication (CMC), typically for amusement’s sake. Having previously started to answer the question, what is trolling? (Hardaker 2010), this paper seeks to answer the next question, how is trolling carried out? To do this, I use software to extract 3,727 examples of user discussions and accusations of trolling from an eighty-six million word Usenet corpus. Initial findings suggest that trolling is perceived to broadly fall across a cline with covert strategies and overt strategies at each pole. I create a working taxonomy of perceived strategies that occur at different points along this cline, and conclude by refining my trolling definition.
        • Citing papers
  • FireAnt (Filter, Identify, Report, and Export Analysis Toolkit) is a freeware social media and data analysis toolkit with built-in visualization tools including time-series, geo-position (map), and network (graph) plotting.
  • Fix marquee – done
  • Export to ppt – done!
    • include videos – done
    • Center title in ppt:
      • model considerations – done
      • diversity injection – done
  • Got the laptop running Python and Tensorflow. Had a stupid problem where I accidentally made a virtual environment and keras wouldn’t work. Removed, re-connected and restarted IntelliJ and everything is working!

Phil 8.29.18

7:00 – 4:30 ASRC MKT

  • Editing videos
  • Need to think about short CHI paper about designing for culture/robot interactions. The trolly problem at scale? How would the sim be set up? The amount of randomness at the initial condition? Stiffness vs. connectivity? Beleif space is still important and is actually used as a concept in path planning
  • Visual Exploration and Comparison of Word Embeddings
    • Word embeddings are distributed representations for natural language words, and have been wildly used in many natural language processing tasks. The word embedding space contains local clusters with semantically similar words and meaningful directions, such as the analogy. However, there are different training algorithms and text corpora, which both have a different impact on the generated word embeddings. In this paper, we propose a visual analytics system to visually explore and compare word embeddings trained by different algorithms and corpora. The word embedding spaces are compared from three aspects, i.e., local clusters, semantic directions and diachronic changes, to understand the similarity and differences between word embeddings.
  • Much work on slides
  • Can’t get Google to recognise my account? 
    curl.exe -H "Content-Type: application/json" -H "Authorization: Bearer "$(gcloud auth application-default print-access-token) https://speech.google
apis.com/v1/speech:recognize -d @sync-request.json
curl: (6) Could not resolve host: ya29.c.EloHBu32-0nBAqimi1Zumlot6rjGtGpUk27qTTESRLW4vtd1LY4ihxBIesU3ga-kmwCaM7YZS-JRo_KNjaC_bj13dWazBcKr4YtAEQYFzSpSBx3DwdS46DTt0bg
{
  "error": {
    "code": 403,
    "message": "The request is missing a valid API key.",
    "status": "PERMISSION_DENIED"
  }
}

    No idea what host: ya29.c.EloHBu32-0nBAqimi1Zumlot6rjGtGpUk27qTTESRLW4vtd1LY4ihxBIesU3ga-kmwCaM7YZS-JRo_KNjaC_bj13dWazBcKr4YtAEQYFzSpSBx3DwdS46DTt0bg is

  • Found a problem with the poster. There are two herding DTW charts. Must be reprinted

Phil 8.27.18

7:00 – 5:00 ASRC MKT

  • Good chat with Barbara yesterday. She suggests horse racing podcasts, since the question is always the same “who’s going to win today” and the information to discuss is much more constrained. Additionally, there is the wagering information that could be used to determine the level of consensus?
  • Found an idiom translator! “Swing of the pendulum” occurs at least in French, German and Italian
  • Downloaded the new videos Need to put them in the ppt when the slides stabilize
  • Pinged Wayne about getting together today
  • Changed the questions page to have English, Italian, French and German terms for belief space
  • Another example of diversity injection (twitter)
  • Working on podcast text handling
      • Created the MapsFromPodcasts project in Development
      • Created an new key and downloaded the key json file
      • Installed Google Cloud Tools (213.0.0), following the directions of this page. Wow. Lots of stuff! 
        Output folder: D:\Programs\GoogleCloudAPI
Downloading Google Cloud SDK core.
Extracting Google Cloud SDK core.
Create Google Cloud SDK bat file: D:\Programs\GoogleCloudAPI\cloud_env.bat
Installing components.
Welcome to the Google Cloud SDK!
Your current Cloud SDK version is: 213.0.0
Installing components from version: 213.0.0
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| These components will be installed. |
+-----------------------------------------------------+------------+----------+
| Name | Version | Size |
+-----------------------------------------------------+------------+----------+
| BigQuery Command Line Tool | 2.0.34 | < 1 MiB |
| BigQuery Command Line Tool (Platform Specific) | 2.0.34 | < 1 MiB |
| Cloud SDK Core Libraries (Platform Specific) | 2018.06.18 | < 1 MiB |
| Cloud Storage Command Line Tool | 4.33 | 3.6 MiB |
| Cloud Storage Command Line Tool (Platform Specific) | 4.32 | < 1 MiB |
| Cloud Tools for PowerShell | | |
| Cloud Tools for PowerShell | 1.0.1.8 | 17.9 MiB |
| Default set of gcloud commands | | |
| Windows command line ssh tools | | |
| Windows command line ssh tools | 2017.09.15 | 1.8 MiB |
| gcloud cli dependencies | 2018.08.03 | 1.3 MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------+------------+----------+
For the latest full release notes, please visit:
https://cloud.google.com/sdk/release_notes
#============================================================#
#= Creating update staging area =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: BigQuery Command Line Tool =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: BigQuery Command Line Tool (Platform Spec... =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: Cloud SDK Core Libraries (Platform Specific) =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: Cloud Storage Command Line Tool =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: Cloud Storage Command Line Tool (Platform... =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: Cloud Tools for PowerShell =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: Cloud Tools for PowerShell =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: Default set of gcloud commands =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: Windows command line ssh tools =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: Windows command line ssh tools =#
#============================================================#
#= Installing: gcloud cli dependencies =#
#============================================================#
#= Creating backup and activating new installation =#
#============================================================#
Performing post processing steps...
..............................................................................................................................................................done.
Update done!
This will install all the core command line tools necessary for working with
the Google Cloud Platform.
For more information on how to get started, please visit:
https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/quickstarts
Google Cloud SDK has been installed!

         

     

    • Google is sooooooooooooooooooooo Unix/Linux
  • Meeting with Wayne
    • Fix slides some more
    • Email about demo and poster – done

Phil 8.26.18

Listening to On Being with guest Mahzarin Banaji (Scholar)

  • The other thing that I do is to actually create inputs into my mind of my own making. I do think that in some ways our brains are simple and that they will believe that things are real even if they’re not. So, that’s what movies do. That’s what novels do for us. So what if I have a series of 1,000 pictures that rotate through on my screen saver of people who come from many parts of the world that I will never, ever see or even think about. Look, just take an example close by. I have no idea what life for a farmer in Iowa is. I bet it’s hard. I bet I have no idea what they have to deal with. I don’t think I will ever truly understand.But, right now, they are a distant group in my mind. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I don’t think about farming and farmers. If my screensaver literally just points out the existence of such people and what their issues might be, I believe that my brain is going to begin to care at some level. And if I show myself possibilities that don’t exist easily, that’s even better.
  • A nice example of diversity injection

Phil 8.23.18

7:00 – 5:30 ASRC MKT

dlr99umvaaed9rk

  • Slides
    • Groups/tribes stay the same, but the topics change
    • Past polarizing topics:
      • Confederate statues
      • Kneeling for the national anthem
      • #blacklivesmatter
      • Hoodies
      • Crack cocaine
      • 1968 Olympics Black Power salute
      • Alabama bus boycott
    • Stiffening a group creates a stampede (In-group high SIH)
    • Adding group-invisible diversity disrupts the velocity and direction of a stampede
    • Arendt/Moscovici slide “So we’re doomed, right! Except…”
    • See what velocity of the disrupted stampede looks like
  • Why Trump Supporters Believe He Is Not Corrupt
    • The answer may lie in how Trump and his supporters define corruption. In a forthcoming book titled How Fascism Works, the Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley makes an intriguing claim. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he suggests, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of the law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of the traditional order.”
  • Climate science proposals are being reviewed by Ryan Zinke’s old football buddy. Seriously.

    • But what if the corruption isn’t hidden at all, but right out in the open? What if, when it’s identified, the perpetrator doesn’t apologize, or demonstrate any remorse or shame, and there’s no punishment? What then? We don’t really have good narratives around what happens in that situation, which is why the Trump administration so often leaves us sputtering and gawking. It can’t just be a motley collection of incompetent grifters, each misruling their own little fiefdom, trying to stay in their boss’s good graces, succeeding less through wits than a congenital lack of shame and the unstinting institutional support of GOP donors. Can it?

Phil 8.22.18

7:00 – 4:00 ASRC MKT