It must be great (and a great challenge) to have access to all the data Facebook and use it to answer questions that are relevant not only for the immediate business objectives of the company. In the words of the Data Science Team leader:<\/p>\n
“The biggest challenges Facebook has to solve are the same challenges that social science has.”\u00a0Those challenges include understanding why some ideas or fashions spread from a few individuals to become universal and others don’t, or to what extent a person’s future actions are a product of past communication with friends.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Cool! These statements might make for a good discussion about the ethics of doing social science research inside and outside academica as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Facebook has a Data Science Team. And here is what they do: Eytan Bakshy […] wanted to learn whether our actions on Facebook are mainly influenced by those of our close friends, who are likely to have similar tastes. […] So he messed with how Facebook operated for a quarter of a billion users. Over a seven-week period, the 76 million links that those users shared with each other were logged. Then, on 219 million randomly chosen occasions, Facebook prevented someone from seeing a link shared by a friend. Hiding links this way created a control group so that Bakshy could assess how often people end up promoting the same links because they have similar information sources and interests\u00a0\u00a0[link to source at Technology Review]. It must be great (and a great challenge) to have access to all the data Facebook and use it to answer questions that are relevant not only for the immediate business objectives of the company. In the words of the Data Science Team leader: “The biggest challenges Facebook has to solve are the same challenges that social science has.”\u00a0Those challenges include understanding why some ideas or fashions spread from a few individuals to become universal and others don’t, or to what extent a person’s future actions are a product of past communication with friends. Cool! These statements might make for a good discussion about the ethics of doing social science research inside and outside academica as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[3,30,33],"tags":[259,260,321,436,542,605],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7g3hj-7Q","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":531,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=531","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":0},"title":"The hidden structure of (academic) organizations","date":"October 23, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"All organizations have a 'deep' hidden structure based on the social interactions among its members which might or might not coincide with the official formal one. University departments are no exception - if anything, the informal alliances, affinities, and allegiances within academic departments are only too visible and salient. Network\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Network analysis"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/10\/social-network-bsk1.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":220,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=220","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":1},"title":"Slavery, ethnic diversity and economic development","date":"December 14, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"What is the impact of the slave trades on economic progress in Africa? Are the modern African states which 'exported' a higher number of slaves more likely to be underdeveloped several centuries afterwards? Harvard economist Nathan Nunn addresses these questions in his chapter for the \"Natural experiments of history\" collection.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Development"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/slave-trades.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":193,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=193","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":2},"title":"Social science in the courtroom","date":"December 2, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Everyone who is interested in\u00a0the sociology of science, causal inferences from observational data,\u00a0employment gender discrimination, judicial sagas, or academic spats should read the latest issue of Sociological Methods & Research. The whole issue is devoted to the Wal-Mart Stores,Inc. v. Dukes et al. case - \"the largest class-action employment discrimination\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Observational studies"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":282,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=282","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":3},"title":"Writing with the rear-view mirror","date":"February 2, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Social science research is supposed to work like this: 1) You want to explain a certain case or a class of phenomena; 2) You develop a theory and derive a set of hypotheses; 3) You test the hypotheses with data; 4) You conclude about the plausibility of\u00a0the theory; 5) You\u00a0write\u00a0a\u00a0paper\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academic publishing"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":662,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=662","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":4},"title":"Hyperlinks","date":"January 30, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"After a not-so-short hiatus during which I visited friends and family in Bulgaria, went through a couple of seasonal colds, and got a new workstation up and running (MacBook Pro with W7), I am finally back to the blog. As a warm-up, a bunch of interesting links you might have\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Hyperlinks"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/coral-2.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":544,"url":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/?p=544","url_meta":{"origin":486,"position":5},"title":"Ethnic job discrimination in the Netherlands","date":"October 29, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"I have more than one reason to care about job discrimination based on ethnicity in the Netherlands. A new study shows that there is plenty to worry about. In short, the researchers sent identical job applications varying only the name - Dutch vs. ethnic (Antillean, Surinamese, Turkish, Moroccan). The 'Dutch'\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Field experiments"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/re-design.dimiter.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}