What can data of social network tell us?

   In the last several lectures, several new definitions in a social network have been introduced which include centrality and prestige. Each social network has it unique centrality and prestige, and both of these two can be defined in two types:actor and group. Centrality can be sorted in three types again: degree, closeness, and betweenness.
   Those are all about measuring data about a social network. Each index has it own mathematical algorithm to calculate, and some algorithms are similar to each other.Here, I am not going to talk about how the data can be calculated, instead I am going to provide some perspectives from myself about the use of these data.
 
   How can these data serve us?

   Firstly, I want to use an example of Weibo to explain my thoughts. In Weibo or many other social networks, people speak out their special thoughts and others can make comments beneath their articals or blogs, and some thoughts may attract a lot of attention and some may not. Weibo has done some assortment according to several measuring index mentioned in the first section.
   Yao Cheng,a famous star in China is well known as queen of Weibo for that she has the most fans in this social network.

   Have you ever thought that your own idea can be shared by 26603377 other persons? I have never imagine this circumstance until social network appeared. What is more, the quantity of people who can share blogs of this star can be further bigger due to the function of "share this blog to other" function. So, what I want to say is, in this case, Yao Chen may have the highest actor prestige, degree centrality and some other indexes.

    For Yao Cheng, those data can help her become more famous and then attract more advertisements. For advertisers, through those data, they can analyze which group of people who like to read Yao Cheng's blogs and decide whether their advertisements can get enough profits in her blogs, which in return can benefit Yao Cheng. For common users like me, I can get the main trend of the society culture or civilization from observing different comments beneath the hot blogs from Yao. Maybe that is why some media critics named Weibo the mirror of the whole society, and why Weibo has been aimed to by dealers in quantity.  

     This picture shows the comments beneath one of the hottest micro-blog, and we can see two advertisement here which can prove the high density of advertisements in Weibo.

    Next, I also want to talk about the social network graph of facebook. If we settle two groups of people who played facebook. One group consists of 50 users who have low log in frequency and barely gave comments, while the other group consists of 50 famous users in facebook. I think the centrality and prestige of second group will be higher than data of group one.

    

    

Read alone or read together?

  In the last class, we have played tow activities. We are called to read a paper and answer two questions followed it. This is the first activity.

The second activity asks us to read the paper again in a group, and answer same questions together.

  Answer in activity one:

    1. A Social Cloud is a resource and service sharing framework utilizing relationships established between members of a social network.
       2. A Social Computation Cloud,A Social Storage Cloud,A Social Collaborative Cloud,A Social Cloud for Public Science,An Enterprise Social Cloud
  An
   Answer in activity two:

  only cut out the parts different with my individual answer to show above.

  

   At first, I feel bored about these activities, because the questions about the paper are quite easy to find the answers just in the paper. And it seems that answers of different students turned to be quite similar.I thought this result definitely can be prospected. How would you expect people to answer the question: who gives birth to you? Of course, mom.In the same way, to the two questions followed the paper, of course, similar answers.

  There are 4 types of knowledge involved in academic learning:factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge and metacognitive knowledge. In my opinion, answering the questions in activity one only involves the factual knowledge and conceptual knowledge. And this may be the reason why we  have similar answers that innovative and self- thinking do not permeate much in applying these two types of knowledge. In other words, we are told to do the right thing under the same condition, so our answers will be alike because we all think that is the right answer,just like we all love our mom and dad; you can say: my brain or god told me to choose like this.

   In activity two, answers in a group have interact. According to communication, how do other members in group find the answer and why they think like this is clear to know.

1.what was the epistemic aims in these activities? Is there any change in them? If so, why did you change your aims?

  The epistemic aim in activity one is to find things out, to acquire true. However the aim in activity two is to adopt minimally justified belief and understanding.Aim changes due to that the method of how we establish our knowledge has changed. Philosophers discusses 4 main types of process of knowledge formation: cognitive processes, processes of formal inquiry, interpersonal processes, community and institutional processes. When we discuss the questions in group, knowledge has been built together in a social environment which pushed the step of individual acquire knowledge to step of understand others' theory, refresh individual one and rebuild theory.

   

2.Is there any differences in terms of individual and group epistemic cognition, how?

  Individual and group epistemic cognition are different. Let me make an inappropriate example, last day I had an exam, and during the review before the exam, I found that efficiency of my review is much higher when reviewing in a group than it when reviewing alone, for I can get more information from the others, and change angles of thinking. What I want to say is group epistemic cognition is more effective and comprehensive than individual epistemic cognition.

3.How did you approach to the problem individually and in group,respectively? Is there any differences in the processes involved?

     When approaching the problem individually, I cares much about correctness of my answer; however when approaching the problem in group, in addition to correctness, more specific understanding of the theory and correctness of the theory call most of my attention.

This blog is finished in a rush. I am so sorry that I failed to make a good balance allocating time among homeworks and exam.