Strength in numbers
Thanks to smartphones, millions of people now hold the ability to text, tweet, post, and ping in the palm of their hand. Much has been written about this constant connectedness and its effects on the individual. But what does it tell us about how society works? What effects do networks have on politics? Those are the questions that MIT doctoral candidate and political methodologist Dean Knox set out to answer in his dissertation, “Essays on Modeling and Causal Inference in Network Data.” To understand the role of networks, he says, we must first make sense of the huge amounts of new data being generated by the technologies that are creating them. And to do that, he has had to create new statistical models for collecting and analyzing the data in the first place. Part of Knox’s research looks at social networks in Iraq and how individuals use them to access government goods...