Mate Choice in an Online Dating Site; "Bully" Film Screening; The Promises of Web-based Social Experiments

Mate Choice in an Online Dating Site

Tuesday, February 14, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

The 21st century has witnessed a transformation of the American dating scene: Online dating—previously a marginalized social practice—has skyrocketed in popularity to become one of the primary ways that singles meet and mate today. While clearly an empirical topic worthy of study in its own right, data from online dating sites also offer an unprecedented opportunity to address questions of longstanding interest to social scientists. In this talk, I introduce a new social network dataset based on behavioral data from a popular online dating site; discuss the utility of these data for understanding the shape of contemporary stratification systems; and provide a first look at the dynamics of inequality, exclusion, and gender asymmetry that characterize the early stages of mate choice. Kevin Lewis is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

Film screening: "Bully" and Forum Discussion

Wednesday, February 15, 5:00pm ET, Longfellow Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Hosted and organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Education in conjunction with the Berkman Center and Facing History and Ourselves.

Directed by Sundance and Emmy-award winning filmmaker, Lee Hirsch, Bully follows five kids and families over the course of a school year. As teachers, administrators, kids and parents struggle to find answers, Bully examines the dire consequences of bullying through the testimony of strong and courageous youth. Through the power of their stories, the film aims to be a catalyst for change in the way we deal with bullying as parents, teachers, children and society as a whole. more information on our website>

The Promises of Web-based Social Experiments

Tuesday, February 21, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live.

The advent of the internet provides social scientists with a fantastic tool for conducting behavioral experiments online at a very large-scale and at an affordable cost. It is surprising, however, how little research has leveraged the affordances of the internet to set up such social experiments so far. In this talk, Jerome Hergueux will introduce the audience to one of the first online platforms specifically designed for conducting interactive social experiments over the internet to date. He will present the preliminary results of a randomized experiment that compares behavioral measures of social preferences obtained both in a traditional University laboratory and online, with a focus on engaging the audience in a reflection about the specificities, limitations and promises of online experimental economics as a tool for social science research. Jerome Hergueux is a PhD candidate in Economics at Sciences Po Paris and the University of Strasbourg and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

David Weinberger on Too Big To Know

We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it's becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don't scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge's new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power. David Weinberger — senior researcher at the Berkman Center and co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab — talks about some important take aways from his new book "Too Big to Know." video/audio on our website>

Felipe Heusser on Open Government Data for Open Accountability

Felipe Heusser — Founder and Director of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, a Latin American NGO based in Chile that uses information technology to promote transparency and active citizen participation, and a Berkman Fellow — gives an overview the spread of transparency policy through freedom of information regulation, and point out to the rise of 'Open Government Data' as the latest chapter of the transparency story, highlighting how it potentially may impact 'open accountability' and the rise of a new breed of online watchdogs. video/audio on our website>