What Happens in Sunnyvale Stays in Sunnyvale

I am off to Sunnyvale for the weekend to attend the wedding of one of my former Ph.D. students. I have many friends in the area, so I will also hang out with some of them, given that I'll already be in the area.

RIP Sinéad O'Connor (1966–2023)

Sinéad O'Connor has died.

She was only 56. But, to be honest, I am surprised that she lasted this long. She seemed to always be struggling.

You can read more about her in her Wikipedia entry.

What Happens in Richland Stays in Richland

I'll soon be visiting Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as part of a Directory Advisory Committee.

Serendipitous Convergence of the Dodgers and Tarzan Boy

On a few occasions this year, I had noticed the Dodger organist playing Tarzan Boy, and I was wondering why.

I had thought it was for something like certain leaping catches in the outfield, but it turns out that it is specifically for rookie James Outman. I figured that out last night because they played it when he got a hit in his first at bat. (I revised my opinion from seeing this when Outman was at the plate and running for a hit, with his locks flowing.) I thought it might have been because of his luxuriantly flowing hair.

I decided to google it to confirm whether I was right, and indeed Tarzan Boy is played specifically for good James Outman action, although it seems to actually be because of a nickname that is catching on. (I hadn't known about eh nickname.)

I am very amused by the fact that this is a convergence between the Dodgers and Tarzan Boy, given how many people from my Lloyd House days at Caltech would associate each of those two things individually with me.

What Happens in Dallas Stays in Dallas

Well, unfortunately, I won't be making my connection (annoying flight delay), and I will be staying an unintended night in Dallas before resuming my journey in the morning.

But at least I won't be liveblogging from the Dallas airport, as I did 16 years ago.

"Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics with Heterogeneous Node-Activity Levels"

One of my papers came out in final form today. Here are some details.

Title: Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics with Heterogeneous Node-Activity Levels

Authors: Grace J. Li and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: Agent-based models of opinion dynamics allow one to examine the spread of opinions between entities and to study phenomena such as consensus, polarization, and fragmentation. By studying models of opinion dynamics on social networks, one can explore the effects of network structure on these phenomena. In social networks, some individuals share their ideas and opinions more frequently than others. These disparities can arise from heterogeneous sociabilities, heterogeneous activity levels, different prevalences to share opinions when engaging in a social-media platform, or something else. To examine the impact of such heterogeneities on opinion dynamics, we generalize the Deffuant-Weisbuch (DW) bounded-confidence model (BCM) of opinion dynamics by incorporating node weights. The node weights allow us to model agents with different probabilities of interacting. Using numerical simulations, we systematically investigate (using a variety of network structures and node-weight distributions) the effects of node weights, which we assign uniformly at random to the nodes. We demonstrate that introducing heterogeneous node weights results in longer convergence times and more opinion fragmentation than in a baseline DW model. The node weights in our BCM allow one to consider a variety of sociological scenarios in which agents have heterogeneous probabilities of interacting with other agents.

"Lonely Individuals Process the World in Idiosyncratic Ways"

One of my papers that came out a couple of months ago now also has its final volume and page numbers. Here are some details about the article.

Title: Lonely Individuals Process the World in Idiosyncratic Ways

Authors: Elisa C. Baek, Ryan Hyon, Karina López, Meng Du, Mason A. Porter, and Carolyn Parkinson

Abstract: Loneliness is detrimental to well-being and is often accompanied by self-reported feelings of not being understood by other people. What contributes to such feelings in lonely people? We used functional MRI of 66 first-year university students to unobtrusively measure the relative alignment of people’s mental processing of naturalistic stimuli and tested whether lonely people actually process the world in idiosyncratic ways. We found evidence for such idiosyncrasy: Lonely individuals’ neural responses were dissimilar to those of their peers, particularly in regions of the default-mode network in which similar responses have been associated with shared perspectives and subjective understanding. These relationships persisted when we controlled for demographic similarities, objective social isolation, and individuals’ friendships with each other. Our findings raise the possibility that being surrounded by people who see the world differently from oneself, even if one is friends with them, may be a risk factor for loneliness.

What Happens in Beaver Hollow Stays in Beaver Hollow

I am off to Beaver Hollow for our 2023 Mathematics Research Community on Complex Social Systems.

"Detecting Political Biases of Named Entities and Hashtags on Twitter"

One of my papers came out in final form earlier today. Here are some details. (This is in collaboration with computer scientists, and stylistically it is rather different from much of my work. However, you'll still notice my hand in it. :P)

Title: Detecting Political Biases of Named Entities and Hashtags on Twitter

Authors: Zhiping Xiao, Jeffrey Zhu, Yining Wang, Pei Zhou, Wen Hong Lam, Mason A. Porter, and Yizhou Sun

Abstract: Ideological divisions in the United States have become increasingly prominent in daily communication. Accordingly, there has been much research on political polarization, including many recent efforts that take a computational perspective. By detecting political biases in a text document, one can attempt to discern and describe its polarity. Intuitively, the named entities (i.e., the nouns and the phrases that act as nouns) and hashtags in text often carry information about political views. For example, people who use the term “pro-choice” are likely to be liberal and people who use the term “pro-life” are likely to be conservative. In this paper, we seek to reveal political polarities in social-media text data and to quantify these polarities by explicitly assigning a polarity score to entities and hashtags. Although this idea is straightforward, it is difficult to perform such inference in a trustworthy quantitative way. Key challenges include the small number of known labels, the continuous spectrum of political views, and the preservation of both a polarity score and a polarity-neutral semantic meaning in an embedding vector of words. To attempt to overcome these challenges, we propose the Polarity-aware Embedding Multi-task learning (PEM) model. This model consists of (1) a self-supervised context-preservation task, (2) an attention-based tweet-level polarity-inference task, and (3) an adversarial learning task that promotes independence between an embedding’s polarity component and its semantic component. Our experimental results demonstrate that our PEM model can successfully learn polarity-aware embeddings that perform well at tweet-level and account-level classification tasks. We examine a variety of applications—including a study of spatial and temporal distributions of polarities and a comparison between tweets from Twitter and posts from Parler—and we thereby demonstrate the effectiveness of our PEM model. We also discuss important limitations of our work and encourage caution when applying the PEM model to real-world scenarios.

What Happens at "Snowbird" Stays at "Snowbird"

Today I am off to the "Snowbird Meeting" (aka the SIAM applied-dynamical systems conference) for the latest instantiation of my favorite scientific conference series.

2023 Inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has announced its 2023 inductees.

Of the acts on the ballot this year, the ones for which I cast a vote are Kate Bush (who made it) and Cyndi Lauper, New Order/Joy Division, and Warren Zevon (who didn't).

Song Parody: "They're Still ODEs to Me"

I felt inspired. :)

What Happens at SOCAMS Stays at SOCAMS

Today I am off to Irvine for the 2023 version of the SOCAMS conference to celebrate applied mathematics in Southern California.

What Happens in Vancouver Stays in Vancouver

I am off to Vancouver today for a little while. I'll be giving a talk tomorrow at University of British Columbia, and I'll also be staying with friends and hanging out with them for a while! (On this day 10 years ago, I flew away to visit the same people.)

What Happens in Potsdam Stays in Potsdam

I am heading to Potsdam, NY to partake in the 6th Northeast Regional Conference on Complex Systems.

"Theorems" (to the tune of ' "Heroes" ', by David Bowie)

"Theorems" (to the tune of ' "Heroes" ', by David Bowie)

I, I will be pure
And you, you will use rigor
And nothing will take it away
We can show them, just for one day
We can prove theorems, just for one day

And you, you can have bounds
And I, I'll take infinite time
We're joint authors, and that is a fact
We're coauthors, and that is that
Mathematics'll keep us together
It will not be just for one day
We can prove theorems for ever and ever
What do you say?

I, I wish I could prove
Like my teachers, my teachers can prove
Though sometimes it's hard to keep it together
I can show them, for ever and ever
Oh I can prove Theorems, just for one day

I, I will be pure
And you, you will use rigor
And nothing will take it away
We can prove Theorems, just for one day
We can do it, just for one day

I, I can remember (I remember)
Standing, by the board (by the board)
Arguments, far above our heads (over our heads)
And we tried, and we were never ignored (never ignored)
Our mentors, were always on our side
Oh we can show them, for ever and ever
Then we could prove Theorems, just for one day

We can prove Theorems
We can prove Theorems
We can prove Theorems
Just for one day
We can prove Theorems

We're students, and nothing will help us
Maybe it's hopeless, then you better not stay
But we could graduate, maybe one day

Oh-oh-oh-ohh, oh-oh-oh-ohh, maybe one day?

"An Adaptive Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Networks "

An article of mine just appeared in final form a couple of days ago. Here are some details.

Title: An Adaptive Bounded-Confidence Model of Opinion Dynamics on Networks

Authors: Unchitta Kan, Michelle Feng, and Mason A. Porter

Abstract: Individuals who interact with each other in social networks often exchange ideas and influence each other’s opinions. A popular approach to study the spread of opinions on networks is by examining bounded-confidence models (BCMs), in which the nodes of a network have continuous-valued states that encode their opinions and are receptive to other nodes’ opinions when they lie within some confidence bound of their own opinion. In this article, we extend the Deffuant–Weisbuch (DW) model, which is a well-known BCM, by examining the spread of opinions that coevolve with network structure. We propose an adaptive variant of the DW model in which the nodes of a network can (1) alter their opinions when they interact with neighbouring nodes and (2) break connections with neighbours based on an opinion tolerance threshold and then form new connections following the principle of homophily. This opinion tolerance threshold determines whether or not the opinions of adjacent nodes are sufficiently different to be viewed as ‘discordant’. Using numerical simulations, we find that our adaptive DW model requires a larger confidence bound than a baseline DW model for the nodes of a network to achieve a consensus opinion. In one region of parameter space, we observe ‘pseudo-consensus’ steady states, in which there exist multiple subclusters of an opinion cluster with opinions that differ from each other by a small amount. In our simulations, we also examine the roles of early-time dynamics and nodes with initially moderate opinions for achieving consensus. Additionally, we explore the effects of coevolution on the convergence time of our BCM.

The Dodgers are Finally Retiring Fernando Valenzuela's Uniform Number!

It took way too long, but the Los Angeles Dodgers announced today that they are finally retiring Fernando Valenzuela's uniform number. Given what Fernandro means to this franchise and this city, the team should have retired his number a very long time ago.

"The Professional Road that I have Traveled (so far)"

I was asked to write about my career trajectory for DSWeb, so I wrote this short article, which officially has the generic title of "Professional Feature — Mason A. Porter".

I really like my concluding sentence: "I want my mentees to continue to do excellent mentorship and research, be warm and kind-hearted, and not take any crap from anyone."

Scott Rolen Elected to Baseball Hall of Fame!

Yesterday, Scott Rolen was elected to Baseball's Hall of Fame in his 6th year of eligibility. He and Fred McGriff (who was elected to the Hall of Fame by an era committee in December) will be officially inducted into the Hall this summer. I am very pleased that both Rolen and McGriff are now in the Hall of Fame!

Scott Rolen is eminently merits his election, and it's great that he got in after several years of rising vote counts. Todd Helton and Billy Wagner made huge gains this year and should be joining the Hall in 2024. Andruw Jones and Gary Sheffield also made huge gains, although Sheffield is in his last year of eligibility for election by the writers in 2024 and is likely to instead be elected later by an era committee. It now looks like Andruw Jones will likely be elected by the writers in the next few years (but probably not in 2024) after getting under 8% of the vote (!) in his first year of eligibility. Jeff Kent, who was in his 10th and final year of eligibility, surged to 46.5% of the vote and is likely to be elected later by an era committee. Carlos Beltrán debuted on the ballot with 46.5% of the vote (matching Kent). I expect that Beltrán will get up to the high 50s in 2024, have some chance (but unlikely) of election in 2025, and probably be elected in 2026.

A strong set of players is debuting on the Hall ballot for the 2024 cycle. This set of players is led by Adrián Beltré, who will surely be a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Joe Mauer also is debuting on the ballot, but I think it will take 2 or 3 years (most likely 2, in my view) for him to get in. Chase Utley is also debuting in 2024. He'll make it eventually, but his counting stats don't stand out, so it's going to take a few years for him to get in (but I think that he will eventually.)

As in each of the past several years, I was closely tracking the Hall of Fame tracker during the past couple of months as writers released their ballots to the public.

Here is Jay Jaffe's recap of the voting results.

Here are some "way too early" predictions (from Bradford Doolittle David Schoenfield) of Hall of Fame results for the next few cycles. For the most part, my views are far closer to Schoenfield's than the Doolittle's.

Update (1/26/23): Jay Jaffe has written his annual ballot round-up of the candidates on this year's ballot.

Update (1/30/23): Jay Jaffe has written his 5-year Hall prognostication.