2/5/16: Top 100 People To Follow To Discover Financial News On Twitter 2016 Rankings

Delighted to be included in the StreetEye's second annual The Top 100 People To Follow To Discover Financial News On Twitter listing:
http://blog.streeteye.com/blog/2016/05/the-top-100-people-to-follow-to-discover-financial-news-on-twitter-april-2016/

Great company all around!

27/6/15: Surreal World of Twitter...

The surreal nature of social media is that in failing to protect us from spam and bots, it actually blocks those of us who genuinely interact on social media without commercial interest.

Thus, I have now been blocked by Twitter for "suspicious automated activity" despite the fact that there is no evidence on my timeline of any activity that fits their own definition of the said 'suspicious automated activity'.

My request to the Twitter Help team to identify the said 'suspicious activity' went unanswered, despite the team attempting to answer my other queries.

I have no recourse on the matter. Twitter has only one default option for correcting for their own abuse of their rules: they offer to send one an SMS message with a code that unlocks one's account. As it happens I have no mobile coverage where I am over this weekend.

Logic implies, Twitter team might just send the said code to my personal email. They have my email, as they used to communicate with me their useless replies. But no, the drones of Twitter Help are incapable of generating anything as creative as offering a code via the only channel of communication open to me.

And so we have it: false accusation of suspicious 'automated activity' generates actual 'automated activity', dumb and irresponsive to actual needs of the Twitter account holders, inflicting the very harm that Twitter purports to minimise.

Well done, Twitter!

31/5/2014: Twitter: Promoting Isolation, Ideological Segregation and All Things Good to Your Political Engagement

A very interesting study looking at comparatives of media and news use via twitter (social media) and traditional media (print, radio and TV). The paper, titled "Are Social Media more Social than Media? Measuring Ideological Homophily and Segregation on Twitter" (May 2014_ by YOSH HALBERSTAM and BRIAN KNIGHT is available here: http://bfi.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/research/Twitter_may232014.pdf

Some highlights:

Per authors, "Social media represent a rapidly growing source of information for citizens around the world. In this paper, we measure the degree of ideological homophily and segregation on social media."

The reason this is salient is that there has been a "tremendous rise in social media during the past decade, with 60 percent of American adults and over 20 percent of worldwide population currently using social networking sites (Rainie et al., 2012)…. Indeed, this phenomenal growth in social media engagement in the U.S. and around the world has transformed the nature of political discourse. Two thirds of American social media users—or 39 percent of all American adults—have engaged in some form of civic or political activity using social media, and 22 percent of registered U.S. voters used social media to let others know how they voted in the 2012 elections."

Per authors, "Three key features of social media distinguish it from other forms of media and social interactions." These are:

• "…social media allow users to not only consume information but also to produce information." It is worth noting that social media can also reproduce information produced on social media, as well as that produced by traditional media.
• "…the information to which users are exposed depends upon self-chosen links among users." In other words, social media produced and distributed information can be self-selection biased. The extent of this selection is more limited in the case of traditional media, where individual biases of consumers can be reinforced by selecting specific programmes/channels/publications, but beyond that, the content received by consumers is the one selected for them by someone else - journalists, editors.
• "…information on social media travels more rapidly and broadly than in other forms of social interactions. …[social media network model] leads to a substantially broader reach and more rapid spread of information than other forms of social interactions."

As authors put it: "Given these three distinguishing features, the rapid growth of social media has the potential to effect a structural change in the way individuals engage with one another and the degree to which such communications are segregated along ideological lines."


To examine this possibility, the authors construct "a network of links between politically-engaged Twitter users. For this purpose, we selected Twitter users who followed at least one Twitter account associated with a candidate for the U.S. House during the 2012 election period. Among this population of over 2.2 million users, we identify roughly 90 million links, which form the network." Based on political party followed, users were assigned ideological identifiers.

Two key findings of the paper are as follows:

1. "…we find that the network we constructed shares important features with face-to-face interactions. Most importantly, both settings tend to exhibit a significant degree of homophily, with links more likely to develop between individuals with similar ideological preferences." In other words, we do show strong selection biases in networks we form. Doh!..
2. "…when computing the degree of ideological segregation and comparing it to ideological segregation in other settings, we find that Twitter is much more segregated than traditional media, such as television and radio, and is more in-line with ideological segregation in face-to-face interactions, such as among friends and co-workers." Worse: we not only form biased networks, we also create selection-biased interactions and generate selection-biased chains and flows of content. Doh! Redux...

Conclusion: "Taken together, our results suggest that social media may be a force for increasing isolation and ideological segregation in society."

Wait… so we act on the social media base to create networks that are closer to friends networks… and this leads to… isolation?.. Well, my eye, I would have thought this would be the opposite…

But top conclusion makes sense:  "The issue of ideological segregation is important when providing such information. Exposure to diverse viewpoints in a society helps to ensure that information is disseminated with little friction across a large number of people. When a community is polarized and is divided into factions, by contrast, information may spread unevenly and may miss intended targets. Our results suggest that social media are highly segregated along ideological lines and thus emphasize these potential problems associated with the flow of information in segregated networks."

The problem, of course is: Can the selection bias be ameliorated? Can people be 'incentivised' to engage with ideological opposites? In my view - yes. This can be achieved most likely by educating people about systems of thought, logic, structures of knowledge, information. The thing is: in social networks, such education is both more feasible (volume of information delivered and speed are both higher) and probably more productive (because there is inherent trust in one's own network that is stronger than in detached media networks. Peers generate stronger bonds than preachers...

The paper has some fascinating data illustration of media biases, though - worth looking at in the appendix.

19/10/2013: WLASze Part 2: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics

This is the second post of my WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences, and zero economics for this week.

Enjoy and be warned, I do stray into 'some' economics (but only as 'science') in this one...


"By discovering a new set of solutions to the famous Maxwell equations governing electromagnetism, Hridesh Kedia of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have shown that light can be tied up in knots. Here the purple and gold cords represent the twisted magnetic field lines of knotted light." Ughh?.. No, really cool - read more here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tying-light-in-knots-slide-show

And… "The same University of Chicago lab, led by William Irvine, also recently discovered a way to tie water up in knots. This photograph shows a basic knotted shape called a trefoil knot made of water, imaged by light scattering off tiny gas bubbles in the liquid."

Question for scientists… can anyone untie the knots of Irish policymakers' ideas? Like the following conjecture: to deal with the effects of the property bubble collapse, Budgets 2010-2014 introduced series of property markets tax incentives… Bet that'll be harder than Maxwell's equations…


But this is WLASze, so let us not dwell too long on matters of Irish policies. Even if for the purpose of advancing the science of the bizarre…

So back to sciences: "Society's techno-social systems are becoming ever faster and more computer-orientated. However, far from simply generating faster versions of existing behaviour, we show that this speed-up can generate a new behavioural regime as humans lose the ability to intervene in real time."

Ok, this is potent stuff. And where better to look for such 'machine outpaces mankind to defeat the entire purpose of the human-made system' than in financial markets (I can't shake off this year's 'Nobel' in Economics)… So: "Analyzing millisecond-scale data for the world's largest and most powerful techno-social system, the global financial market, we uncover an abrupt transition to a new all-machine phase characterized by large numbers of subsecond extreme events. The proliferation of these subsecond events shows an intriguing correlation with the onset of the system-wide financial collapse in 2008. Our findings are consistent with an emerging ecology of competitive machines featuring ‘crowds’ of predatory algorithms, and highlight the need for a new scientific theory of subsecond financial phenomena."

Here's the full article: http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130911/srep02627/pdf/srep02627.pdf

Wanna see something really scary?

Or in different visualisation:

Ok, now that I am onto Financial Markets and their 'efficiency' - a compendium of links explaining this year's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. No commented from me:

• http://asociologist.com/2013/10/14/you-cant-beat-the-market-but-the-market-can-beat-you/
• http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/10/a-note-on-the-2013-nobel-like-prize-in-economics.html
• http://afinetheorem.wordpress.com/2013/10/14/a-brief-word-on-the-2013-nobel/
• http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.ie/2013/10/lars-peter-hansen-explained-kind-of.html
• http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/the-nobel/?_r=1
• http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.kr/2013/10/gene-famas-nobel.html
• http://blogs.ft.com/ft-long-short/2013/10/14/fama-shiller/
• http://simplystatistics.org/2013/10/14/why-did-lars-peter-hansen-win-the-nobel-prize-generalized-method-of-moments-explained/

Now I've done it… this was supposed to be WLASze and it is now more Finance & Economics than Arts or Sciences…

I recently wrote about the determinants of what makes content go viral on social networks (see link here). The study was based on Google+ - a network that Google seems to think is a major one, yet everyone else seems to think of as a 'may be one day' contender. Now, more real viral propagation visualisation via twitter:

Link: http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/08/visualizing-how-online-word-of/


As Apple is pushing ahead with the meat (USD5 billion) plan for new HQs in Cupertino, CA, here's an overview of the project: http://www.dezeen.com/2013/10/16/fosters-apple-campus-unanimously-approved-by-cupertino-city-council/

Yes, buildings of this scale are a challenge. Yes, aesthetics of the corporate identity at this scale are a challenge. Yes, Apple is strongly 'impositional' organisation with emotional attachment to 'eco-sthetics' and reality of a massive Death Star orb floating in alien space… so then, yes, the plans are perfectly befitting the client…

As a life-long fan of Apple (I still have a working-order first marketed laptop by the company in my collection and our household has a pile of interconnected Apple devices) all I can say is, sadly, with the shift in Apple's fortunes, the company is now running out of ideas… But wait, I am not alone: http://www.dezeen.com/2013/09/13/apple-has-reached-creative-saturation-says-steve-jobs-colleague-hartmut-esslinger/


On a beautiful side (to round off this week's WLASze): Gagosian Gallery is hosting a Willem De Kooning Ten paintings show, comes November 8:
http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/willem-de-kooning--november-08-2013

De Kooning is a master of light and contrast, depth and balancing extremal abstract expressionism with minimalism. His work is stark, striking, bright with simplified, distilled essence of countering colour and movement and space. These are his later works, right before his death in 1997.

The middle image above is taken from the coverage of the MoMA retrospective of de Kooning's works back in 2011.

It was not always thus, as you can see from his earlier works, such as Gotham News, 1955:

You can see more of de Kooning's works here: http://www.benditz.de/ and here: http://theartstack.com/artists/willem-de-kooning

Enjoy. De Kooning is a great master with deep, often disturbed depth of psychological insight alternating with organic capacity to surprise, to open up that momentary window into viewer's own imagination...