We are all social scientists now (but weren’t we born that way, anyway?).

The last two days, a number of us were at Hamed Haddadi's excellently run workshop on social networks - see the web for some more info (and slides/talks and

http://www.commnet.ac.uk/node/42

challenge discussions to appear later) - One we had involved the idea of scaling up social science research so it can meet the dynamic/complex systems/graph theory people half way (right now most anthropology studies take 3 years to study 8 people and involve video diaries and interviews etc etc, whereas most the graph analaysis work is glibly working away on all of 500M facebook users ,or 10M phone call records, or 5M foursquare users locations etc etc) - so we suggesetedi) social scientists study social scientists studying something, and we then automate them. ii) we figure out better sampling metholdoogies for taking groups of 8 out of 5M iii) we scale up NLP and vision processing to cope with automatic social science/ethnology on 5M users and iv) we figure out how to train up and  get all the users to study temselves and incentise them to join in (free phones, all you can eat data plans, or even just plain old fashioned money).

 

meanwhile, the ccle route from King's Cross to QMUL/Mile ENd road is a history lesson in itself (go down Gray's Inn Road til you hit High Holborn, and turn east. You're then on the A11, effectively pointed towards Ilford. The name of the road reflects the history of the medieval city of london, as you go through westgate, newgate (yes, the prison), ten Cheapside, Poultry, Cornhill, Leadenhall (road off to onesise is Threadneedle St) and Aldgate (was Aldersgate)....and on to Whitechapel - awesome - a much less dangerous and fun route back is the Grand Union Canal towpath, along the side of Victoria Park and up past Haggleston to Islington...(5.6 miles by runkeeper:)

 

I was wondering about synaesthesia and data representation - you could touch, smell, hear, feel, taste, and even predict 6 out of 8 bits - the other two would be parity, to be fair and not too odd:)