TedX Bay Area Talk: The Myth of Selective Sharing – Digital Health Futures: Empowerment or coercion?

05AugMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

I spoke about my concerns with the continued belief in selective sharing. I argue at this TedX Bay Area talk that it is unwise to expect that digital information systems are capable of privacy or selective sharing. In other words, it is a dangerous myth to believe in a feature that in practice fails regularly and by design. In fact, it seems that it is practically impossible to create any digital information system that is secure.

In such a world we may want to reconsider our sharing practices, particularly if they were built on the idea of selective sharing. If any of your digital information is something you would rather not share publicly, you may want to rethink the idea that you can keep your information private.

If you are building an information system, you may want to rethink the idea that you can offer selective sharing in a reliable form.

Thanks to the folks at TedX Bay Area, particularly Tatyana Kanzaveli for the opportunity to work out these thoughts and share them.

Here are the slides that were used in the talk:

20130724 ted x-marc smith-digital health futures empowerment or coercion from Marc Smith

Coming soon from NodeXL: v.86 preview and beyond

28MayMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

Last week’s NodeXL meeting focused on the coming work items for the next release. Four major items are lined up for the next few weeks. We may publish a release once a few of these items are complete.

> Legends and axes with scale marks for the chart canvass.

This is part of our larger work item called “Make the charts ready to publish”. A related work item to address this goal is export to a vector file format. A scalable vector format will allow people to create graphs of arbitrary resolutions to fit their presentation needs.

> Export to XPS (which should make it possible to get our files to PDF with some 3rd party help!)

Since NodeXL is intended to support non-programmer network analysts we plan to add support for other network analysis file formats. A leading example is the UCINet format which has the added virtue of holding many sample data sets that are widely used in classes and network course work. If you have a network data file format you would like NodeXL to support feel free to comment here or on the Codeplex NodeXL discussion.

> UCINet file format compatibility

Improvements to the layout of complex graphs is a deep area of research. A recent member of the NodeXL team, Janez Brank has proposed and prototyped an alternative mechanism for node layout, namely the Fast Multi-Scale Method from Harel and Koren. This method initially selects a small subset of nodes and lays them out; this initial layout is then refined in several iterations, with more and more nodes added to the layout in each iteration, until a layout of the entire graph is created. The cost function used to optimize the layout at each step is designed to reward layouts in which the Euclidean distance between nodes corresponds approximately to the length of the shortest path between them. Our developer, Tony Capone, plans to implement the design in the coming weeks. We have not added a new layout for a while and those recent additions have been deterministic geometric layouts like grid, circle, and sine wave. We have never added an alternative to the Fruchterman-Reingold force directed layout with which we started the project. This is a big feature addition that should have a big impact in making NodeXL layouts more visually appealing and informative.

> Updated layout #1

We hope these features deliver a lot of value to our users and address the big themes the team is working towards: Scale, Clarity, and Connection. We seek to make NodeXL perform against reasonably sized data sets, to improve the exploration and discovery of structures in graphs, and to simplify the import and export of data between NodeXL and social media network data sources beyond the email and Twitter support present in the application today.

Some other features that we have been considering include:

Continue reading →

NodeXL: Now with metrics API

10MarMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

The on-going NodeXL project team has a few new milestones!

Recently NodeXL crossed the 5,000 downloads mark!

I will present workshops on the use of NodeXL at International Network for Social Network Analysis “Sunbelt” conference in San Diego in March 2009 and Communities and Technologies 2009 in June at Penn State. More interesting are the classes being taught elsewhere that will make use of NodeXL!

The newest release (NodeXL_1.0.1.76.zip) adds key features for generating measurements of a complex directed graph.

Developers can access these measures directly through the Metrics API.

1.0.1.76 (2009/2/18)

For new users, there are now no graph metrics selected by default, and you will get a message explaining how to select them the first time you attempt to calculate graph metrics. This is to make the Select Graph Metrics dialog box more discoverable.
In the Select Graph Metrics dialog box, some metrics are now marked as “slow.”
Each graph metric in the Select Graph Metrics dialog box now has a Details link that explains the metric and how it is calculated.
The graph metrics are now divided into groups.
Graph metrics now get inserted near the left edge of the worksheets. They used to get appended to the right edge.
For application developers, graph metrics are now available in a separate assembly. They used to be part of the Excel Template code.
Bug fix: Saving the graph image to the clipboard or a file via the right-click menu in the graph pane didn’t work properly if the scale of the graph was changed.
Bug fix: If an edge or vertex color was specified in the workbook, the opacity specified in the Options dialog was ignored.
Bug fix: If a graph had a self-loop (an edge connecting a vertex to itself), switching to and from another workbook caused an error. (The first line of the error message was “at WpfGraphicsUtil.GetFarthestRectangleEdge…”)

NodeXL – a sample of user goals and research interests as a Wordle cloud

20DecMay 7, 2015 By Marc Smith

NodeXL - a sample of user goals and research interests as a Wodle cloud — NodeXL - a sample of user goals and research interests as a Wordle cloud

Thanks to inspiration from Adam Perer, here is a Wordle.net picture of some of feedback text — a rough presentation of the ideas, topics and research goals submitted by a collection of attendees of a recent lecture on NodeXL at Harvard. A recording of the slides and audio from the talk is available from the Harvard Program on Networked Governance website and also on the Government Innovators Network website.

A copy of the video that does not require registration is available here.

As people registered for the lecture some took the time to share their interests in network analysis and the NodeXL project. The key themes and topics from these statements focus on studying the social network of various populations of interest including (in no particular order): governments, enterprises, migrants, terrorists, innovators, politicians, corporations, criminals, research literature, sick people and online communities.

Research goals were focused on tasks like:

Map a complex set of relationships
Find key people: bridge roles, sinks, sources, etc..
Find “missing people”
Measure cohesion of subgroups
Map diffusion and change overtime
Find network correlates of the adoption of innovation

This feed back will shape the kinds of features we explore in the NodeXL project. What are your goals for exploring network data sets? What questions are you trying to answer? What kinds of network structures are of greatest interest? How can NodeXL best support that exploration?

Your comments welcome!

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