journal of social structure REDUX (original post date 1/19/11))

JoSS | This work was supported in part by Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research(ONR), United States Navy Grant No. 9620.1.1140071, NSF IRI9633 662 and the NSF IGERT 9972762 for research and training in CASOS. Additional support was provided by CASOS - the center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the author and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Department of Defense, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, or the U.S. government.

Abstract: Given the increasing threat of terrorism and spread of terrorist organizations, it is of vital importance to understand the properties of such organizations and to devise successful strategies for destabilizing them or decreasing their efficiency. However, intelligence information on these organizations is often incomplete, inaccurate or simply not available. This makes the study of terrorist networks and the evaluation of destabilization strategies difficult. In this paper, we propose a computational methodology for realistically simulating terrorist networks and evaluating alternative destabilization strategies. We proceed to use this methodology to evaluate and conduct a sensitivity analysis of the impact of various destabilization strategies under varying information surveillance regimes. We find that destabilization strategies that focus on the isolation of individuals who are highly central are ineffective in the long run as the network will heal itself as individuals who are nearly structurally equivalent to the isolated individuals "move in" and fill the communication gaps.

Introduction
For reasons of national security it is important to understand the properties of terrorist organizations that make such organizations efficient and flexible, and based on this understanding devise successful strategies to destabilize such organizations or curtail their efficiency, adaptability, and ability to move knowledge and resources. The assessment of destabilization strategies poses a number of key challenges. What does the underlying organization look like? Does it evolve? What strategies inhibit or effect the evolutiuon so that the organization is destabilized? In this paper, we provide an approach to assessing destabilization strategies that draws on work in organization science, knowledge management and computer science.

Terrorist organizations are often characterized as cellular organizations composed of quasi-independent cells and distributed command. In a sense, this is a non-traditional organizational configuration; hence, much of the knowledge in traditional organizational theory, particularly that focused on hierarchies or markets, does not apply. To be sure, lessons can be learned from the work on distributed and decentralized organizations that provides some guidance. This work demonstrates that such structures are often adaptive, useful in a volatile environment, and capable of rapid response [1] [2]. In other words, we should expect terrorist organization to adapt, and adapt rapidly. This suggests, that in general, they should be difficult to destabilize; however, the traditional organizational literature provides little guidance on how to destabilize the organization.

In general, the organization's form or design profoundly influences its performance, adaptability, and ability to move information [3]. It follows that organizations can be destabilized by altering their design. The one caveat here, is that organizations, particularly more distributed and decentralized ones, are continually evolving [4]. Terrorist organizations are often characterized as dynamic networks in which the connections among personnel define the nature of that evolution. This suggests that social network analysis will be useful in characterizing the underlying structure and in locating vulnerabilities in terms of key actors.

In general, organizations evolve as they face unanticipated changes in their environment, rapidly evolving technologies, and intelligent and adaptive opponents. Over the past decade, progress has been made in understanding the set of factors that enable adaptation and partially validated models of adaptive networks now exist [5]. A key result is that, in the short run, there appears to be a tradeoff between adaptivity and extremely high performance in organizations [6]. This suggests that forcing an organization to adapt should reduce its performance. Thus, even if an actor is no longer key, the mere isolation of that actor may be sufficient to be disruptive. However, to assess this a model of organizational change and network healing is needed.

Since the destabilization of terrorist networks could inhibit their ability to effect harm, there is a profound need for an approach that would allow researchers to reason about dynamic cellular networks and evaluate the potential effect of destabilization strategies. To be useful, such an approach must account for the natural evolution of cellular networks. This situation is further complicated by the fact that the information available on the terrorist network is liable to be incomplete and possibly erroneous. Hence, destabilization strategies need to be compared and contrasted in terms of their robustness under varying levels and types of information error. In other words, it would be misleading to judge destabilization strategies in terms of their impact on a static an unchanging network [7].

These problems suggest the need for a new methodological approach. In this paper, we provide an approach based on the use of a multi-agent network model of the co-evolution of the network of "observers" (the blue network) and the "terrorists" (the red network) in which the observers can capture only partial data on the underlying covert network and the covert network evolves both naturally and in response to attacks by the observers. This approach builds off of organization theory and social network theory, as well as machine learning and dynamic network analysis. Specifically, we have developed a computational model of dynamic cellular organizations and used it to evaluate a number of alternative strategies for destabilization of cellular networks.

It is important at the outset to note that this examination of destabilization strategies is highly exploratory. We make no claims that the examination of destabilization strategies is comprehensive, nor that the types of "error" in the data that intelligence agencies can collect is completely described. Further, our estimate of the structure of the covert network is based on publicly available data much of which is qualitative and requires interpretation. Thus, this work should be read as a study in the power of an empirically grounded simulation approach and a call for future research. Further, we restrict our analysis to a structural or network analysis and focus on what does the covert network look like, how does its structure influence its performance and ability to pass information, how does it evolve, how can its evolution be altered (its behavior destabilized) through interventions focused on the nodes, and what interventions should be taken given the level of fidelity in the information that we have. Admittedly, in this complex arena there are many other factors that are critical, but they are beyond the scope of this study. Thus, from a straight social network perspective, this study suggests the types of methodological issues that will emerge when working with dynamic large scale networks under uncertainty.

To ground this paper, a short case description is provided of Al Qaeda with the focus on the network structure. In these two descriptions we draw on both military and organizational theory. This is followed by a discussion of the intelligence agencies engaged in anti-terrorist activity and the possible data and errors in said data. Our intent is to demonstrate, at a fairly high level, the context and the resultant information and modelling problems, not to provide a full analysis for intelligence or military operations. As good science often emerges from attacking hard real world problems, we are trying to provide sufficient detail to understand the basis for the problems that research must address, rather than simply provide a high theoretical description of general data problems. This is followed by a brief discussion of the applicability of traditional social network analysis and the need to take a dynamic network perspective. We then describe a computational model of terrorist organizations as dynamic evolving networks, and anti-terrorist bodies with emphasis on their information collection and destabilization strategies. A virtual experiment is used to examine destabilization strategies and the results are then discussed.

a little taste of what unspeakable is hogging...,

mit | It has been almost two decades since the beginning of the web. This means that the web is no longer just a technology of the present, but also, a record of our past.

Email, one of the original forms of social media, is even older than the web and contains a detailed description of our personal and professional history.

Immersion is an invitation to dive into the history of your email life in a platform that offers you the safety of knowing that you can always delete your data.

Just like a cubist painting, Immersion presents users with a number of different perspectives of their email data.

• It provides a tool for self-reflection at a time where the zeitgeist is one of self-promotion.
• It provides an artistic representation that exists only in the presence of the visitor.
• It helps explore privacy by showing users data that they have already shared with others.

Finally, it presents users wanting to be more strategic with their professional interactions, with a map to plan more effectively who they connect with.

So Immersion is not about one thing. It’s about four. It’s about self-reflection, art, privacy and strategy. It’s about providing users with a number of different perspectives by leveraging on the fact that the web, and emails, are now an important part of our past. Fist tap Dale.

like burning off a digital tick....,

You have deactivated your Facebook account. You can reactivate your account at any time by logging into Facebook using your old login email and password. You will be able to use the site like you used to.

an ISP with a search engine is intrinsically evil - network free K.C.

Harpers | Isaac Wilder opens a black steel cabinet on the twenty-sixth floor of Oak Tower in downtown Kansas City and shows me what he hopes will be the future of the Internet. “This is the router,” he says, pointing to a box the size of a DVD player. “The ethernet cable runs out here, up through the floor, to a dish that’s beaming a signal out to the Rosedale Ridge housing project. There’s . . . 400-plus people, who have access to the Internet for the first time, in their homes at least.”

A local nonprofit, Connecting for Good, pays the monthly $125 bill for the entire housing project. This comes out to roughly $9 per year per housing unit — a far cry from the $70 a month that these same families would spend for the new high-speed fiber optic service Google is currently rolling out in Kansas City, which I wrote about for the April issue of Harper’s Magazine. It’s even cheaper than the slower service Google is offering, which costs $300 for seven years of guaranteed access.^[*]

And that’s the point. Wilder and his organization, the Free Network Foundation, have come here to wage war with Google, which recently cut a widely-publicized deal to bring the city a next-generation fiber optic network, and which turned down Connecting for Good’s proposal to allow multiple low-income families to share a single Google Fiber connection. It’s clearly going to be a guerilla campaign. Wilder, twenty-two, is a college dropout who wears stained Carhartt jeans and sports a thick strawberry-blond beard that seems better suited to a trapper than to an Internet pioneer.

“The one clear rule,” Wilder says of FNF’s philosophy, “is that the Internet should be treated as a commons, the same way that we treat our sidewalks or our air or our water. Everybody’s got a right to use it on the same terms.”

To do this, the foundation advocates the use of decentralized “mesh” networks that rely on microwave dishes to distribute a powerful wireless Internet connection. Wilder calls these dish-and-router assemblies FreedomLinks. Community groups can pool their resources, buy equipment to receive the signal, and distribute it to their residents. Because mesh networks share their signal and bypass the capital expense of installing copper or fiber-optic cable, they’re much cheaper than buying access from corporate providers like Google or Time Warner.

Wilder and his partner, Tyrone Greenfield, first set up a mesh network at New York City’s Zuccotti Park, to give Occupy Wall Street protesters access to the Internet. To Wilder and Greenfield, the Google Fiber project illustrates the dangers of letting private companies control digital access. Google might claim to be interested in expanding Internet access to the poor, but its real goal is to monetize the data their network can collect from its users. As proof, Wilder cites the terms of Google’s contract with both Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri. “You can’t hook your own server up to Google Fiber,” he says. “So if you do want to publish something, the easiest choice is going to be through Google’s own services. This creates a sort of locked-in environment where somebody is using a piece of Google hardware, on a Google network, using Google services. You know every detail of their habits. Every detail of what they’re reading.”

visualizing how viral content spreads over twitter

infosthetics | ViralSearch [microsoft.com], developed by Jake Hofman and others of Microsoft Research, visualizes how content spreads over social media, and Twitter in particular.

ViralSearch is based on hundred thousands of stories that are spread through billions of mentions of these stories, over many generations. In particular, it reveals the typical, hidden structures behind the sharing of viral videos, photos and posts as an hierarchical generation tree or as an animated bubble graph. The interface contains an interactive timeline of events, as well as a search field to explore specific phrases, stories, or Twitter users to provide an overview of how the independent actions of many individuals make content go viral.

See also NYTLabs Cascade: How Information Propagates through Social Media for a visualization of a very similar concept.

why I'm quitting facebook

cnn | We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. With this information, Facebook and the "big data" research firms purchasing their data predict still more things about us -- from our future product purchases or sexual orientation to our likelihood for civil disobedience or even terrorism.

The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we -- and the young, particularly -- spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.

The efforts of a few thousand employees at Facebook's Menlo Park campus pale in comparison to those of the hundreds of millions of users meticulously tweaking their pages. Corporations used to have to do research to assemble our consumer profiles; now we do it for them.

The information collected about you by Facebook through my Facebook page isn't even shared with me. Thanks to my page, Facebook knows the demographics of my readership, their e-mails, what else they like, who else they know and, perhaps most significant, who they trust. And Facebook is taking pains not to share any of this, going so far as to limit the ability of third-party applications to utilize any of this data.

Given that this was the foundation for Facebook's business plan from the start, perhaps more recent developments in the company's ever-evolving user agreement shouldn't have been so disheartening. Fist tap Arnach.

reinventing the world order? umm, no....,

tweetping

dailyreckoning | Most people today use technologies without a clue to the larger picture of what is really happening to the structure of the world because of them. People are staring at the trees and not noticing the gigantic, growing, and ever expanding forest, much less considering the meaning of it all.

This is an attempt to provide a larger look, starting with one of the most beautiful images on the entire Web. It comes from Tweetping.net. This site lights up a tiny pixel for every public communication sent through Twitter.

What you see serves as a proxy for the growth of global communication networks far more complex and voluminous than most people imagine. The reach extends far beyond that of any regime in the world. By comparison, the control that government has over the planet, as egregious and ghastly as it is, is miniscule.

This puts into perspective the $3 million that the Eurocrats are spending to skew upcoming elections in favor of centralized solutions and put down Euroskeptics. It cannot be done. Governments think they can control this, but they can’t.

Twitter was born in 2006, but its present form was built by users themselves. The developers made the infrastructure and let it happen. It is not only about just telling your friends what you had for lunch. It serves its users — each of whom has exactly as much power as any other — as a portal to the entire digital universe.

facebook's scary engine of unintended self-disclosures...,

Facebook's scary engine of unintended self-disclosure.
Fist tap Dale.

google needs to quit the u.s. chamber of commerce

Googlequitthechamber | Google's unofficial corporate motto is "don't be evil". On many fronts, outlined below, Google's actions have lived up to its rhetoric. But the US Chamber of Commerce's positions on the key issues of the day are in direct conflict with Google's mission and hurt Google users all around the world. Google's membership in the Chamber of Commerce legitimizes the Chamber. If Google's staff and leadership are truly committed to not being evil, they need to end their membership in the US Chamber of Commerce.

Google works to protect the environment
Google founder Sergey Brin has been a major donor to climate causes, including donating $200,000 to a campaign to keep California's stringent global warming emissions cap in place. He also donated $1 million to support the establishment of a renewable energy fund in California.

But Google's commitment to the environment extends beyond one of its founders. Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA is powered entirely by solar energy, making it one of the world's largest solar-powered complexes. They are even advancing "Google Earth Engine", which allows scientists and developing countries to track activity causing climate change - like deforestation.

Google has entered into Power Purchase Agreements, committing to purchase power from clean energy facilities across the country. Long-term financial agreements with two wind farms in Oklahoma and Iowa are expected to produce 15% of Google's total energy use by next year. Google has touted its formidable investment in clean energy technology as a model for other corporations, challenging other companies to think about long-term benefits once renewable energy prices are competitive with coal.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is one of the biggest obstacles to ending our addiction to fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis. See more on the Chamber's climate and environmental policies here.

“All engagements are transparent and attributable.”

NYTimes | The morning sun had barely cast its fresh light over Tampa Bay when Ardashir Safavi — born in Iran, a refugee to Turkey, educated in the mid-Atlantic states — was up and patrolling two dozen Persian-language Web sites, hunting militant adversaries in cyberspace.

His mission was to scan news reports, blogs, social media and online essays to identify those he viewed as “containing lies, misinformation or just misperceptions” about American military operations and Pentagon policy across the Middle East.

In recent months, Mr. Safavi and his teammates spotted posts that included doctored photographs of Osama bin Laden purporting to prove that Al Qaeda’s leader had not died in an American commando raid. They turned up blogs stating that the Pentagon was accelerating war plans for invading many Muslim nations, and others amplifying Taliban accusations that American troops rape with impunity across Afghanistan.

Mr. Safavi works as part of the Digital Engagement Team, established in 2008 by the military’s Central Command to “counter extremist ideology, promote cultural awareness and explain U.S. interests,” said Maj. David E. Nevers, the team’s chief officer, who must approve all responses before they are posted on foreign-language Web sites.

The team includes 20 native speakers of Arabic, Dari, Persian, Pashto, Urdu and Russian, the latter a shared language across the Muslim countries of the former Soviet states of Central Asia. Given that Central Command is responsible for military actions in an arc of instability stretching from the Indian Ocean across the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, people here call their headquarters “Tampa-stan.”

The government’s expanding efforts in computer-network warfare, offense and defense are among the most secret enterprises carried out by the military and intelligence community. To counter the adversary’s use of the Internet, American cyberwarriors have hacked into extremist chat rooms to sow confusion, or to inject poisonous code to take down militant Web sites. Sometimes, they choose not to act, but silently track the online movements of jihadists to learn their plans.

In contrast, the Digital Engagement Team operates in total sunshine: all of the online postings carry an official stamp acknowledging sponsorship by Central Command.

The team’s operators “respectfully deflect baseless and often irrational insults, confront adversaries with factual evidence and expose extremist propaganda that might otherwise go unrefuted,” Major Nevers said. “All engagements are transparent and attributable.”

The only obfuscation is the use of online pseudonyms to protect the civilian contract employees from potential retaliation.

twits tweeting telling on themselves...,

Nature | US intelligence agency aims to forecast unrest by reading the runes of social media. It is every government's dream: a system that can predict future events such as riots, political upheavals and the outbreak of wars. Last week, a collection of academics and private businesses was scrambling to meet the deadline for proposals for research aiming to do just that.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), a research arm of the US intelligence community, is sponsoring the work under the Open Source Indicators (OSI) programme. The three-year project, with an unspecified budget, is designed to gather digital data from a range of sources, from traffic webcams to television to Twitter. The goal, according to IARPA, is to provide the intelligence community with predictions of social and political events that can "beat the news".

Initially, the OSI project will focus on Latin America, which has abundant publicly available data and offers a convenient test bed for researchers' models. Those models will build on strategies that have already shown promise for predicting disease outbreaks and consumer behaviour, and which are becoming increasingly popular with US national security agencies (see Nature 471, 566–568; 2011).

Indeed, the OSI project is one of many being sponsored by the US national security community, which seeks to meld mathematics, computer science and economics with the social sciences, creating a new field of social and political forecasting that has often been compared to Isaac Asimov's concept of 'psychohistory'.

At the Center for Collective Intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, computer scientist Peter Gloor has been working with colleagues to build models that can predict consumer behaviour, such as ticket sales for Hollywood films, using a range of online sources including social media. "We're up to 90% accuracy" for predicting box-office returns, says Gloor, who is part of a team applying for OSI funding.

do moods on twitter follow biorhythms?

NYTimes | However grumpy people are when they wake up, and whether they stumble to their feet in Madrid, Mexico City or Minnetonka, Minn., they tend to brighten by breakfast time and feel their moods taper gradually to a low in the late afternoon, before rallying again near bedtime, a large-scale study of posts on the social media site Twitter found.

Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.

The report, by sociologists at Cornell University and appearing in the journal Science, is the first cross-cultural study of daily mood rhythms in the average person using such text analysis. Previous studies have also mined the mountains of data pouring into social media sites, chat rooms, blogs and elsewhere on the Internet, but looked at collective moods over broader periods of time, in different time zones or during holidays.

“There’s just a torrent of new digital data coming into the field, and it’s transforming the social sciences, creating new lenses to look at all sorts of behaviors,” said Peter Sheridan Dodds, a researcher at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the new research. He called the new study “very exciting, because it complements previous findings” and expands on what is known about how mood fluctuates.

He and other outside researchers also cautioned that drawing on Twitter had its hazards, like any other attempt to monitor the fleeting internal states labeled as moods. For starters, Twitter users are computer-savvy, skew young and affluent, and post for a variety of reasons.

“Tweets may tell us more about what the tweeter thinks the follower wants to hear than about what the tweeter is actually feeling,” said Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, in an e-mail. “In short, tweets are not a simple reflection of a person’s current affective state and should not be taken at face value.”

The study’s authors, Scott A. Golder and Michael W. Macy, acknowledge such limitations and worked to correct for them. In the study, they collected up to 400 messages from each of 2.4 million Twitter users writing in English, posted from February 2008 through January 2010.

They analyzed the text of each message, using a standard computer program that associates certain words, like “awesome” and “agree,” with positive moods and others, like “annoy” and “afraid,” with negative ones. They included so-called emoticons, the face symbols like “:)” that punctuate digital missives.

The researchers gained access to the messages through Twitter, using an interface that allows scientists as well as software developers to work with the data.

ironies abound in the media reaction to the English riots that erupted between August 6-10.

Media Lens | It was widely reported that two young men acting independently - Jordan Blackshaw, 20, and Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22 – had been sentenced to four years in prison for trying to incite riots via Facebook in the Manchester area. This ‘despite both being of previous good character’, and despite the fact that their Facebook entries - viewed by a few hundred people – failed to generate a single rioter. Farcically, the only people waiting for Blackshaw at his gathering point were the police.

The four-year jail sentences were harsh indeed, as the Guardian noted:

‘If the two Cheshire men had left home and actually taken part in a riot, it is likely they would have been charged with violent disorder. The average sentence passed on the 372 people convicted of violent disorder in 2010 was just over 18 months. The 1,434 people convicted of public order offences last year got, on average, two months inside.

‘Normally, to qualify for a four-year sentence, a convict would have to kidnap somebody (average sentence 47 months in 2010), kill someone while drink driving (45 months), or carry out a sexual assault (48 months).’

Clearly, judges felt that even failed attempts to incite disruption via social media were worse than actual participation in the riots.

Writing in the Daily Mail, columnist Melanie Phillips located the cause of the riots in ‘fatherless boys who are consumed by an existential rage and desperate emotional need, and who take out the damage done to them by lashing out from infancy at everyone around them’.

This vicious behaviour is fostered by ‘a world without any boundaries or rules. A world of emotional and physical chaos. A world where a child responds to the slightest setback or disagreement by resorting to violence.’

And who can doubt that compassion and restraint in the face of disagreement offer the best hopes for a peaceful world? The 11th century Buddhist poet Ksemendra recalled the wise counsel offered to one enraged king:

'Lord, do not talk like this. If you return anger for anger, anger increases. If you give hate in return for hatred, you will never be rid of your enemies. Would you put out a fire by covering it with wood? It will always rekindle... If you meditate on tolerance to overcome anger, all will become your friends.' (Leaves of the Heaven Tree, Dharma Publishing, 1997, p.333)

Earlier this month, Phillips commented on the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks:

‘The real problem with the US and UK reaction to 9/11 was that they did not follow through… we should have gone on to deal with Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Saudi as well.’

Did she mean ‘deal with’ their concerns and grievances in a just and even-handed way? Should the US and UK have recognised their own wrongdoing, their own responsibility for generating hatred? In clarification, Phillips quoted herself from September 2002:

‘The US hopes that sorting Saddam will deliver to these other states the simple message: unless you desist from terror, you're next.’

A world ‘without any boundaries or rules’, in other words, where unilaterally ‘resorting to violence’ and 'lashing out' is the natural response.

Journalists like Phillips, who use national media platforms like the Daily Mail (circulation 2 million) to agitate for war at a time when the decision lies in the balance, are typically garlanded with awards, not sent to the slammer.  After two years spent cold-selling Blair’s war on Iraq, David Aaronovitch, then of the Guardian, won the What the Papers Say Columnist of The Year Award for 2003. In the same year, following a similar pro-war performance, the Independent’s Johann Hari was made Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards (to his credit, Hari has since recanted his support for the Iraq war). Phillips was awarded the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 1996.

Politicians do even better, of course. Last month, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Tony Blair, now the Middle East Quartet’s Special Envoy, was to receive an award ‘to express Israel’s appreciation for his efforts toward Middle East peace'. A decision worthy of a different kind of Orwell Prize. Meanwhile, Channel 4 reports:

‘Since resigning in June 2007 Tony Blair has financially enriched himself more than any ex-Prime Minister ever. Reporter Peter Oborne reveals some of the sources of his new-found wealth, much of which comes from the Middle East.’ 

campus is one big commercial

NYTimes | IT’S move-in day here at the University of North Carolina, and Leila Ismail, stuffed animals in tow, is feeling some freshman angst.

A few friendly upperclassmen spring into action.

But wait: there is something odd, or at least oddly corporate, about this welcome wagon. These U.N.C. students are all wearing identical T-shirts from American Eagle Outfitters.

Turns out three of them are working for that youth clothing chain on this late August morning, as what are known in the trade as “brand ambassadors” or “campus evangelists” — and they have recruited several dozen friends as a volunteer move-in crew. Even before Ms. Ismail can find her dorm or meet her roommate, they cheerily unload her family’s car. Then they lug her belongings to her dorm. Along the way, they dole out American Eagle coupons, American Eagle water canisters and American Eagle pens.

Ms. Ismail, 18, of Charlotte, welcomes the help. “I’ll probably always remember it,” she says.

American Eagle Outfitters certainly hopes so, as do a growing number of companies that are hiring college students to represent brands on campuses across the nation.

This fall, an estimated 10,000 American college students will be working on hundreds of campuses — for cash, swag, job experience or all three — marketing everything from Red Bull to Hewlett-Packard PCs. For the companies hiring them, the motivation is clear: college students spent about $36 billion on things like clothing, computers and cellphones during the 2010-11 school year alone, according to projections from Re:Fuel, a media and promotions firm specializing in the youth market. And who knows the students at, say, U.N.C., better than the students at U.N.C.?

Corporations have been pitching college students for decades on products from cars to credit cards. But what is happening on campuses today is without rival, in terms of commercializing everyday college life.

Companies from Microsoft on down are increasingly seeking out the big men and women on campus to influence their peers. The students most in demand are those who are popular — ones involved in athletics, music, fraternities or sororities. Thousands of Facebook friends help, too. What companies want are students with inside knowledge of school traditions and campus hotspots. In short, they want students with the cred to make brands seem cool, in ways that a TV or magazine ad never could.

mobbing yoots better put those crackberries down...,

TechnologyReview | Those involved in the recent rioting and looting in Britain are unlikely to have their identities protected by the BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM), contrary to reports that such data is "untraceable."

While BBM does provide greater privacy than public social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook, British police are still likely to be able to use it to track down those coordinating and participating in the disorder that has taken place over the past four nights. BlackBerry's Canadian manufacturer, Research In Motion (RIM), has refused to answer questions, perhaps because releasing certain information about the degree to which it is cooperating with the authorities could be unlawful.

BlackBerry users can only exchange messages via BBM if they have exchanged their unique PIN codes, which they can do quickly via e-mail, social network, or scanning a QR barcode using a handset's camera. Using BBM is more like sending a text to multiple contacts than posting on a social network.

The network provider's server ceases to be involved once it determines for a user which contacts are logged on and has informed those contacts that the user is available. After that, communications occur directly between users' client software, although BBM messages are routed via RIM's servers.
Advertisement

Media reports have suggested that part of the rioters' and looters' attraction to BBM is its relative security compared to social media or text messaging. However, the widespread use of BBM by teenagers and young adults, including those involved in the violence, is more likely explained by its speed, convenience, and low cost. These attributes have made BlackBerry handsets popular among the age group of those involved in the trouble, accounting for 37 percent of the British teenage market, according to a report released by Ofcom, the independent regulator and competition authority, last week.

BlackBerry has resisted calls to suspend BBM, and some have speculated that the service provides users with a level of technical protection. "It's like text messaging with steroids," said Mike Butcher, a technology journalist and adviser to London mayor Boris Johnson, on the BBC's radio show Today. "You can send messages to hundreds of people, and once it's gone from your phone, it cannot be traced back to you."

collective dopaminergic tweaking

Video - flash mob robs 7-11

davidbrin | Please forgive this open letter, offering suggestions in a field outside my own. I'm no biologist, physician or chemist. Still, my background -- usefully exploring a wide range of scientific issues -- may make this seem less impudent. (I have written New York Times best-selling books that include The Transparent Society and The Postman.)1

Will you indulge a query that may prove pertinent to your work?

For years I've followed advances that investigate reinforcement processes in the human brain, especially those involving dopamine and other messenger chemicals that are active in mediating pleasure response. One might call this topic chemically-mediated states of arousal that self-reinforce patterns of behavior.

Of course, what this boils down to -- at one level -- is addiction. But not only in the sense of illegal drug abuse. In very general terms, "addiction" may include desirable things, like bonding with our children and "getting high on life." These good patterns share with drug addiction the property of being reinforced by repeated chemical stimulus, inside the brain.

Now, certainly, knowing that life's wholesome pleasures are chemically reinforced doesn't make love any less sincere, a sunset less beautiful, or even faith in God any less sincere. Indeed, generalizing our study of auto-reinforcement may help us understand how wholesome pleasure works... and perhaps how better to choose which behaviors get reinforced.

Please bear with me. This line of reasoning is going somewhere important. So important that it may bear upon some of society's most pressing problems.

* * * * *
Generalizing the Word "Addiction"

I have long admired those who keep advancing the science of addiction, often uphill against the oversimplifying puritanism of a stale "Drug War"... or else having to overcome naive platitudes at the other end of the political spectrum. Some of the august workers who spared time to talk to me about this topic have included Hans Breiter, Rich Wilcox, Stanley Glick, Jonathan D. Cohen, Alan I. Leshner, Gregory Berns, Dan Ariely, Steven Grant, and Seth Boatwright-Horowitz.

Like the hot topic of Global Warming, this one draws so much political heat that it's a wonder anything can get done at all. And yet, here I am, offering brazen suggestions.

Indeed, I believe the field of addiction may be myopically missing a substantial area of potential research. This area concerns volitionally or habitually self-stimulated secretion -- or, putting it rather crudely, "self-doping."

In other words, the power that individuals have to trigger the release of psychoactive chemicals simply by entering into certain types of consciousness.

I am not talking about mysticism or New Age states of awareness. True, some workers have measured neurochemical effects of meditation and other eastern arts. But this ignores a great many other pleasurable, or semi-pleasurable mental states that require considerably less discipline to access than the meditative plateau. States that are accessible to nearly everyone, every day.

Of course, this overall effect has been known ever since William James wrote Varieties of Religious Experience. But I'd like to suggest strong reasons to study autonomous self-stimulation along new directions that are tangentially related to those already being pursued. For one thing, new research trends - of which you are a part - seem to offer potential hope for getting out of the horrible Drug War.

Suppose that, instead of preaching to substance abusers that they should "get high on life," we could actually train them in self-triggered endorphin/dopamine-releasing methods? Methods the rest of us learn unconsciously in childhood. Better addictions that do not suffer from receptor down-regulating and other problems, such as depression or insatiability.

Beyond obvious implications re: substance abuse, there is another aspect of such research that might benefit society.

* * * * *
Progress in Studying "Self-Addiction"

Of course we know that individuals who are addicted to psychoactive chemicals can often wind up behaving in socially harmful ways while in pursuit of their high. But what of many other compulsively harmful behaviors we see practiced around us. Might some of them have similar roots? What if many irrationally harmful -- even self-defeating -- actions arise from individuals seeking to trigger a self-doped pleasure response?

(It has been said that "insanity is doing the same thing, over and over, while expecting different results." Doesn't that sound like addiction?)

Consider studies of gambling. Researchers led by Dr. Hans Breiter of Massachusetts General Hospital examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) which brain regions activate when volunteers won games of chance -- regions that overlapped with those responding to cocaine!

"Gambling produces a similar pattern of activity to cocaine in an addict," according to Breiter.

Moving along the spectrum toward activity that we consider more "normal" -- neuroscientists at Harvard have found a striking similarity between the brain-states of people trying to predict financial rewards (e.g., via the stock market) and the brains of cocaine and morphine users.

Along similar lines, researchers at Emory University monitored brain activity while asking staunch party members, from both left and right, to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. "We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, Emory's director of clinical psychology. "Instead, a network of emotion circuits lit up... reaching biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted. Significantly, activity spiked in circuits involved in reward, similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix," Westen explained.

How far can this spectrum be extended? All the way into realms of behavior -- and mental states -- that we label as wholesome? Rich Wilcox of the University of Texas says: "Recovery process in addiction is based to a great extent on cognitively mediated changes in brain chemistry of the frontal/prefrontal cortex system. Furthermore... there is even a surprising amount of literature cited in PubMed suggesting that prayer also induces substantial changes in brain chemistry."

Clearly this spectrum of "addiction" includes reinforcement of behaviors that are utterly beneficial and that have important value to us, e.g., love of our children. I get a jolt every time I smell my kids' hair, for instance. The "Aw!" that many people give when then see a baby smile is accompanied by skin flushes and iris dilation, reflecting physiological pleasure. Similar jolts come to people (variously) from music, sex, exercise and the application of skill.

Although a lot of recent research has danced along the edges of this area, I find that the core topic appears to have been rather neglected. I'm talking about the way that countless millions of humans either habitually or volitionally pursue druglike reinforcement cycles -- either for pleasure or through cycles of withdrawal and insatiability that mimic addiction -- purely as a function of entering an addictive frame of mind.

For a majority, indeed, this process goes un-noticed because there is no pathology! Reiterating; it is simply "getting high on life." Happy or at least content people who lead decent lives partake in these wholesome addictive cycles that have escaped much attention from researchers simply because these cycles operate at the highest levels of human functionality. (It is easy to verify that there is something true, underlying the phrase "addicted to love.")

This wholesomeness should no longer mask or exclude such powerfully effective mental states from scientific scrutiny. For example, we might learn more about the role of oxytocin in preventing the down-regulating or tolerance effects that exacerbate drug addiction. Does this moderating effect provide the more wholesome, internally-generated "addictions" with their long-lasting power?

Even more attractive would be to shine light on patterns of volitional or habitual addictive mentation that are NOT helpful or functional or desirable.

Gambling has already been mentioned. Rage is obviously another of these harmful patterns, that clearly have a chemical-reinforcement component. Many angry people report deriving addictive pleasure from fury, and this is one reason why they return to the state, again and again. Thrill-seeking can also be like this, when it follows a pathology of down-regulating satiability. Ernst Fehr, Brian Knutson, and John Hibbing have written about the pleasure-reinforcement of revenge, that Hollywood films tap incessantly in plot lines that give audiences a vicarious thrill of Payback against villains-who-deserve-it.

twitter caused tottenham riot....,

themediablog | The Daily Mail this morning has suggested Twitter may be to blame for violent riots in Tottenham, North London, last night. I'll not link to the story - as they're no doubt hoping to drive traffic with such nonsense.

Predictably we're not told whose "fears" these are. I suspect it's a case of 'journalistic licence'. And presumably The Mail considers its own images of burning vehicles and those broadcast on rolling news channels to millions through the night to be less controversial than those posted and retweeted "more than 100 times" on Twitter.

Further down the article any doubts that Twitter's was a mere bit-part in the violence have vanished altogether as it is a declared a bull blown "Twitter riot" in one of the image captions

the insidious evils of "like" culture

WSJ | If you happen to be reading this article online, you'll notice that right above it, there is a button labeled "like." Please stop reading and click on "like" right now.

Thank you. I feel much better. It's good to be liked.

Don't forget to comment on, tweet, blog about and StumbleUpon this article. And be sure to "+1" it if you're on the newly launched Google+ social network. In fact, if you don't want to read the rest of this article, at least stay on the page for a few minutes before clicking elsewhere. That way, it will appear to the site analytics as if you've read the whole thing.

Once, there was something called a point of view. And, after much strife and conflict, it eventually became a commonly held idea in some parts of the world that people were entitled to their own points of view.

Unfortunately, this idea is becoming an anachronism. When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. When it was hijacked first by advertising and then by commerce, it seemed like it had been fully co-opted and brought into line with human greed and ambition.

But there was one other element of human nature that the Internet still needed to conquer: the need to belong. The "like" button began on the website FriendFeed in 2007, appeared on Facebook in 2009, began spreading everywhere from YouTube to Amazon to most major news sites last year, and has now been officially embraced by Google as the agreeable, supportive and more status-conscious "+1." As a result, we can now search not just for information, merchandise and kitten videos on the Internet, but for approval.

Just as stand-up comedians are trained to be funny by observing which of their lines and expressions are greeted with laughter, so too are our thoughts online molded to conform to popular opinion by these buttons. A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn't retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don't show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.

Conversely, when we're looking at someone else's content—whether a video or a news story—we are able to see first how many people liked it and, often, whether our friends liked it. And so we are encouraged not to form our own opinion but to look to others for cues on how to feel.

"Like" culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in.

facebook's face-recognition "feature" draws privacy scrutiny

NYTimes | European Union data protection regulators said on Wednesday that they would investigate Facebook over a feature that uses face-recognition software to suggest people’s names to tag in pictures without their permission, and a privacy group in the United States said that it planned to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over the feature.

A group of privacy watchdogs drawn from the European bloc’s 27 nations will study the measure for possible rule violations, said Gérard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party. Authorities in Britain and Ireland said they are also looking into the photo-tagging function on the world’s most popular social networking service.

“Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people’s prior consent and it can’t be activated by default,” said Mr. Lommel. Such automatic tagging suggestions “can bear a lot of risks for users” and the European data protection officials will “clarify to Facebook that this can’t happen like this.”

Facebook said on its blog on Tuesday that “Tag Suggestions” was available in most countries after being phased in over several months. When Facebook users add photos to their pages, the feature uses facial-recognition software to suggest names of people in the photos to tag based on pictures in which they have already been identified. Before the feature was introduced, users could tag pictures manually without permission from their friends.

The feature is active by default on existing users’ accounts, and Facebook explains on its blog how people can disable the function if they don’t want their names to be automatically suggested for other people’s pictures.

“We launched Tag Suggestions to help people add tags of their friends in photos; something that’s currently done more than 100 million times a day,” Facebook, which is based in Palo Alto., Calif., said in an e-mailed statement. “Tag suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested.”

In Europe, where personal privacy is protected by law more often than in the United States, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have also been pushed by data protection officials to limit the amount of time they store online users’ search records.

social activity signals what is authoritative and good?

Technology Review | This ambitious project gets much of its information from the simple "Like" button, a thumbs-up logo that adorns many Web pages and invites visitors to signal their appreciation for something—a news story, a recipe, a photo—with a click. Taylor created the concept in 2007 at FriendFeed, a social network that he cofounded, which was acquired by Facebook in 2009. Back then, the button was just a way to encourage people to express their interests, but in combination with Facebook's user base of nearly 600 million people, it is becoming a potent data-collecting tool. The code behind the Like button is available to any site that wants to add it to its pages. If a user is logged in to Facebook and clicks the Like button anywhere on the Web, the link is shared with that person's Facebook friends. Simultaneously, that thumbs-up vote is fed into Taylor's Web-wide index.

That's how the Wall Street Journal highlights articles that a person's friends enjoyed on its site. This is what lets Microsoft's Bing search engine promote pages liked by a person's friends. And it's how Pandora creates playlists based on songs or bands a person has appreciated on other sites.

This method of figuring out connections between pieces of content is fundamentally different from the one that has ruled for a decade. Google mathematically indexes the Web by scanning the hyperlinks between pages. Pages with many links from other sites rise to the top of search results on the assumption that such pages must be relatively useful or interesting. The social index isn't going to be a complete replacement for Google, but for many types of activity—such as finding products, entertainment, or things to read—the new system's personal touch could make it more useful.

Google itself acknowledges this: it recently rolled out a near-clone of the Like button, which it calls "+1." It lets people signify for their friends which search results or Web pages they've found useful. Google is also using Twitter activity to augment its index. If you have connected your Twitter and Google accounts, Web links that your friends have shared on Twitter may come up higher in Google search results.

Another advantage of a social index is that it could be less vulnerable to manipulation: inflating Google rankings by creating extra links to a site is big business, but buying enough Facebook likes to make a difference is nearly impossible, says Chris Dixon, cofounder of Hunch, a Web startup that combines its own recommendation technology with tools from Facebook and Twitter. "Social activity provides a really authentic signal of what is authoritative and good," says Dixon. That's why Hunch and other services, including an entertainment recommendation site called GetGlue, are building their own social indexes, asking people to record their positive feelings about content from all over the Web. If you're browsing for something on Amazon, a box from GetGlue can pop up to tell you which of your friends have liked that item.

A social index will be of less use to people who don't have many online connections. And even Facebook's map covers just a small fraction of the Web for now. But about 10,000 additional websites connect themselves to Facebook every day.