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2014

Climbing Mount Maslow

In his 1943 paper, A Theory of Human Motivation, Abraham Maslow introduced a simple principle that has had a profound influence in the fields of psychology and sociology. Namely, he introduce the concept of a hierarchy of human needs which he termed Physiological, Safety, Belongingness and Love, Esteem, Self-Actualization and Self-Transcendence. And Maslow's big main point here was that it is necessary to first satisfy the basic needs before we can even have the luxury to start worrying about the higher-level concerns. But for me, looking through Maslow's hierarchy in some detail, it seems that all the cool kids hang out towards the top of that hierarchy. I've been there in the past, and am occasionally so fortunate as to touch the top of the hierarchy again from time to time. But I think that I (we) can do better than this! So I determined myself to try and devise a way to "hack" Maslow's Hierarchy so as to maximize the time I'm spending near the top.

Understanding Eigenvector Centrality with the Metaphor of Political Power

If you play around much with graphs, one of the first things that you'll run into is the idea of network centrality. Centrality is a value associated with a node which represents how important and how central that node is to the network as a whole. There are actually quite a few way of defining network centrality - here are just a few:

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Examples of A) Degree centrality, B) Closeness centrality, C) Betweenness centrality, D) Eigenvector centrality. -- Figure shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia
  • Degree centrality - This, the simplest measure of centrality, is simply the count of how many a connections a particular node has.
  • Closeness centrality - This is the inverse of a node's farness. Farness, in turn, is the sum of the length of the shortest paths connecting the node in question to all other nodes.
  • Betweenness centrality - This is the count of number of shortest paths that pass through a given node.

But, my favorite measure of centrality is eigenvector centrality. Why? Because I invented it! Ok, ok... that's not exactly true, but I did at least independently discover it. And the way I discovered it helped it stick in my mind ever since.

Greetings

This is the first post of what I hope will be many posts to come. Being the first, I feel that it is import to lay out the themes that I intend to cover and the goals that I expect to achieve. However -- having not the slightest idea of what I will do with this blog, or even if I'll do anything with it at all, you'll have to be satisfied with the pretentious sounding introductory material which you are currently reading.