The digital traces we leave behind when engaging with the modern world offer an interesting lens through which we study behavioral patterns as expression of gender. Although gender differentiation has been observed in a number of settings, the majority of … Continue reading
By harnessing the power of our collective intelligence, can humans as a species work together to implement thoughtful solutions in an age of connectivity? In a world riddled with big problems, leading social scientist Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland has heartening news. … Continue reading
Standard advice about preparing for disasters focuses on building shelters and stockpiling things like food, water and batteries. But resilience – the ability to recover from shocks, including natural disasters – comes from our connections to others, and not from … Continue reading
Long before the advent of social media, human social networks were built around sharing a much more essential commodity: food. Now, researchers reporting on the food sharing networks of two contemporary groups of hunter-gatherers in the Cell Press journal Current … Continue reading
The threshold model has been widely adopted as a classic model for studying contagion processes on social networks. We consider asymmetric individual interactions in social networks and introduce a persuasion mechanism into the threshold model. Specifically, we study a combination … Continue reading
This paper looks at how ideas, constructs, methods and insights coming out of systems thinking and the sciences of complex systems can be applied to the study of social entrepreneurship. At present, there is no one general theoretical perspective that … Continue reading
How does network structure affect diffusion? Recent studies suggest that the answer depends on the type of contagion. Complex contagions, unlike infectious diseases (simple contagions), are affected by social reinforcement and homophily. Hence, the spread within highly clustered communities is … Continue reading
Despite recent advances in uncovering the quantitative features of stationary human activity patterns, many applications, from pandemic prediction to emergency response, require an understanding of how these patterns change when the population encounters unfamiliar conditions. To explore societal response to … Continue reading
Our understanding of how individual mobility patterns shape and impact the social network is limited, but is essential for a deeper understanding of network dynamics and evolution. This question is largely unexplored, partly due to the difficulty in obtaining large-scale … Continue reading
Social groups are fundamental building blocks of human societies. While our social interactions have always been constrained by geography, it has been impossible, due to practical difficulties, to evaluate the nature of this restriction on social group structure. We construct … Continue reading
