A pre-print from Mark Newman of the Santa Fe Institute. Here's the abstract:

"Recent work has demonstrated that many social networks, and indeed many networks of other types also, have broad distributions of vertex degree. Here we show that this has a substantial impact on the shape of ego-centered networks, i.e., sets of network vertices that are within a given distance of a specified central vertex, the ego. This in turn affects concepts and methods based on ego-centered networks, such as snowball sampling and the "ripple effect". In particular, we argue that one's acquaintances, one's immediate neighbors in the acquaintance network, are far from being a random sample of the population, and that this biases the numbers of neighbors two and more steps away. We demonstrate this concept using data drawn from academic collaboration networks, for which, as we show, current simple theories for the typical size of ego-centered networks give numbers that differ greatly from those measured in reality. We present an improved theoretical model which gives significantly better results."

Ego-centered networks and the ripple effect

(Summary excerpted from Science, 23 November 2001)

"It may not expose the dark recesses of your soul, but the Implicit Association Test can reveal attitudes you may not admit to your closest friend--or even to yourself. By gauging your immediate reactions to sequences of words or images flashed on the screen, the five versions of the test supposedly disinter deep-seated biases on race, gender, age, politics, and academic subjects. The results can be illuminating and are occasionally disconcerting: In the racial associations test, the site reports, most Americans betray some preference for whites over blacks. To get in-depth explanations of the scoring and background, however, you have to visit the researchers' home pages, where you can peruse their papers on what they've learned from 3 years of probing attitudes online and read about the test's limitations."

The Implicit Association Test

If you are ever approached by a bunch of over-eager white guys in a white van who try to sell you ("cheap!!!") a set of surround-sound speakers straight out of the van, ... mock them laughingly and offer to sell them some dot-com stock.

(Scroll down to the "consumer reviews" section of the page.)

Tom: Do you remember these guys in Atlanta?

Beware the white van

Here's an article from the latest issue (October) of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Skim through to the section of "Reflexivity". I think MemeSreams should promote valuable discourse among members of the community.

Abstract: In recent times, much has been said about the possibility that the two-way, decentralized communications of cyberspace can provide sites of rational-critical discourse autonomous from state and economic interests and thus extending the public sphere at large. In this paper the extent to which the Internet does in fact enhance the public sphere is evaluated. [A]nalysis shows that vibrant exchange of positions and rational critique does take place within many online fora. However, there are a number of factors limiting the expansion of the public sphere online. [...]

Computer-Mediated Communication and the Public Sphere

Table of Contents includes:
The Idea of Space ... as geography; as political boundaries;
Space and movement
Internet and Space: Transforming Relationships
The elements of the transformation
Consequences of the transformations
Finding a New Space: Cybernetic Space
Internet and Cybernetic Space

From Cyber Space to Cybernetic Space: Rethinking the Relationship between Real and Virtual Spaces

A new report from the United States Internet Council (USIC) explains that the majority of online users are not native English speakers.

"The Internet continued to grow at a very rapid pace and surpassed a half-billion online users in 2001. In fact, the Internet is growing so rapidly that the architecture of the Internet is being compelled to reshape itself with a new IP structure and new Top Level and multilingual domains. [...] In 2001 the online population crossed the half billion milestone and online demographics began to increasingly reflect offline realities. Significantly, native English speakers lost their dominance in 2001 and now represent approximately 45% of the online population."

Based on this report and a recent Harris poll, it's clear that the now-stagnant US online population no longer dominates the network. In case there was previously any doubt, take notice: the global Internet has arrived.

Not multi-lingual? You may be missing half the Net.

"We propose some simple models of the growth of social networks, based on three general principles: (1) meetings take place between pairs of individuals at a rate which is high if a pair has one or more mutual friends and low otherwise; (2) acquaintances between pairs of individuals who rarely meet decay over time; (3) there is an upper limit on the number of friendships an individual can maintain. Using computer simulations, we find that models that incorporate all of these features reproduce many of the features of real social networks, including high levels of clustering or network transitivity and strong community structure in which individuals have more links to others within their community than to individuals from other communities."

The Structure of Growing Social Networks

In one hand the Qur'vn, in the other a wineglass,
Sometimes keeping the rules, sometimes breaking them.
Here we are in this world, unripe and raw,
Not outright heathens, not quite Muslims.
--Mujir (12th century)

Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems

NYT film critic A.O. Scott writes: "I hope that little will change about the indomitable four-fingered family that resides in a pink bungalow on Evergreen Terrace. For nothing has summed up the promise and confusion of American life in the post-cold-war era better than "The Simpsons." Nothing else has harnessed the accumulated energies and memory traces of the civilization with so much intelligence and originality."

Why "The Simpsons" always was, is, and always will be better than "South Park." (Not that this was ever in doubt.)

NYT: How 'The Simpsons' Survives

Summary/Review from The Scout Report:

This new site from Southern Methodist University (SMU) features just over 200 government documents from World War II. Plans are to enhance the database to approximately double its size by May, when 300-500 documents will be included. Users can either view the documents in a simple list (sortable by title, author, or publication date) or perform a fielded search (title, author, subject, or keyword). Advanced searches allow for boolean operators and additional fields (series, SuDoc number, and publisher information). Results provide cataloging information, links to lists of other titles by the same subject and agency, an image of the document's cover, and a link to the document itself (.pdf). While it might be nice if the site offered more of a guided browse by subject option, this is nonetheless a nice collection of archival material that should be welcomed by historians in a variety of fields or general readers with an interest in World War II. The project documentation section, which includes, among other things, cataloging guidelines and information on catalog configuration, should be useful to users working on similar Web archives. Rounding out the site are an Other Resources section, which offers half a dozen annotated links, and a link to SMU's World War II Memorial Plaza.

World War II-era U.S. Government Publications