Spring 2004
Thursdays 1:40 Psych 205
Seminar Schedule:<http://math.la.asu.edu/~tom/cognition/math+cogsched.html>
On Thursday, March 11, at 1:40 PM in Psych 205,
the Mathematics and Cognition Seminar will
present brief discussion with Dr. Tom Taylor
of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics,
on the topic of
"Social Networks and Social Capital."
Abstract.
| The term "Social Capital", coined by political scientist Robert
Putnam, refers to the features of social organization including networks,
norms, and trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual
benefit. (One might digress to speculate which academic units are best
or least endowed with social capital, but then comparisons are invidious)
In this talk we present an extended executive summary of an extended paper by Ronald Burt, of the U. Chicago Graduate School of Business, titled"The network structure of social capital" . In brief, the thesis of this paper is that information is valuable to economic endeavors, that information tends to flow along our social network, and that value accues to being an isolated bridge, or broker, between subnetworks in the larger social network. Then, to the extent that time allows, and I am not restrained from doing so, we will discuss the fidelity to reality of some current mathematical models of sociality. In sequence we will discuss the usefulness of simple graphs, in which context we touch briefly on the small world paradigm, directed graphs, undirected and directed multigraphs. Last and perhaps least, we present an autonoma model with local "tapes", which generalizes work of Killeen and Taylor. |