"That is one of the potential shifts in social reading: Can I create value for other people by saying that I found this passage by Bruno LaTour striking — even if I never look at it again? That’s an amazing act of what I called “frozen sharing” in my last book. Being generous about things when you are offering it out to the public, without it being either in a specific time frame or for a specific target."

"In this paper we define what we call an affinity system, which is a set of individuals, each with a vector characterizing its preference for all other individuals in the set. The preference of a member can be given either by a ranking of all members or by a weighted vector that defines the degrees of its affinity to others. Affinity systems are useful for modeling social systems as well as general data sets, as social interactions are often determined by affinities among the members. We also define a natural notion of (potentially overlapping) communities in an affinity system, in which the members of a given community collectively prefer each other to anyone else outside the community. Thus these communities are "self-determined" or "self-certified" by the affinity system. We provide a tight polynomial bound on the number of self-determined communities as a function of the robustness of the community. Moreover, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for enumerating these communities, as well as a local algorithm with a strong stochastic performance guarantee that can find a community in time nearly linear in the of size the community.…"

"In a recent paper, we analyzed the self-assembly of a complex cooperation network. The network was shown to approach a state, where every agent invests the same amount of resources. Nevertheless, highly-connected agents arise that extract extra-ordinarily high payoffs while contributing comparably little to any of their cooperations. Here, we investigate a variant of the model, in which highly-connected agents have access to additional resources. We study analytically and numerically whether these resources are invested in existing collaborations, leading to a fairer load distribution, or in establishing new collaborations, leading to an even less fair distribution of loads and payoffs."

“Honey Money”, Catherine Hakim’s provocative book, is a different kettle of fish. Where Mr Hamermesh and Ms Rhode see discrimination, she sees an opportunity for women to enhance their power “in the bedroom and the boardroom”. She argues that “erotic capital” is an underrated class of personal asset, to set beside economic capital (what you have), human capital (what you know) and social capital (who you know).

via http://twitter.com/mia_out/status/94710581499658240 " “They are a very connected family—connected in terms of technology,” says writer Katherine Rosman on WSJ.com. “But what makes it super interesting is that they are also a very close-knit family and very traditional in many ways. [They have] family dinner five nights a week.” The Wilsons have managed to seamlessly integrate social media into their everyday lives, and Rosman believes that while what they are doing may seem extreme now, it could be the norm soon. “With the nature of how we all consume media, being on the internet all the time doesn’t mean being stuck in your room. I think they are out and about doing their thing, but they’re online,” she says.""We found that the types of things that they are doing online often look a lot like political engagement, sharing information and having discussions about important matters. Those types of discussions are the types of things we’d like to think people are having in public spaces anyway. For the individual, there is probably something being gained and for the collective space there is probably something being gained in that it is attracting new people.” "

The real reason why we succeed in our relationships and careers is the strength of our unconscious, according to David Brooks, who was inspired by a meeting with Gordon Brown to unravel the power of our inner voice

"To counter this trend, and to encourage collaboration in the workplace, we built an internal tool called Lunch Roulette that selects random pairs of Fellows to join each other on impromptu lunch dates.…"

Similar to Klout measures your influence, authority blah blah blah.

Es geht wieder einmal ums Kapital, wie der französische Soziologe Pierre Bourdieu in den achtziger Jahren beschrieben hat. Menschen sammeln durch Beziehungsarbeit „soziales Kapital“ an – eine Ressource, die auf der Zugehörigkeit zu einer sozialen Gruppe beruht und aus gegenseitigem Kennen und Anerkennen resultiert.

Editorial comment by Gary Cunningham, vp Northwest Area Foundation.

"Many definitions define what social capital is and what it does. In fact, there seems to be broader agreement in the literature about what social capital does, than what it is! In particular, it is widely agreed that social capital facilitates mutually beneficial collective action."

"This leads me to something else that I always find hard to articulate: the ROI of IndyHall, or even coworking in general.

We’ve been running IndyHall for nearly 3 years as a business for a reason, and a profitable one at that. But the metrics for ROI aren’t salient, since most of the investment has been in human, knowledge, and time capital, and the return doesn’t show up on our balance sheet. As such, Geoff and I don’t take a draw, at least not in terms of cash…because that’s not what’s we’ve invested. If there was a balance sheet for the social capital we’ve invested and seen in return, though, and we had metrics for it, we’d be able to far better express and share what we’ve accomplished."

We consider three hypotheses about relatedness and well‐being including the hive hypothesis, which says people need to lose themselves occasionally by becoming part of an emergent social organism in order to reach the highest levels of human flourishing. We discuss recent evolutionary thinking about multilevel selection, which offers a distal reason why the hive hypothesis might be true. We next consider psychological phenomena such as the joy of synchronized movement and the ecstatic joy of self‐loss, which might be proximal mechanisms underlying the extraordinary pleasures people get from hive‐type activities. We suggest that if the hive hypothesis turns out to be true, it has implications for public policy. We suggest that the hive hypothesis points to new ways to increase social capital and encourages a new focus on happy groups as being more than collections of happy individuals.

If market culture sees us as a mass of disconnected individuals, each without a history or enduring affiliations, the commons sees us as interdependent social creatures. It is refreshing to see this perspective affirmed in such a rich, detailed way by a new book, Consequential Strangers: The Power of People Who Don’t Seem to Matter But Really Do (W.W. Norton), by Melina Blau and Karen L. Fingerman.