#preferential attachment

[ladyfingerpress]

#94 Attractive Thinking

The Forces of Cognition

archive.org/details/z_lxxxxiiij/

[ladyfingerpress]

SN#3

Social Oncology

Growth. My breasts are growing. A spot’s growing on the right with a frightening suddenness. I can cut it out, and my joy’s marred. A divot forever. I’m trying to unify the good and bad feelings about my body. To undisconnect my pieces and care for the whole.

I think of the life principle. Growth and cancer come from the same place. Cancerous growth must result sometimes from life’s motions. From its excesses and even its diversities.

I think of Luigi. I realize the likes of him are social oncologists.

I think of preferential attachment. The scientific inevitability that bedevils my anarchism. The rich get richer, then what? The slogan says eat them.

But cancer is unappetizing.

Remove them. Cut them out. Biopsy if you like.

Take care of the mark, take care of the organ, take care of the whole.

Continue reading

[spectrumofnetworks]

Those who have been on Twitter a few years can game this by accumulating a large percentage of followers who never return. A simple thing Twitter can do to make this metric more fair is to change number of followers to active followers. Active followers would mean something like number of followers who have logged in the past 30 days. Additionally you can have a metric like Tweet Reach, which would be the number of times a tweet from this user loaded into the timeline of another in the past 30 days. It’s easy to see why this is a scary proposition for Twitter. Switching to active followers means breaking the news to users that they’re considerably less popular than they’ve been told. This is hard for platforms to do, as it would be a judgement day for a lot of precious egos.

Twitter’s Root Injustice — - meta - — Medium

[afgurri]

Say you have a 1 in 100,000 chance of winning at roulette, but winning gives you an additional chance out of 100,000—bringing you to 2 in 100,000. If each victory increases your probability by another chance out of 100,000, the vast supermajority of players won’t experience much of a difference in outcomes. However, if you were to have a pool of, say, one million players at a given moment, a tiny sliver of them would experience a cascade of increasing probabilities until reaching a point where additional victories became highly probable.

The Most Powerful Force in the Universe

Did you know that merely by reading this Umlaut piece, you increase the probability that someone else will read it?

[lordlyaffordance]

Social media works for prominent people better

Tufekci again:

"Social media, like almost new tools, can differentially empower the already connected (rich get richer) as opposed to the completely or weakly unconnected. There are 12,000 people who were detained by military prosecutors in Egypt and many languish in jails without such attention. However, this is not an either/or situation. Whether or not #freemona and #freealaa help others depends on whether they become “charismatic megafauna” –where a prominent example helps the whole ecology– or part of a “celebrity system”–where a few people get the attention in isolation. Charismatic megafauna is how ecologists refer to popular animals such as the Panda or tigers–powerful symbols which help move people to preserve vast amounts of landscape. Ecologists aren’t just interested in playing with cuddly panda or tiger babies, and would like to save the whole ecosystem — but carefully and deliberately put faces of pandas and tigers on their campaigns because of the the way human brain and human societies work. It is just very hard to move large numbers of people without powerful and sympathetic symbols. Mona and Alaa are both such powerful and sympathetic symbols and they are both aware of this. In spite of the fact that his wife is about to give birth to their first child, Alaa refused deals which would have gotten him released if only he would accept a few limits on his speech because he realizes the powerful symbolic position he occupies. In her very first interview, Mona immediately talked about her fellow detainees and how those less privileged than her face much worse fates. Still, though, it is not just up to their efforts whether attention bestowed only upon them. Activists and concerned people must be cognizant of this fraught negotiation between using the power of the spotlight on one person versus using it shine it on wider swaths. This can’t be done just by complaining about the “celebrity” or “star” system as not only is that not going away (because it is a deep human impulse), and it is often the best way to start a campaign. The problem is making sure it doesn’t stop there–and that remains an open question and constant struggle."

[lordlyaffordance]

Not all tweets are equal

"Twitter is about to start attaching value ratings to users' tweets. The value judgements will be assigned to the public metadata of tweeters' posts, and used by Twitter's streaming API to help developers more selectively curate massive amounts of status updates. Designations of "none," "low" and "medium" will most likely debut on Feb. 20, according to a post by developer advocate Arne Roomann-Kurrik on the Twitter developers' blog. A "high" value option will be rolled out sometime after the initial batch. How exactly tweets will be ranked is not entirely clear, but Roomann-Kurrik says "medium" — and, later — "high" value posts will be roughly analogous to the "Top Tweets" results you get when you search a word or hashtag on Twitter.com. That likely indicates tweets drawing high engagement or coming from users with large followings."

Well, if engagement (number of favorites, replies or retweets) is used as the measure, then this measure is not as dangerous as taking into account the 'status' of the user that is making the Tweet (for example if you used follower numbers.)

Yet even with engagement it could be unfair. Users with large followings are much more likely to get engagement on their content. A form of preferential attachment.

What would be more meritorious is if it was engagement as a factor of the size of their following. In other words have your engagement exceeded what a person with your audience size would be expected to get?

This is also an example where the inequality is not in an affordance or user experience, but in the classification of data via an algorithm.

The Twitter announcement.

[lordlyaffordance]

Can "leaderless revolutions" stay leaderless?

Zeynep Tufekci asked this question in a blog post (extract below) just after the apparent success of the Egyptian uprising, and that post is the genesis of this blog about inequality online.

Perhaps its because I'm from a country blighted by so many problems caused by obscene inequality, perhaps I'm just another sucker for techno utopianism, but when John Perry Barlow wrote his Declaration for Independence for Cyberspace, something inside me went yeah! On the Internet we will do things differently.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

When I read that I thought that, mmm... such a world would be rather nice. And for some time it seemed that digital media lived up to the utopian promise. A break with big top down hierarchical media.

And then I read Tufekci's post:

I agree and have said before that this was the revolution of a networked public, and as such, not dominated by traditional structures such as political parties or trade-unions (although such organizations played a major role, especially towards the end). I have also written about how this lack of well-defined political structure might be both a weakness and a strength. A fact little-understood but pertinent to this discussion, however, is that relatively flat networks can quickly generate hierarchical structures even without any attempt at a power grab by emergent leaders or by any organizational, coordinated action. In fact, this often occurs through a perfectly natural process, known as preferential attachment, which is very common to social and other kinds of networks. In order to understand how this process works, consider the potential mechanisms by which a node in a network grows in importance. Let’s do a short-hand conceptualization and accept the number of followers in a Twitter network as a measure of importance... Read more

[lordlyaffordance]

A preferential attachment process is any of a class of processes in which some quantity, typically some form of wealth or credit, is distributed among a number of individuals or objects according to how much they already have, so that those who are already wealthy receive more than those who are not. "Preferential attachment" is only the most recent of many names that have been given to such processes. They are also referred to under the names "Yule process", "cumulative advantage", "the rich get richer", and, less correctly, the "Matthew effect"... The principal reason for scientific interest in preferential attachment is that it can, under suitable circumstances, generate power law distributions.

Preferential attachment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia