Science

I have read around 200 papers this year. A large fraction of them were very technical, some reviews and other very fashionable. But among them, I would like to highlight the ones that for me are the best. This is a personal selection and it is based not only on the technical aspects, but more on their impact. Specifically, these two papers change the way we look at privacy and how our actions reveal important information about us which was not obvious in the first place. ...

Joint work by Manuel García-Herranz, Department of Computer Science, Universidad Autonóma de Madrid Manuel Cebrián, National Information and Communications Technology Australia, University of Melbourne Esteban Moro, Department of Mathematics, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid While public demonstrations are Social Science’s most important and studied phenomena, they are also the most mysterious and poorly understood ones. Demonstrations trigger new social movements, change countries attitudes, and have the potential to overthrow governments. ...

In our last (just accepted) paper “Limited communication capacity unveils strategies for human interaction” [link] we have found that we humans have different social strategies when we communicate/interact with people. Specifically, the sociability of a person (the total number of contacts in a time interval) which is usually taken as the connectivity in the social network is actually the result of two different human features: Social capacity: the number of relationships humans can maintain opened and which is limited Social activity: the number of relationships human form and destroy as a consequence of their daily tasks, family, events, etc. ...

Happy World Book Day La Caballería andante (...) es una ciencia, dijo Don Quijote (...) que encierra en sí todas o las más ciencias del mundo (...) el que la profesa ha de ser jurisperito, y saber las leyes de la justicia distributiva y conmutativa (...) ha de ser teólogo, para saber dar razón de la cristiana ley que profesa (...); ha de ser médico, principalmente herbolario, parara conocer (...) las yerbas que tienen virtud de sanar las heridas (. ...

To me, the main question when modeling a process in the social sciences is "when does emulation count as explanation?" — John Myles White (@johnmyleswhite) March 25, 2013 Interesting question. I guess the problem is that sometimes in science a model does not pretend to make any prediction, neither is supported by any relevant data. It simply emulates reality.

**UPDATE**: the version of the R code in this post does not work with newer versions of the igraph package (\ 1.0). I have posted an updated version of this post here: [Temporal networks with R and igraph (updated)](/post/2015-12-21-temporal-networks-with-r-and-igraph-updated/). Please visit the new post to use the new code and follow the discussion there. In my last post about how a twitter conversation unfolds in time on Twitter, the dynamical nature of information diffusion in twitter was illustrated with a video of the temporal network of interactions (RTs) between accounts. ...