Leveraging Advances in Social Network Thinking for National Security Proceedings of a Workshop (2018) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
2 Networks-Plus: Beyond the Individual (teams and contexts)
2 Networks-Plus: Beyond the Individual (teams and contexts)
Pages 9-18
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From page 9... ...
Matthew Brashears, University of South Carolina, a moderator of this panel, raised several points about networks to start the session. First, he suggested that physical proximity can be an ambiguous signal; that is, physical closeness does not necessarily indicate that individuals have a significant interaction or relationship.
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From page 10... ...
SUPERSYNTHESIZERS IN AN AGE OF INFLUENCE Regina Joseph, New York University, described her research on supersynthesizers, defined as individuals with cognitive and analytic skills that go beyond those of superforecasters.1 Superforecasters, she explained, are individuals identified as "most accurate in determining future geopolitical and economic outcomes." She argued that supersynthesizers are needed as members of analytic teams within the Intelligence Community (IC) to tackle national security challenges presented by the changing nature of social networks and the ways in which the public retrieves, consumes, and distributes information.
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From page 11... ...
These transactions, she suggested, can have adverse impacts if manipulated for emotional effect. From a Huxley viewpoint, she asserted, the addictive behavior of active social media users constitutes a form of servitude; devotion to such platforms and the enormous amount of personal data now owned by social media companies underscore the potential for effective control of the public.
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From page 12... ...
According to DeChurch, two types of literature in the behavioral sciences -- in the areas of team assembly and team composition -- address how teams assemble from networks. In the team assembly area, she said, researchers examine what social forces drive people to want to work together.
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From page 13... ...
She suggested that the reason outside or multiteam connections are important is that they improve information sharing, which in turn can bring more facts and ideas to teams for consideration, as well as increase understanding of and appreciation for a team's progress and goals. DeChurch drew attention to one study that examined how prompts or interventions affect information sharing among online teams.
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From page 14... ...
She referenced a report that reviewed the prewar intelligence reports on Iraq's weapons programs and intelligence oversight after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,3 which identified shortcomings in teamwork. She cited from that report issues of "groupthink dynamics" that led to assumptions and failure to use institutional mechanisms designed to challenge those assumptions, as well as issues of bureaucratic structure and complex policies that impeded information sharing.
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From page 15... ...
research on communities that examines where people live and travel and how infrastructure affects community cohesion, segregation, and polarization. Given both the range of questions that arise in urban network research and the number of relevant disciplines, Neal sees a need for researchers to consider more carefully when a network science approach is appropriate for a particular research question to address some of the issues he has noted in the literature.
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From page 16... ...
Neal called attention to one of the major challenges in the field -- whether available network methods work for spatially embedded networks. Many current methods were developed from nonspatial graph theory, he observed, adding that the field has discovered that "conventional community detection algorithms tend to work fairly poorly if the network is spatially embedded." By poorly, he said he meant that the algorithms almost always find the already-obvious proximate clusters of nodes and provide no deeper information.
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From page 17... ...
In addition to this government effort, however, there also were unofficial measurements. Cervone explained that in the immediate aftermath of the accident, the University of Tokyo initiated a citizen science project called SAFECAST, which distributed about 8,000 instruments6 to people living in the Fukushima area so they could collect crowdsourced radiation data.
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