Abstracts

Hands-On Network Science with Python Scripting and the Socratic Method

Daniel Abel, Eotvos University (Budapest)

Based on my experience of leading interactive labs for an introductory

network science course for undergraduate students with basic math and

programming knowledge, I will discuss challenges of holding

interactive labs and show some tips and tools for overcoming or

avoiding them. I will argue that scripting is an indispensable part of

a network science course and discuss how to enable students to

actively participate in writing scripts during class. Finally, I will

suggest covertly introducing network science into the general

curriculum by using it for example problems for programming courses.

Between You and Me: The Role of Formal and Informal Brokers in the Diffusion of Research Evidence in an Urban School District

Alan J. Daly, University of California, San Diego;

Kara Finnigan, University of Rochester;

Nienke Mooleaar, University of Twente

A number of scholars across the globe are drawing on Network Science to understand educational improvement processes. Insights from this work suggest that the quantity and quality of social ties between and among educators, both horizontally (within district offices and schools) and vertically (across district and school), may support and constrain efforts at educational reform. However, to date only a fraction of that work directly examines the interactions between educational leaders as they go about the work of improving large urban school systems. Further, even less of that research focuses on examining the alignment between “formal” leadership roles and largely “informal” positions in a social network. In addressing these gaps, we drew on social network methods and interviews to examine leaders who hold formal “brokerage” roles in the district in order to understand the degree to which these individuals occupy broker positions in an informal social network. In addition, we drew on a classification system offered by Fernandez and Gould (1989) to categorize the particular types of brokerage roles that are being enacted. Results indicate a lack of congruence between formal and informal systems and often leaders in formal brokerage positions engage these roles with significant variation. Additional findings suggest that the diffusion of evidence is shaped by formal and informal brokers, which may ultimately inhibit a systemic and coherent approach to improvement.

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Teach Network Science to Teenagers

Lucas Jeub, University of Oxford Mathematical Institute

This talk presents our outreach efforts to introduce school students to network science. Networks, because they are omnipresent and simple to grasp at a basic level, provide an ideal means to motivate students to pursue mathematics and science in greater depth. At our outreach events we use examples from everyday life and some puzzles from graph theory to guide students towards developing their own approach to the problem at hand and discover network principles for themselves. Acting more as facilitators rather than teachers, we aim to give students a taste of the joy of discovery, an aspect of science and mathematics that is often underrepresented in schools. We present our experiences and outlines of our modules in the hope that we can encourage others to participate in and develop similar activities. For those interested in more details, we refer you to our editorial article available at http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.6567.

Suicide Ideation in Online Social Networks

Naoki Masuda, University of Tokyo

Suicide is a major cause of death for adolescents in many countries.

We examined a data set obtained from a social networking service in

Japan. The social network is composed of a set of friendship ties

whose creation needs mutual endorsement of the two users involved. We

statistically examined users' characteristics, both related and

unrelated to social networks, which contributed to suicide ideation.

Suicide ideation of a user was defined as the membership to at least

one active user-defined community related to suicide. We found that

the number of communities to which a user belongs to, the

intransitivity, and the fraction of suicidal neighbors in the social

network, contributed the most to suicide ideation in this order. We

found similar results for depressive symptoms.

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How to build your very own landscape?

Erzsébet Ravasz Regan,

Center for Vascular Biology Research

BIDMC / Harvard Medical School

Teaching high school students to work with new abstract concepts is engaging work. I will tell the story of four dedicated students working their way into modeling a biological regulatory network. The team is building its own software to simulate the dynamics of a small Boolean regulatory network. They calculate the system's state transition graph, the energy of states when the dynamics is noisy, and visualize the state transition network as an energy landscape. The students are learning to write computer code as they go, and are about to start preparing a poster based on their work, a poster I am planning to bring to NetSciEd2013.

Introducing Network Science to Students in a National College of Technology in Japan for Graduation Research Projects

Toshihiro Tanizawa, Kochi National College of Technology, Japan

National Colleges of Technology in Japan were established in 1960's for providing the industries with young engineers ready at work. Each college admits graduates from junior high schools and have a five-year course. Their educational objectives are mainly oriented to providing students with knowledge and skills that can be readily applied to manufacturing industries. I have been working in a National College of Technology as a professor of applied mathematics and physics and thus I have a little different viewpoint in the faculty of my department as a researcher more interested in pure and fundamental science.

In my college, students have to fulfill a one-year research project in their fifth (last) grade for graduation. According to the educational objectives, most graduate research projects in my college are relating to making "real things" such as improved mechanical or electrical devices. Due to my own inclination toward research activity, however, I have been offering research topics taken from network science, which do not MAKE real things but seek the ways for UNDERSTANDING how complex systems work. In this talk I like to share the processes and the results of these research projects to see how the students studying applied engineering come to realize the wide range of applicability of abstract mathematical perspectives seen in network science to real problems.