Florian Wanders

Summer Institute in Computational Social Science in Helsinki, Finland

This summer, I attended the Summer Institute in Computational Social Science in Helsinki, Finland. Here’s a look back at two unforgettable weeks. Scroll down to see the resulting app!

Ethics

• Just because some data are public does not mean you can use them in your research. Weigh the risk and benefits of using public data. Consult your ethics board.

Twitter, Facebook, & Co.

• That viral tweet might not be so viral. Instead of mimicking the spread of a virus (right side of the figure below), tweets tend to be broadcast (left). Figure courtesy of Goel, Anderson, Hofman, & Watts (2016).

  

• People use Facebook and twitter differently. Depending on which data you use, you will arrive at different conclusions (Alhabash & Ma, 2017). Oh, and people also call, text, and meet up.

Semantic Analysis

• I like visualizations. A lot. Courtesy of Shirakawa (2015).

  

• Struggling to decide on the number of topics in your topic model? Structural topic modeling handles this for you by picking the model with the highest harmonic log-likelihood.

The Power of Combining Data Sets

• We combined data on happiness ratings from kaggle with data from the world bank to answer the question of what sets happy countries apart. Neither dataset alone could provide this answer, but by combining the data, we found: employment rates among women was the best predictor.

  

Survey Sampling

• Wiki surveys allow hurried people to leave their contribution quickly and engaged users to contribute a lot. Figure courtesy of Salganik & Levy (2015). Check out allourideas.org for a tool that implements this principle.

  

• We can (to some extent) adjust for imbalanced non-probability sampling with post-stratification. E.g., in a linear model in R, simply include weights=weights in your call to lm, where the weights is a vector in your data that specifies the weight of each row.

On Causality

• Argument: causality is not required for policy decisions. We do not need to understand why the weather forecast predicts rain to decide whether we will take an umbrella. Counter-argument: we should be hesitant to recommend policy decisions that we do not understand. Google’s image tagging algorithms appeared to work fine until it made racist headlines (Kasperkevic, 2015).

On Algorithmic Bias

• Algorithms that are blind to ethnicity do not exist (predictions will often be comparable whether ethnicity is included or not). Rather, control for ethnicity and then see what explains the remaining variance.

On Möllki, Sauna, and Kajaking

• The Finnish Way.

On Amazing People

A big thank you to the organizers in Finland, Matti Nelimarkka, Pihla Toivanen, and Juho Pääkkönen, as well as the coordinators of the summer institute Matthew Salganik and Chris Bail. And to wonderful friends.

The Summer Institute Computational Social Science Helsinki has started! We had a great first day, filled with lectures and discussions. I'm looking forward to what's to come in the next 2 weeks! #SICSS2018

— Ilse Pit (@IlsePit) June 18, 2018

To Be Continued

We (Hannes Rosenbusch, Ilse Pit, and me) continued working on our project after the summer school. You can check out a preview here. Funny enough, Hannes and I had met a year earlier on another summer school (Decisions, Laws, and the Probability of Big Data, in Haifa, Israel), but only got to know each other now.

References

1. Goel, S., Anderson, A., Hofman, J., & Watts, D. J. (2016). The structural virality of online diffusion. Management Science, 62(1), 180–196. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2158
2. Alhabash, S., & Ma, M. (2017). A tale of four platforms: motivations and uses of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat among college students. Social Media + Society, 3(1), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117691544
3. Shirakawa, M. (2015). N-gram IDF: A global term weighting scheme based on information distance. 24th International World Wide Web Conference. Retrieved from https://www.slideshare.net/MasumiShirakawa/www-48698138
4. Salganik, M. J., & Levy, K. E. C. (2015). Wiki surveys: Open and quantifiable social data collection. PLoS ONE, 10(5), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0123483
5. Kasperkevic, J. (2015). Google says sorry for racist auto-tag in photo app. The Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/01/google-sorry-racist-auto-tag-photo-app

Zim Wiki

Zim is a fantastic note taking program that allows you to store all your thoughts/notes/ideas and to link between them. Think of your personal Wikipedia, but much more accessible:

Zim allows me to have all my notes in one place, from my trip to Finland that I planned this summer, over the papers I am working on, to my favorite recipes. Even better, I can link between entries. For example, when I write down ideas for a project in one entry, I can link to more detailed entries about components of that project in other entries.

Download Zim

You can download the free and open-source software zim here.

Tips & Tweaks

• As much as I love zim, I am not a friend of bright green headers. On Windows, navigate to (or create) the folder C:/Users/usr/AppData/Roaming/zim/config/zim/profiles/Notes and copy the file style.conf from C:/Program Files (x86)/Zim Desktop Wiki/data into this folder. Then open the copied file (e.g., in notepad++) and change

    [Tag h1]
    foreground = #4e9a06
  

  into

    [Tag h1]
    foreground = #333
  

  Also modify the other header tags (h2 through h6) to your linking. Save style.conf, close and re-open zim and enjoy a calmer interface (or perhaps you changed the colors from bright green to neon red). See also my post on superuser for more info and links to Linux.

• To be able to copy images from one entry to another (say you want to restructure parts of your wiki), make sure you store all images outside of your notebook. In my case, I added a folder images into the folder ZimNotebooks, which already contained the folder Notebook (where my notes are stored). Two more tips:

  • You can resize images in zim by right-clicking and then selecting Edit Properties.

  • Give images descriptive names, e.g., effect-sizes.png for an image with an overview of effect sizes.

• The last entry in my wiki is shortcuts. I copied some commands that I use frequently from here and from here. Especially in the beginning I found it helpful to have these commands handy (although you can also do completely without and still enjoy zim).

• You might realize in shock that you deleted an entry (or even a folder with many entries!) and there seems to be no way to get your content back. Don’t panic, zim works with simple text files. All you have to do is go to your Recycle Bin and restore the entries/folders you deleted and you are good again.

Extras & Plugins

• You can customize Zim’s preferences under Edit > Preferences. Under the tab Plugins you will find a list of handy plugins (activate by ticking the respective check box).

• You can use this plugin to use Mendeley in Zim. See here for more details. The mendeley plugin (and possibly other plugins) might not work anymore: Graham Rowlands, the developer of zim: “Apologies, I don’t ever use zim anymore, nor can I get it to even launch on macOS Sierra. But, my blind attempt at a fix can be found on the fix/ui-issues branch — let me know if that works.”

• You can use git as a version control tool for your wiki. See here for more details.