Sociomatrix --Reflect of Lecture 7 & 8 & 9

Recently, I have learnt many interesting concepts about the social network analysis including not only meaningful but also useful calculation from the lectures. All the content in class inspired me a lot and I want to pick the sociomatrix, one important property of the social network analysis, to share with you.

Before giving the description and explanation of sociomatrix, let’s introduce the sociogram first.

Sociogram is a graphical representation of social networks. It can help us see the interactions in the social networks intuitively. Prof. Chan showed us the sociogram of our blogosphere. You can easily find the interesting interaction of your own in the previous period of writing blog and giving comments to others’ blogs.

Figure 1 Sociogram of blogosphere

You may see that some are isolated yet some are tightly connected with others, those relationships are showed as lines between the individuals. The sociogram is performed well in human eyesight to see the relation. But how can we let the computer know or aware of that information as well? In other words, before the computer doing the social network analysis, it must have some basic data, like the connection between whom and whom, to calculate.

We might aware that any one of those connections involves only two individuals. And even considering the directed graph, it still involves two nodes. That property might already inspire you to think the relationship as a way of mathematics, like matrix.

Matrix of two dimensions is exactly prefect for indicating the relationship between two things. If we put the elements the same sequence both at the horizontal and vertical direction, or you can say the row and the column, and we use 1 and 0 to represent that there is a connection between the two elements or not, we have a matrix as we expect. The matrix is for the social network and we can give it an exclusive name, sociomatrix.

We give the definition of the sociomatrix if we consider the directed sociogram as follows:

For the pair<ni,nj>, which means the element ni of the social network point to the element nj in the socogram, we regard Xij as the value (1 for yes and 0 for no) that is there a tie from the ni to nj on the relation. The diagonal elements are usually undefined because SNA ignore the “self-choice” element.

We take another simple sociogram as example to intro the sociomatrix and we know that B points to C but not vice versa. We can get the idea that X23 equals to 1 and X32 equals to 0, just exactly represent the relationship in the sociogram. Then we have a clear idea about Xij: From the view of row, element i choose element j. From the view of column, element i is chosen by element j.

Figure 2 Sociogram of 4 people's relation

	A	B	C	D
A	-	0	1	1
B	0	-	1	1
C	1	0	-	0
D	1	1	0	-

Chart 1 Sociogram transform to Sociomatrix

Figure 3 Sociomatrix of  4 people's relation

Sociomatrix can not only represent the link of elements but calculate to find the potential relationship with the operation like transpose, addition, subtraction, multiplication and even power.

Power of the sociomatrix may be the most difficult to understand. But after discussion and reflection, we can clearly know the product of a sociomatrix can show the walk of length. With the help of the matrix, the social network analysis seems to be much more reliable and interesting.

Figure 4 Discussion on the power of sociomatrix in class

What’s more, there are many other concepts like actor centrality and actor prestige which contain fascinating calculation and information. Wish to learn more knowledge in the next lecture!

Communication Networks--Reflect of Lecture 5 & 6

Note at the beginning: This article will be divided into two parts. The first part I will talk about the Communication Networks which is proposed by Porf. Chan in the lecture 5. And the second part I would like to share something around the assignment in the lecture 6, including the answer of the two class activities.

Let’s talk about Communication Networks first. We have learnt many concepts around social networking and we studied Social Psychology Theories of Groups and Group Behaviors, Social Experience as well as Cloud Collaboration in the fifth lecture. What interests me most in this lecture is Communication Networks and I am going to illustrate some understanding of mine about it in this blog.

We shall begin with the concept of group. A group indicates that its members should be aware of and somehow interact with each other, specifically, they consider themselves as a group. Like Prof. Chan said that a group is a structure consists of members with different roles, status, relations and communication networks, as well as subgroups. Group members usually share the same interests, topics or target. So we may think about the question, that is, how can those members share the information with others. In other words, what does the communication between them look like? Now we focus on communication networks, which can be regarded as communication structure that restrict its member can communicate with whom at one time.

There are five organizations of communication networks if we consider the number of members in group is five, which was proposed by Bavelas in 1950. The communication structures are as follows: Circle, Chain, Y, Wheel and Concom. According to the picture of communication patterns in problem solving involving five peoples, we can clearly see the relationship and state of members in group.

Figure of Five Different Communication Structures

Take Circle pattern as example, a person can only communicate to his/her neighbor on both left-hand and right-hand side, so does everyone else. In such pattern, information or messages can only be delivered by person to person like cascade form but in two directions from the start. You may notice the situation that if one of them receives the message but do nothing about it, such as not telling the other neighbor, that neighbor still have chance to get the message if others are responsible to deliver the message to their neighbors. Imagine that a group of students deliver paper note in class, one pass the note to another and the note can be delivered back from different student, which forms the circle pattern.

We can easily cut off one of those communications to form Chain pattern, just like the situation we mentioned that one do nothing about the communication to the next one. Unlike the Circle pattern, its disadvantage is obvious that the information may not go further if one in the middle of chain is unwilling to pass on the message. So in this Chain pattern, a requirement that members must be active in the group is needed. The Chain pattern is just like the process of posting a letter.

We continue cutting off one of communications’ connection but link the separate member to the middle one of the chain, thus we gain the Y pattern. Y pattern is similar to the Chain pattern yet the one who can communicate with three members plays a more important role in the group.

It can be seen more easily that the middle member’s status isn’t the same as others if we keep on cutting off the connection and do the same thing that link the apart one to the middle member, where we get the Wheel pattern. The middle member is called as central person or key person. Nowadays, many enterprises’ management structure is using this Wheel pattern to managing the company and normally the key person is exactly the CEO. Centralized networks is recognized as a structure that is both appropriate and fast to deal with simple task while decentralized network is apt to handle complex task.

The Concom pattern is formed if every two members can communicate with each other and it is the most popular pattern in building social networking communication. In this pattern, there is no such a central person or leader existing, so everyone in the group plays an equal role with the highest participants’ satisfaction. Members can talk without any hesitate like in the real life because that the social network doesn’t have his/her boss or superior. We can hardly see any e-commerce social network don’t use this pattern to form their social networking and thus the users have the highest flexibility to buy things from one online-shop to the other.

To sum up, Communication Networks is diverse and each of them leads to different level of leadership among the members. To find out the most suitable and effective communication pattern to solve different problems is very important in social networks.

As for the lecture 6, we have learnt some concepts about collaboration and specially, we have an assignment in class, that is, to do a reading and answer two questions as an individual and as a group.

As a solo assignment, my answers of the questions are as follows:

The first question is that what is the definition of Social Cloud? By highlighting in yellow color in the article, I found the definition: A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network. It leverages pre-existing trust relationships between users and its resources exchanged need not be symmetric and can represent vastly different capabilities.

The second one is what are the possible applications of a Social Cloud? Also by highlighting in gray color, I found that there are mainly five aspects of possible applications of a Social Cloud which are as follows: social computation cloud, social storage cloud, social collaborative cloud, social cloud for public science, enterprise social cloud. Each has its own property and difference between others.

As for class activity, our group create a Google document to edit, share and discuss the answers.

The former answer becomes that a Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network. It can change the situation that some individual users of a social network are bounded by finite capacity and limited capabilities. A cloud-based usage model is used to enable virtualized resource sharing through service-based interfaces. And the Social Cloud leverages pre-existing trust relationships between users and its resources exchanged need not be symmetric and can represent vastly different capabilities.

The latter one turns to be like this:

There are mainly five aspects of possible applications of a Social Cloud which are as follows: social computation cloud, social storage cloud, social collaborative cloud, social cloud for public science, enterprise social cloud. Each has its own property and difference between others.

Examples:

Social Computation Cloud : Onlive.com

Social Storage Cloud: SkyDrive by Microsoft, Google drive(docs can be shared with others), dropbox

Social Collaborative Cloud: Google Docs

Social Cloud for Public Science: Wikipedia, SETI, Rosetta, Docking

I think the epistemic aim in Class Activity One is just the metacognition part. We find the answer from the article and highlight it, whose process is exactly the same as knowing the knowing and learning the learning. We just classify which sentences are relate to the questions and acquire the most correlative belief and explanation. But in Class Activity Two is totally different. We discuss the answer of our own and explore more information about the social cloud. We correct our wrong understanding by listening others’ elaboration and relearn the same thing in a different point of view which you don’t think like that before. You absorb others new idea or knowledge and think the question again to find the best definition, which approaches the truth, that’s why we change our aim from just understanding.

According to the assignment as individual and group work, the epistemic cognition is different and the group work reaches the third level of the cognition. The reason is mainly because the aims at the two stages are different. For individual part, we just try to understand the key words. Meanwhile, we modify and correct our understanding in a group discussion. Besides, limitation and justification of knowledge are different from person to person, which affect the belief of one own.

When talking about the process of approaching to those problems, I do the different ways in two activities. As individually, I read the whole article first, then find and highlight the key words or sentences which relates to the question, summarize those highlight part to get the answer as well. As in a group, I put my understanding to the group mates and express my thoughts. Then listen to the others and discuss with them not only to find the consent but also to inspire myself through group mates’ ideas. Finally, we share and summarize the ultimate answer.

In addition, I find it interesting that everyone does the metacognition in different ways. Some of them highlight the original sentences in the article and some of them just underlining the key word in the sentences. Moreover, some write down their answer using their own words.

To sum up, everyone has his/her way to achieve the cognition and metacognition. Yet we usually achieve the epistemic cognition as a group, and it mainly rely on the individual cognition, understanding and knowledge.

From Self-Cognition To Social Psychology

We all know that Social Networking concentrates on building the relationships among people. Individuals are unique as well as alike, and we do have our human nature. To identify who we are and what we are, we sometimes actually do the self-cognition unconsciously. In the meantime, the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors may vary from person to person differently, and these differences can be influenced by the actual, imagined or implied presence of others. Social Psychology is exactly studying how and why case like this.

When it comes to self-cognition, it contains many aspects. For instance, when we are aware of ourselves as an object, we are at the state of self-awareness. Besides, we look ourselves at different ways which includes the private self, such as thoughts and feelings, and public self about our own public image. Self-cognition is a self-improvement process, it can make you find out the question like “What am I like” and your social/personal identity. When we put self-cognition into society or social network, it connects to the social group tightly. Self-presentation is just the way that we show ourselves in front of others and we usually have our own strategic motives in different situations.

Interaction between person and person is the fundamental process of social networking. Except from the self-cognition, we also consider the fact that we are in the society and we are influenced by each other to some degree. Observation, Imitation and Modeling are the three basic forms of learning socially. Our behavior or performance can be affected by the environment, especially from the modeling, just like the Bandura’s Bobo Doll Experiment. The social psychology can typically explain how these human behaviors become.

Social Psychology is a scientific study with large scale extent. We then focus and constrain it as the efficacy part, it might be good for us to know social psychology clearly. People may have greater efficacy when they work in group than working alone. Try to image that you are doing a project on your own and basically you will feel fear about the failure, which generates negative attitude. But as a group to do the project, you may feel quite good about the company from your group mates and focus on the goal as well as not to drag your group down, which generates the positive attitude. In some degree, working as a group can activate more responsibility and persistence, which actually affects one’s choice of activities and effort.

In Social Networking, we can’t ignore the individuals’ self-cognition and social psychology because both of them are the element of the interaction. Only by knowing these factors better can we explore Social Networking deeper and know the attribution of social behavior more comprehensively.

Three Level of Cognition

We learn things and absorb knowledge from the others or from the new task every day. Actually, when we reach the media or news, we come to an action called cognition, whose hierarchy can be defined as three levels. Level 1 is Cognition. It is a set of mental processes which includes attention, memory, read, writing, etc. Level 2 is Metacognition, which means to cognize the cognition. In specific, it’s the ability about knowing one’s own cognitive processes and regulating these processes. Level 3 is so-called Epistemic Cognition. Individuals share their ideas with each other and rise above them to reach the goal of knowledge advancement, which reflects on the limits, certainty as well as criteria of knowing.

Three Level Hierarchy of Cognition

As a contrast, there is a classification of learning objectives called Bloom’s Taxonomy. It divides cognition into six degrees, which are as follows: Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and Evaluation. It might has more detail of its hierarchy, but when it comes to Social Networking fields and problems solving, that three level of cognition is adaptable to some degree and thus we focus on that hierarchy.

At the first level, it might be easy to understand the cognition because when we read news from Twitter or WeiBo, we just process the cognition at its stage. It’s very common to be at this cognition stage when we write something or memorize something. As for the second level, we defined metacognition as “knowing about knowing” or “learning how to learn”. In Social Networking, for example, data processing is at the stage of metacognition, the evolution of the progress, such as Facebook Timeline, as well. We usually categorize or classify things by their property in order to find them easily later and this process is also metacognition. For instance, we want to find our old friends in the Social Network, yet we just can’t remember all the name of our friends at the time. We then simply categorize them by the time we know each other. By searching the high school, we can always find the our high school mates. In other situation, we know friends’ birthplace and then we add a restriction on birthplace, and after all, we just find them by looking up the city.

Picture of Facebook Timeline form website

At the highest level, the Epistemic Cognition, who has five key components, leads you to reach the goal of knowledge. From the lecture, we know the five key components are as follows:

1.       Epistemic aims

2.       Structure of knowledge

3.       Certainty, sources, and justification of knowledge

4.       Epistemic virtue and responsibility

5.       Reliably and processes

Prof. Chan gave out the questionnaire about Epistemic Cognition to us to finish, and in comparison between two columns of affection with or without the Social Networking, we know exactly how the Internet and Social Networking influence our knowledge. To summary, Internet and Social Networking make us rethink about the knowledge and broaden our vision to the knowledge, even to the truth.

From the lecture, we bring home to ourselves to learn the cognition. Besides, we learn the way that we still focus on the Social Networking and distinguish what stage are we at among the three levels of cognition. What’s more, we know that Social Networking is not only about Internet but also involves psychology and cognition.

What Can Social Networking Do?

What else can social networking do except from keeping in touch with friends in virtual www world? It might be a question to all of people who concentrate on building social networking websites at the beginning.

As far as our experience in the past, we know that we can buy things and ask questions through the Internet websites and web-forums. In lecture 2, Prof. Chan systematically introduced us Social Tasks, Social Media with Social Marketing. What interest me most are Open Source Development and Social Recommendation.

Open Source Development can be included in Social Tasks. As its name indicating, it is a kind of cooperation by putting the open source code of software or methods into the Internet website or forum. Any potential people or developer from all over the world can access to the code and improve it. We have already known that CSDN (Chinese software develop net) and Github are exactly the examples of the Open Source Development and thanks to them, many problems in our learning process can be dealt with easily by searching keywords and reading the documentation of code. It’s very convenient for developing beginner to study and improve themselves.

Another interesting thing we learnt is the Social Recommendation. We got in touch some familiar experience about it. For instance, when we log in WeiBo or Twitter and post news, you can set the topic by using the notation “#” to enclose the content you are writing so that you can easily find the similar content of recommendation by clicking the topic. Another example is the Genius of Apple App Store. You can open the Genius option in Apple App Store and it will recommend you some great apps you might be interested according to your downloaded apps.

Genius in App Store

The Social Recommendation seems more and more important in social networking. It is like commercial advertisement but much more interactive. It can search the things you like automatically and output the results for you so that you might very likely click on them which indeed increase the click rate even the incomes of websites. So it’s very important to have a considerate analysis system to filter the potential recommendations. There are three basic derived social recommendation methods as follows: User-based filtering and Item-based filtering with Content-based filtering.

Content-based filtering method gives recommendations by collecting the tags and keywords of items. It is mostly based on the characteristics and preferences of items. If you like apple products like iphone and you set the tag of apple as IT product, the recommendation won’t return the fruit apple for you.

User-based filtering and Item-based filtering are both Collaborative Filtering. To figure out the difference between them, Prof. Chan used a fourth object to explain. Let’s imagine another model that A like Apple product iphone and fruit apple while you are A’s best friend with high correlation in favor.  When you search iphone, User-based filtering method might return you iphone and fruit apple to you by matching A’s favor. Yet Item-based filtering method might just return you iphone and ipad because they are highly correlated as Apple Company product.

I think that commercial websites should think much more about the recommendation filtering methods so that they can earn more profit from social recommendations. And to do it better, it may be a good way to build a social networking for customers like what Taobao did.

In fact, Social Networking can do much more than Open Source Development and Social Recommendation. It can gather great ideas from all over the world as Social Brainstorming or Crowsourcing. Besides, it can record your life or ideas by Blog. To company, it's no need to mention the usage and importance of Social Commerce. In brief, Social Networking can do a lot more than we have known and we should keep digging its potential worth.

Reflection and Review of Social Networking

Nowadays, more and more people, especially adolescents, are spending much more time on the internet than ever. Many surveys say that this situation occurs mostly because of the emergence of so-called social network such as Facebook and twitter. When talking about the Social Network, apart from those social network site, the second thought comes to you might be the movie “The Social Network” in 2010. The movie is about how the famous social network website, which would become known as Facebook, be created by a Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg.

The front cover of the movie The Social Network

The trailer of The Social Network

We all know that the general development of social networking began with the Theory of Six Degrees, followed by the stage of making friend with stranger and the stage of entertainment. And for now, thanks to Facebook, we have walked into the stage of socialgram connected to the real world networking. We may also know that many SNS (Social Networking Services) nowadays aim at helping people to establish social networks of Internet application service, in the meanwhile, we are familiar with the other SNS called Social Network Sites including RenRen and KaiXin. So, what’s the difference between social network and social networking?

So far as we know from the lecture in the first week, there are some differences between social network and social networking. While social network is a kind of social structure whose “nodes” (individuals or groups) are bonded by one or more types of relationship or interdependency, social networking is the bridge connects those “nodes” by service/technology provided. For instance, there is a group of people who fascinate about movies and we maintain that those people have the same property of interest, then it can be defined these people have connection with each other by the property, and these people become the "nodes" in the social network. Social networking can be a platform or website forum that building the relationship among people, such as DouBan Group and IMDB Community.

Besides the comparison of social network and social networking, Professor Rosanna also talked about the topic of social media versus social networking. In my opinion, social media uses technologies such as blogs, podcasts, wikis, and vlogs (videoblog) to let people discover or read news and information. Theoretically, these news and information will be propagated through the Internet without the limitation of time and region, and that propagation process will be done through social media. As the definition of social media, we can know that social media include social networking websites. Social networking sites mostly can link and share those news and information from social media sites, just like a citation in research paper, but the social media still dissociate from social networking websites. For example, you hardly can define Wikipedia as social networking website because of its not helping people being linked in a specific orientation, but you can always cite and link those wiki into your WeiBo or Facebook to let your friends know the information. Your friends may reply or forward it and that's exactly the connection between you and your friends has been linked. Thus, we can conclude that social networking concentrates on building the relationships among people and rethink that social media is just a shift in how people discover and read news and information.

As for me, I really like SNS and quite want to build a mobile software platform or application like Path to link my close friend to share my life through picture, video and my location. And that’s why I study in this course to get more knowledge of social networking.

User Interface of Path