Comm 156 Midterm Flashcards
What is a network?
Mathematical model of interactions. (collection of points joined together in pairs by lines)
What are the two ingredients that every network has?
Nodes and links
What is the proper verbiage when describing a network?
Two nodes are connected if… “they share, they go to”
What is the degree of a node?
The number of links connected to the node
What is a component of a network?
A subnetwork in which every node is connected to every node through chain of links. There can be more than 1 in a network.
What is the small world effect?
The minimum number of links that one must pass to get to another node
What does the Allen Curve state?
The probability of two people communicating diminishes as the distance increasing.
What did the “This Hurts Me As Much As It Hurts You” reading find?
People closer together in a concentration network will tend to reinforce their behaviors, where more connections within groups can expose people to new behavior
What did the Enron emails reveal?
They revealed that hubs within a project network highlighted illegal activity.
What is a bipartite network?
Nodes that can be divided into two groups so that all the connections go from one group to the other.
What can a bipartite network be projected into?
Two different networks that each only have one type of node. “____ is connected if they share a ____” (Such as: ingredients, and flavor compounds”
What is a weighted network?
Different nodes have different weights (size) according to the strength of their connection, aka how many links they have attached to it
What did the Framingham study find?
People’s behavior is correlated to the behavior of their neighbor, or close neighbor. Aka if my neighbor smokes, I am more likely to smoke and a neighbor two links down is more likely to smoke than a random person in the population. The further you are, statistically is goes down, however.
What is a homophily?
When nodes in a network tend to connect to similar nodes.
What is a directed network?
When a node goes from one to the other; usually shown with an arrow
What are network communities?
They are subgroups of a network with a lot of connections within the group but not between the groups
Potential Causal Explanation for Social Contagion: Influence
An individual’s behavior affects the behavior of her network neighbors (as in the obesity study) . Network changes behavior. Being connected can lead to similar behavior.
Potential Causal Explanation for Social Contagion: Selection/ Network Dynamics
The network itself changes. Similar people become closer (homphily) and dissimilar people break ties. Similar behavior can lead to being connected. (as in the liberal/conservative/independent blog)
Potential Causal Explanation for Social Contagion: Exogenous Covariates
An external factor that is somehow correlated with the network causes the ties to change. (such as, geography)
What is the mathematical model for going viral? When does an epidemic occur?
Susceptible > Infected > Recovered. (SIR) An epidemic occurs when the infection rate exceeds the recovery rate.
What is the mathematical equation for the Epidemic threshold? What do the variables stand for? What is that number otherwise known as?
cid > 1 (C= contact rate, i= infectivity rate, and d= duration time) - The Viral Tipping Point
What is the infection rate?
The total contacts between susceptible people and infected people
What is infectivity?
The probability that a contact between a susceptible person and an infected person will lead to an infection
What is the contact rate?
On average, how many contacts does the susceptible person have a day
What is the SIR graph model that will happen over time?
The S people will go from 100 > almost 0. The I people will go in a bell curve. The R people will go from 0 > almost 100.
What was Ebola a failure?
It was always less than 1, so it dies. Low contact rate between people in rural Africa and those who contacted it, usually stayed home in isolation. Low infectivity rate because bodily fluid has to go into us. Low duration time because people tend to die pretty quickly.
Why was H1N1 not a failure?
It was contacted in the cities, where air travel and modern transportation increased the contact rate. Easier to transmit than ebola because people just need to be near you. There is a longer duration time (weeks).
What is the small world problem? 2 possibilities.
The probability of 2 people with mutual acquaintance meeting up. X –> Z through Y. Either everyone can be linked through a small amount of acquaintances or people have circles and cliques that prohibit any 2 random people from meeting. Additionally we have social classes and cliques.
What 3 things need to be done to start an epidemic?
Increase the contact rate, increase the infectivity rate, and increase the duration time. That way, cid > 1
Which marketing features work better: Viral or Passive? Why?
Viral works better because you are personally sending a message to a friend, rather than it being automatic every time you use that application. It works better because Active has a larger I and D, but the C is low because people ignore it. Viral has a low I and D but the C is high and overtime it has a longer duration.
What is the issue with the viral tipping point?
It assumes that:
- Everyone interacts at random
- Everyone is equally as susceptible
- All people have equal amounts of contacts
However:
- We often interact with the same people
- Our status is correlated with the status of others
What is the problem with using social science to measure contagion?
We don’t always have a large enough N (sample size). It is difficult to manipulate networks in a controlled way. They are expensive. Are not all face-to-face anymore.
How do we solve the social science problem?
We use a model network that “looks like” a real network. This allows us to be able to measure and manipulate the features of the network.
What is the average path length? How do we find it?
For any two nodes, this is the shortest path between them (the distance). You measure the length between all the pairs of nodes and then take the average.