[press release] Penn Professor Shows How ‘Spontaneous’ Social Norms Emerge

Thinking this still does not shed any light on “wisdom of crowds” vs rumor mongering.  Consensus isn’t always a matter of truth finding.  Critical thinking skills are important!
Great insight, tho’.

From the 2 February 2015 Penn State press release by Katherine Unger Baillie

Fifteen years ago, the name “Aiden” was hardly on the radar of Americans with new babies. It ranked a lowly 324th on the Social Security Administration’s list of popular baby names. But less than a decade later, the name became a favorite, soaring into the top 20 for five years and counting.

While some may attribute its popularity to a “Sex in the City” character, a new study led by the University of Pennsylvania’s Damon Centola provides a scientific explanation for how social conventions – everything from acceptable baby names to standards of professional conduct – can emerge suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, with no external forces driving their creation.

The research used an original Web-based experiment to test whether and how large populations come to consensus. The findings have implications for everything from understanding why different regions of the country have distinct words for the same product — soda versus pop, for example — to explaining how norms regarding civil rights gained widespread traction in the United States.

The paper, “The Spontaneous Emergence of Conventions,” will appear in the Early Edition of theProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Feb. 2.

“Our study explains how certain ideas and behaviors can gain a foothold and, all of a sudden, emerge as big winners,” Centola said. “It is a common misconception that this process depends upon some kind of leader, or centralized media source, to coordinate a population.  We show that it can depend on nothing more than the normal interactions of people in social networks.”

Centola is an associate professor in Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication and the School of Engineering and Applied Science and is director of the Network Dynamics Group at Penn. He partnered on the work with physicist Andrea Baronchelli, an assistant professor at City University London.

To understand how social norms arise, Centola and Baronchelli invented a Web-based game, which recruited participants from around the World Wide Web using online advertisements. In each round of the “Name Game,” participants were paired, shown a photograph of a human face and asked to give it a name. If both players provided the same name, they won a small amount of money. If they failed, they lost a small amount and saw their partner’s name suggestion. The game continued with new partners for as many as 40 rounds.

Though the basic structure of the game remained the same throughout the experiment, the researchers wanted to see whether changing the way that players interacted with one another would affect the ability of the group to come to consensus.

They began with a game of 24 players, each of whom was assigned a particular position within an online “social network.” The participants, however, weren’t aware of their position, didn’t know who they were playing with or even how many other players were in the game.

Centola and Baronchelli tested the effects of three different types of networks.

In the “geographical network” version, players interacted repeatedly with their four closest neighbors in a spatial neighborhood. In the “small world network” game, participants still played with only four other players, but the partners were chosen randomly from around the network. And in the “random mixing” version, players were not limited to four other partners, instead playing each new round with a new partner selected at random from all the participants.

As the games proceeded, the researchers observed clear patterns in people’s behavior that distinguished the different networks.

In the geographical and small world network games, participants easily coordinated with their neighbors, but they were not able to settle on one overall “winning” name for the population. Instead, a few competing names emerged as popular options: Sarah, Elena, Charlene and Julie all vying for dominance, for instance, with no global agreement.

 

[New Scientist Article] Data trackers monitor your life so they can nudge you

From the 7 November 2013 New Scientist article by Hal Hodson

Once you know everything about a person, you can influence their behaviour. A thousand students with tattletale phones are going to find out how easy that is

THERE’S something strange about this year’s undergraduate class at the Technical University of Denmark – they all have exactly the same kind of phone.

The phones are tracking everywhere the students go, who they meet and when, and every text they send. Around 1000 students are volunteers in the largest-ever experiment of its kind, one that could change our understanding of how we interact in groups.

Sune Lehmann and Arek Stopczynski of DTU are using the data to build a model of the social network the students live in – who talks to who, where groups gather. They plan to test whether the results can be used for purposes like boosting student achievement, or even improving mental health. “We hope to be able to figure out how to make this work in terms of academic performance,” says Lehmann.

This is sociology on a different scale, gathering detailed data about an entire group and then using that information to “nudge” them into changing their behaviour. Used ethically, the results could improve the way society works, transforming everything from healthcare and public transport to education and governance. Used for the wrong reasons, it could be extremely dangerous.

…

Used ethically, the results could improve the way society works, transforming everything from healthcare and public transport to education and governance. Used for the wrong reasons, it could be extremely dangerous.

…

Used ethically, the results could improve the way society works, transforming everything from healthcare and public transport to education and governance. Used for the wrong reasons, it could be extremely dangerous. a 2010 study, participants were encouraged to boost their activity levels either through personal rewards, or rewards given to a buddy who was supposed to keep tabs on them. Being motivated by an incentivised buddy resulted in twice the activity increase of the direct reward.

…

..nudges related to public health could be as simple as allowing doctors to ring up their patients when their activity levels start to follow patterns that correlate with, say, diabetes or depression, and asking them if they are feeling OK.

…

But we shouldn’t lose sight of the potential dark side, says Evan Selinger, a technology ethicist at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. “There is extraordinary power in the access to data at a personal level – even predicting future behaviour,” he says. “There’s a lot to be gained, but there’s a lot of problems that scare the living ******** out of me.”

 

 

Related articles

• It’s time to close the Government’s sinister ‘Nudge Unit’ and let the free market take over (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
• Doctors Track Your Physical Activity Through Smartphones (biospace.com)

 

Researchers propose social network modeling to fight hospital infections

This image shows a Intensive Care Unit. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

 

From the 22 October 2013 EurkAlert

 

Researchers propose social network modeling to fight hospital infections

		IMAGE: This is an illustration of dense (left) and sparse (right) patient ICU social networks. Patients in the circle that share a nurse are connected by lines (links), while patients that…   Click here for more information.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Two researchers at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business have teamed up with a researcher at American University to develop a framework to help prevent costly and deadly infections acquired by hospitalized patients. According to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), these transmissions strike one out of every 20 inpatients, drain billions of dollars from the national health care system and cause tens of thousands of deaths annually.

The research of Sean Barnes, Smith School assistant professor of operations management; Bruce Golden, the Smith School’s France-Merrick Chair in Management Science; and Edward Wasil of American’s Kogod School of Business, utilized computer models that simulate the interactions between patients and health care workers to determine if these interactions are a source for spreading multi-drug resistant organisms (MDROs). Their study shows a correlation of a “sparse, social network structure” with low infection transmission rates.

This study comes in advance of HHS’ 2015 launch and enforcement of a new initiative that penalizes hospitals at an estimated average rate of $208,642 for violating specific requirements for infection control. In response, the study’s authors have introduced a conceptual framework for hospitals to model their social networks to predict and minimize the spread of bacterial infections that often are resistant to antibiotic treatments.

The authors manipulated and tracked the dynamics of the social network in a mid-Atlantic hospital’s intensive care unit. They focused on interactions between patients and health care workers – primarily nurses – and the multiple competing factors that can affect transmission.

“The basic reality is that healthcare workers frequently cover for one another due to meetings, breaks and sick leave,” said Barnes. “These factors, along with the operating health care-worker-to-patient ratios and patient lengths of stay, can significantly affect transmission in an ICU… But they also can be better controlled.”

The next step is to enable hospitals to adapt this framework, which is based on maximizing staff-to-patient ratio to ensure fewer nurses and physicians come in contact with each patient, especially high-risk patients.

“The health care industry’s electronic records movement could soon generate data that captures the structure of patient-healthcare worker interaction in addition to multiple competing, related factors that can affect MDRO transmission,” said Barnes.

The study, “Exploring the Effects of Network Structure and Healthcare Worker Behavior on the Transmission of Hospital-Acquired Infections,” appears in a recent issue of the peer-reviewed IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering. The study was partially funded by the Robert H. Smith School of Business Center for Health Information and Decision Systems.

 

###

 

A full copy of the study is available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/19488300.2012.736120?journalCode=uhse20#.UmV9WPmsjlN

 

 

Related articles

• Researchers propose social network modeling to fight hospital infections (eurekalert.org)
• Researchers Propose Social Network Modeling to Fight Hospital Infections (npchikani.wordpress.com)
• Researchers propose social network modeling to fight hospital infections (medicalxpress.com)
• KDHE releases statistics on Kansas hospital-acquired infections (kansas.com)
• [Reblog] Gloves and Gowns Don’t Stop Spread of All Infections in Hospitals (jflahiff.wordpress.com)
• Most C. diff ‘not hospital spread’ (bbc.co.uk)
• Why patients are at higher risk of getting Hospital Infections (healthandcare.in)
• Infection Prevention Week – Hand Hygiene (kindredhealthcare.com)
• Hospital alert over Hepatitis C infection (belfasttelegraph.co.uk)

 

[Journal Article] The Emergent Discipline of Health Web Science -with related links and articles

Larger image –>http://www.flickr.com/photos/40726922@N07/4702688723

Came across this article through an online professional health community.  It describes how the Internet is changing approaches to healthcare issues.  Current evidence shows Web sites can empower professional and lay alike through informational Web pages, social media, health record annotations and linkages for exploration and analysis. However, these applications can be built on to better serve the health care related needs of all.  The Web can be better” engineered for health research, clinical research, and clinical practice. In addition, it is desirable to support consumers who utilize the Web for gathering information about health and well-being and to elucidate approaches to providing social support to both patients and caregivers. Finally, there is the motivation to improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of health care.” The paper goes on to outline channelling further efforts in these areas.

• Social networks
• Patient Engagement Through Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing
• Sensors, Smart Technology and Expert Patients
• “Big Data”, Semantic, and Other Integration Technologies
• Rapid, Automated, Contextualized Knowledge Discovery and Application

From the full text of the article

Abstract

The transformative power of the Internet on all aspects of daily life, including health care, has been widely recognized both in the scientific literature and in public discourse. Viewed through the various lenses of diverse academic disciplines, these transformations reveal opportunities realized, the promise of future advances, and even potential problems created by the penetration of the World Wide Web for both individuals and for society at large. Discussions about the clinical and health research implications of the widespread adoption of information technologies, including the Internet, have been subsumed under the disciplinary label of Medicine 2.0. More recently, however, multi-disciplinary research has emerged that is focused on the achievement and promise of the Web itself, as it relates to healthcare issues. In this paper, we explore and interrogate the contributions of the burgeoning field of Web Science in relation to health maintenance, health care, and health policy. From this, we introduce Health Web Science as a subdiscipline of Web Science, distinct from but overlapping with Medicine 2.0. This paper builds on the presentations and subsequent interdisciplinary dialogue that developed among Web-oriented investigators present at the 2012 Medicine 2.0 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts.

Read the entire article here

Related links

• Health Web Science Lab – “A Hippocratic Revolution in Medicine”

The Health WebScience Lab is a multi-disciplinary research initiative between Moray College UHI, NHS Grampian, HIE OpenFinder and Sitekit Solutions Ltd based in the Highlands of Scotland committed to improving health locally, nationally and internationally.

This initiative will lead, connect and collaborate on research in the emerging discipline of WebScience and Healthcare to create communities which take responsibility for their own wellbeing and self-care. This will be achieved through the application of information and other communication technologies via the internet across a whole range of functions that affect health care thereby stimulating novel research between health care professionals, the community at large and industry.

• Health Web Science Twitter account

studies ” the effects of the interaction of healthcare with the web, and of the web with healthcare” and how one can be effectively harnessed to change the other

• 3rd International Conference on Web Science (Program with many links to presentations)

Related articles

• Participatory Medicine 2.0 (projecthealthdesign.typepad.com)
• HealthCamp Boston 2012: Brainstorming the Future of Health Care (healthblawg.typepad.com)
• Semantic Web (pantypeblog.wordpress.com)
• Cooperation in Health: Mapping Collaborative Networks on the Web (plosone.org)
• Text Analytics and Semantic Processing Fuel New Web Paradigm (arnoldit.com)
• What is WebScience? (mymindbursts.com)
• Medicine 2.0’13: 6th World Congress on Social Media, Mobile Apps and Web 2.0 in Health, Medicine, and Biomedical Research (walterfarah.net)