I am writing this entry from San Diego, where I am attending my first Sunbelt social networks conference. Based on early estimations, I seem to be one of about 5 math/physics types in a conference with over 500 social scientists. (Let the festivities begin!) All of tomorrow's talks are workshops, and I didn't pay to participate in any of them, so my plans are just to mill around, get some work done, and soak up the atmosphere.
One of the things I have told some of you before is that if people studying network science are going to influence the social scientists, we need to not just go to our venues (the March Meeting, NetSci, etc.) but also to theirs. The social scientists who know me seem to be pretty happy with the work I am doing, so I think I'm doing reasonably well in trying to establish some local connections. This has become much more common over the last couple of years, and hopefully there will continue to be more of it.
I'll try to confirm the rumor that social scientists dress much better at their conferences than mathematicians and physicists do at theirs. Stay tuned.
11 hours ago
4 comments:
funny. I can tell you that at clinical meetings the dress code bar is >> mixed MD/PhD meetings is > mostly PhD meetings in the US, but in Europe there don't seem to be such distinctions.
if you have some time you should investigate the San Diego foreclosure market - just drive around and see all the vacant properties. I would guess that if you can get social network data and overlay it on top of foreclosure data there would be some pretty interesting findings. Communal risk taking/aversion, hub individuals who appear to exert influence over large groups, and very few individuals who bridge risk taking/averse groups.
So far, I can't tell any difference between what I would see at math and physics meetings--except that the nerdy jokes have a social networks flavor instead of other flavors. :)
Mason,
My brother just shared
a fabulous story of grad student self-immolation, which I thought you'd enjoy.
Wow. That guy is pretty "awesome." Thankfully, none of the people I interviewed did anything remotely like that. In fact, I have never seen any interviewee behave in that extreme a fashion. The story is really funny, but part of me is crying as well.
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