Sunbelt Debriefing

Today was the last day of my first Sunbelt social networks conference.

There were a ton of statisticians (though they mostly consisted of ERGMers) a lot more CS people than I was expecting (though I figured there would be a decent number there), and a metric fuck ton of sociologists of all shapes, sizes, and stripes. Of the more than 500 people present, I was one of what was perhaps literally less than a handful of mathematicians + physicists. I have said this before and I will say it again: If the people from my side of the community want to maximize their impact on problems in the social sciences, then we need to publish in their journals, go to their conferences, and participate on their SOCnet mailing list. The number of individual collaborations is much larger than it used to be---this has really improved in the last couple of years---and I am not the only math/physics person who participates in SOCnet discussions, but we can't just be inbred and only publish in our own journals. It's not good enough.

I had a good time at the conference (though I think I would have had a lot more fun if I knew more than a couple of people), and several of the talks were excellent. Barabasi had to cancel, and I was really looking forward to the fireworks that were going to follow his talk. I got along quite well with the social scientists, and I felt accepted at the conference even though my background was so different from everybody else (even though some of the talks were quite quantitative). Carter Butts gave an excellent plenary talk, and Phil Bonacich gave the other non-cancelled plenary. (You can ask me offline about that talk.) I also found out that apparently Stan Wasserman---who seems to be addicted to Facebook, by the way, given how often he was logging in during talks---is buds with Vespignani and (to a lesser extent) Barabasi, with whom he apparently just likes to have fun arguing. One of the nice things about this conference was being able to match some names to faces (it was like 1999 again, when I went to the Snowbird dynamics conference for the first time, except that I am 10 years older), though of course I recognized only a small subset of the names of the well-known people. The only one of them I met was Barry Wellman, who is one of the main people from the origins of Sunbelt, and I got along quite well with him. One thing that I already pretty much knew but got confirmed was that the math/physics networks folks from Cornell-and-friends (the Strogatz-Newman-etc. crowd) are very well-respected in this community, whereas certain other prominent members of our community are not. (As many of you know, my origin in networks is exactly the Cornell-and-friends group.)

The conference was held in the Bahia Hotel on Mission Bay, so I got a chance to walk along the beach and to feel the breeze as I used my laptop or read. That's always good, though I did find that when I was walking along the beach I felt a bit lonely not having any friends around to walk with me. (I definitely felt out of place during those times because everyone on the beach was so different from me.)