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How the Other Half Votes: The United States, Part One – Sabato's Crystal Ball

Overall, Joe Biden won 126 of the 151 top half counties, although that still means that Donald Trump won 25 of them, which might be somewhat surprising in a national electorate where population density seems so highly correlated with partisanship. Biden’s haul was up from Obama, who won 112, but Obama won more counties overall, 692 to 538 for Biden (those numbers come from Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Louis Jacobson, who wrote about county-level voting patterns for us in 2021).

Study finds surprising source of social influence: Want to promote your new product or trigger a shift in thinking? Steer clear of the influencers -- ScienceDaily

So, if you want to spread gossip -- easily digestible, uncontroversial bits of information -- go ahead and tap an influencer. But if you want to transmit new ways of thinking that challenge an existing set of beliefs, seek out hidden locations in the periphery and plant the seed there. "Our big discovery," Centola added, "is that every network has a hidden social cluster in the outer edges that is perfectly poised to increase the spread of a new idea by several hundred percent. These social clusters are ground zero for triggering tipping points in society." Centola and Guilbeault applied their findings to predicting the spread of a new microfinance program across dozens of communities in India. By considering what was being spread through the networks, they were able to predict where it should originate from, and whether it would spread to the rest of the population. Their predictions identified the exact people who were most influential for increasing the adoption of the new program. Guilbeault, now an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, noted, "in a sense, we found that the center of the network changed depending on what was spreading. The more uncertain people were about a new idea, the more that social influence moved to the people who only had parochial connections, rather than people with many far-reaching social connections." Guilbeault added, "the people in the edges of the network suddenly had the greatest influence across the entire community."

QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right | The New Republic

The unchecked growth of far-right conspiracy-mongering online also meant that, in terms of messaging, the movement was poised to enter prime time. Many of today’s lead organizers are doing their networking and recruiting out in the light of day, with the assistance of a wide array of celebrity enablers, from Alex Jones and Roseanne Barr to former President Trump himself. Ardent fans of The Turner Diaries don’t need to wait for the gun shows that the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh frequented to find one another. But about one month before that 1995 bombing, Stormfront became one of the first white nationalist forums to launch its own website. When the man who headed to El Paso in 2019 to shoot and kill 23 people and injure two dozen others wanted to release his white supremacist manifesto timed to the attack, he made a post on the message board 8chan—a platform where Q left his “drops” for followers to decipher—19 minutes before the first 911 call. And while online visibility might forewarn surveilling authorities about Q-related insurrectionist plans, it has not stopped the violence, as the January rioting at the Capitol made all too clear.

GameStop insurgency just latest rebellion against 'the Big Guys'

The Big Guys’ problem is that nobody likes them much. From Silicon Valley to Wall Street, they’re deeply unpopular with ordinary Americans, on both the left and the right, resentment they’ve stoked with selfishness, arrogance and condescension. Their solution to this unpopularity has been to use their control over online platforms, and their influence over the government, to silence their critics.

The Place of College Grads in the Urban-Rural Divide - Bloomberg

While college grads make up 55 percent of the workforce in most leading urban counties (there is one urban county, Falls Church, Virginia, where the share of college grads is a staggering 80 percent), less than 10 percent of adults hold a college degree in the lowest-performing urban counties. By way of comparison, college grads make up a similar 55 percent in the leading rural counties and less than 5 percent or so in the lowest-performing rural counties.

The Social Life of Forests - The New York Times

“Where some scientists see a big cooperative collective, I see reciprocal exploitation,” said Toby Kiers, a professor of evolutionary biology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. “Both parties may benefit, but they also constantly struggle to maximize their individual payoff.” Kiers is one of several scientists whose recent studies have found that plants and symbiotic fungi reward and punish each other with what are essentially trade deals and embargoes, and that mycorrhizal networks can increase conflict among plants. In some experiments, fungi have withheld nutrients from stingy plants and strategically diverted phosphorous to resource-poor areas where they can demand high fees from desperate plants.

The Social Life of Forests - The New York Times

In some of her earliest and most famous experiments, Simard planted mixed groups of young Douglas fir and paper birch trees in forest plots and covered the trees with individual plastic bags. In each plot, she injected the bags surrounding one tree species with radioactive carbon dioxide and the bags covering the other species with a stable carbon isotope — a variant of carbon with an unusual number of neutrons. The trees absorbed the unique forms of carbon through their leaves. Later, she pulverized the trees and analyzed their chemistry to see if any carbon had passed from species to species underground. It had. In the summer, when the smaller Douglas fir trees were generally shaded, carbon mostly flowed from birch to fir. In the fall, when evergreen Douglas fir was still growing and deciduous birch was losing its leaves, the net flow reversed. As her earlier observations of failing Douglas fir had suggested, the two species appeared to depend on each other.

Quantifying Reputation and Success in Art

Early access to prestigious central institutions offered life-long access to high-prestige venues and reduced dropout rate. By contrast, starting at the network periphery resulted in a high dropout rate, limiting access to central institutions. A Markov model predicts the career trajectory of individual artists and documents the strong path and history dependence of valuation in art.

Loneliness alters your brain's social network: Feeling disconnected from others is reflected by how the brain represents relationships -- ScienceDaily

Thinking about someone from each category corresponded to a different activity pattern in the mPFC: one for the self, one for the social network (both friends and acquaintances), and one for celebrities. The closer the relationship, the more the pattern resembled the pattern seen when thinking about the self. These brain patterns differed for lonelier individuals. Activity related to thinking about the self was more different from activity related to thinking about others, while the activity from thinking about others was more similar across social categories. In other words, lonelier people have a "lonelier" neural representation of their relationships.

Defining geographic regions with commuter data: Novel method could enable more nuanced understanding of metropolitan communities -- ScienceDaily

A new mathematical approach uses data on people's commutes between and within U.S. counties to identify important geographic regions. Mark He of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and colleagues present this work in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on April 29, 2020. Defining the boundaries that separate metropolitan areas has major implications for research, governance, and economic development. For instance, such boundaries can influence allocation of infrastructure funding or housing subsidies. However, traditional methods to define metropolitan regions often hamper meaningful understanding of communities' characteristics and needs.

A breakthrough in estimating the size of a (mostly hidden) network -- ScienceDaily

For homogeneous networks -- in which every unit plays the same -- accessing a mere 10% of the units could be sufficient to exactly infer the size of the entire network, Porfiri concludes. But the same approach fails for heterogeneous networks, which are far more common in the field of complex systems: Think of the early stage of the novel coronavirus outbreak, in which every person experienced a widely different range of contacts due to their social and professional lives. Hence, the author recommends prudence in the inference of the size of a network dynamical system from available measurements when information on the nature of the network is lacking.

Your Life is Driven by Network Effects

Compatibility between two people in terms of their individual characteristics is sometimes much less important than the compatibility between their networks. This is one possible reason why there is a surprisingly low divorce rate amongst arranged matches made solely on the basis of compatibility between kin networks.

Abe Lincoln on innovation, network effects

“I have already intimated my opinion that in the world’s history, certain inventions and discoveries occurred, of peculiar value, on account of their great efficiency in facilitating all other inventions and discoveries. Of these were the arts of writing and of printing, the discovery of America, and the introduction of Patent Laws.”

Sunflowers found to share nutrient-rich soil with others of their kind

In the first study, the researchers placed isolated sunflower plants near a rich food source and watched how it behaved. As expected, the plant sent more roots into the area, allowing it to consume more nutrients. But they also found that when they placed two sunflower plants an equal distance from the same food source, both sent fewer roots than they would have were they alone. This was a clear sign that the plants were not only aware of the presence of the other, but were working together to allow both of them to gain the greatest benefit. In another experiment, the researchers placed sunflower plants at different distances from the rich soil patch and found that the sunflower nearest the soil patch sent out just as many new roots as if it were isolated. In other experiments, the researchers planted multiple plants at different distances from the nutrient-rich patch to see how they would respond. They report that plants that were growing with a neighbor actually decreased root length in such shared patches—and they did not increase them when they were close to very high-quality soil areas. The researchers conclude that sunflowers work together to gain the most benefit from the soil for themselves and for those around them.

Sunsetting Sip: A Post Mortem | Product Hunt

Sip was a single player experience and lacked an engagement loop that would encourage users to invite other users. This point is even more important today as consumers face fatigue and makers face increasing competition as the cost to build continues to drop. Distribution should be considered on day one and built into the product.

Structure of brain networks is not fixed - Neuroscience News

“You can think of the brain like an organization where employees work together to make the whole system run,” said Iraji. “For a long time, we thought brain networks were like departments or offices, where the same people were doing the same job every day. But it turns out that they may be more like coworking spaces, where people move in and out and there are different jobs being performed at any given time.” Ignoring these spatial and functional variations could result in an incorrect and incomplete understanding of the brain, Iraji added. “Let’s say we measure functional connectivity between two regions at different times, and we see some variability,” he said. “One view is to say that the strength of connectivity associated with specific task changes over time. But what if that region is responsible for different tasks at different times? Maybe there are different people in these two offices on different days, so that’s why we’re seeing the difference in communication.”

Unsupervised word embeddings capture latent knowledge from materials science literature | Nature

Furthermore, we demonstrate that an unsupervised method can recommend materials for functional applications several years before their discovery. This suggests that latent knowledge regarding future discoveries is to a large extent embedded in past publications. Our findings highlight the possibility of extracting knowledge and relationships from the massive body of scientific literature in a collective manner, and point towards a generalized approach to the mining of scientific literature.

Social network structure is predictive of health and wellness

Social network analysis has been used for health-related problems including mental health [4, 6], physical well-beings [1, 2], and illness [8, 27]. Most of the work has largely focused on social networks as a diffusion mechanism of health [1–5] or emotions [6–9]. This paper provides a novel perspective on the value of social network structure in not only understanding our health behavior but also in predicting the wellness states, above and beyond what the data from wearables or demographic tells us. Clearly, social networks are an important piece of the puzzle about our health and wellness. We showed that by including features derived from social networks, accuracy increases significantly and at times using only social network features adds more predictability. Specifically, we find that happiness and positive attitude have the most significant jump when using social network structure features in addition to health behavior and demographic data. This clearly demonstrates that it is the tight coupling of an ego’s social and health behavior that result in improved understanding and predictability of the ego’s wellness state.

Your circle of friends is more predictive of your health, study finds -- ScienceDaily

Social network structure provided significant improvement in predicting one's health and well-being compared to just looking at health behavior data from the Fitbit alone. For example, when social network structure is combined with the data derived from wearables, the machine learning model achieved a 65 percent improvement in predicting happiness, 54 percent improvement in predicting one's self-assessed health prediction, 55 percent improvement in predicting positive attitude, and 38 percent improvement in predicting success. "This study asserts that without social network information, we only have an incomplete view of an individual's wellness state, and to be fully predictive or to be able to derive interventions, it is critical to be aware of the social network structural features as well," Chawla said.

Artists Become Famous through Their Friends, Not the Originality of Their Work - Artsy

While past studies have suggested that there is a link between creativity and fame, Ingram and Banerjee found, in contrast, that there was no such correlation for these artists. Rather, artists with a large and diverse network of contacts were most likely to be famous, regardless of how creative their art was. Specifically, the greatest predictor of fame for an artist was having a network of contacts from various countries. Ingram believes this indicates that the artist was cosmopolitan and had the capacity to reach different markets or develop ideas inspired by foreign cultures. The “linchpin of the network,” he added, was Kandinsky. They also found that famous artists tended to be older, likely because they were already famous as abstraction was emerging, Ingram explained.

How ideas go viral in academia: Where idea starts is key -- ScienceDaily

To answer that question, the researchers turned the 2015 dataset into a network of connected universities. If a university placed one of its Ph.D. students in a job at another school, then those two schools were linked. The resulting "roadmap" showed how faculty might carry ideas from their graduate schools to the universities that hired them. The researchers then ran thousands of simulations on that network, allowing ideas that began at one school to percolate down to others. The team adjusted for the quality of ideas by making some more likely to shift between nodes than others. The findings, published in October in the journal EPJ Data Science, show that it matters where an idea gets started. When mid-level ideas began at less prestigious schools, they tended to stall, not reaching the full network. The same wasn't true for so-so thinking from major universities. "If you start a medium- or low-quality idea at a prestigious university, it goes much farther in the network and can infect more nodes than an idea starting at a less prestigious university," Morgan said.

Resynchronizing Neurons to Erase Schizophrenia - Neuroscience News

he Geneva neuroscientists chose to focus on neural networks of the hippocampus, a brain structure notably involved in memory. They studied a mouse model that reproduces the genetic alteration of DiGeorge syndrome as well as some behavioural changes associated with schizophrenia. In the hippocampus of a control mouse, the thousands of neurons that make up the network coordinate according to a very precise sequence of activity, which is dynamic in time and synchronized. However, in the neural networks of their mouse models, the scientists observed something completely different: the neurons showed the same level of activity as in control animals, but without any coordination, as if these cells were incapable of communicating properly with each other. “The organization and synchronization of neural networks is achieved through the intervention of subpopulations of inhibitory neurons, including parvalbumin neurons,» says Carleton. “However, in this animal model of schizophrenia, these neurons are much less active. Without proper inhibition to control and structure the electrical activity of other neurons in the network, anarchy rules. ”

Understanding the smallest brain circuits: Researchers reveal how anatomically distinct microcircuit brain networks suppress each other, compete and collaborate -- ScienceDaily

"We observe that when some neurons speed up, others slow down-and they do this in a coordinated fashion over several seconds," Galán said. "What we are discovering here, revealing for the first time, is a mode of operation of the brain circuits that shows you cannot have all of your networks operating at once," he said. Galán and his team explain those two anatomically distinct and competing networks in the smallest of the brain's microcircuits, calling them "anti-correlated cortical networks," in a recent issue of Scientific Reports. Co-authors include biology Professor Hillel Chiel and undergraduate students Nathan Kodama (first author), Tianyi Feng, James Ullett and Siddharth Sivakumar. Galán said the discovery was especially gratifying because it culminates the testing of a mathematical model he developed a decade ago. "That was a theoretical prediction-the idea that the wiring of brain circuits could be inferred from their spontaneous activity," he said. "When we were finally able to test this idea experimentally, we discovered the competing neural networks; it all came together in this study."

Similar neural responses predict friendship | Nature Communications

Two of the “Big Five” personality traits—extraversion11,12 and openness to experience12—appear to be more similar among friends than among individuals who are not friends with one another. However, the remaining Big Five traits do not predict friendship formation well13. Similarities in conscientiousness and neuroticism are not associated with friendship formation12, and evidence for more similar levels of trait agreeableness among friends has been found in some studies12, but not in others11.

The Network Effects Manual: 13 Different Network Effects (and counting)

The direct network effect was the first ever to be noticed, back in 1908. The Chairman of AT&T at the time, Theodore Vail, noticed how hard it was for other phone companies to compete with AT&T once they had more customers in a given locale. He pointed this out in his annual report to shareholders, writing that: “Two exchange systems in the same community, cannot be… a permanency. No one has use for two telephone connections if he can reach all with whom he desires connection through one.” Vail noticed that the value of AT&T was mostly based on their network, not their phone technology. At the time, it was a revolutionary insight. It showed that even if a new telephone was clearly superior to their old phone on a technical level, no one would want the new telephone if they couldn’t use it to call their friends and family.

Smart people have better connected brains: In intelligent persons, some brain regions interact more closely, while others de-couple themselves -- ScienceDaily

The study shows that in more intelligent persons certain brain regions are clearly more strongly involved in the exchange of information between different sub-networks of the brain in order for important information to be communicated quickly and efficiently. On the other hand, the research team also identified brain regions that are more strongly 'de-coupled' from the rest of the network in more intelligent people. This may result in better protection against distracting and irrelevant inputs. "We assume that network properties we have found in more intelligent persons help us to focus mentally and to ignore or suppress irrelevant, potentially distracting inputs," says Basten. The causes of these associations remain an open question at present. "It is possible that due to their biological predispositions, some individuals develop brain networks that favor intelligent behaviors or more challenging cognitive tasks. However, it is equally as likely that the frequent use of the brain for cognitively challenging tasks may positively influence the development of brain networks. Given what we currently know about intelligence, an interplay of both processes seems most likely."