Social Intelligence Stories That Caught Our Attention: Volume Thirteen

Here’s the social intelligence stories that caught our attention across the web the week of the 8^th of July.  This week we have the language around job adverts, the language around spoilers, R and data science, and hackers using social media to break into companies.

How Facebook’s Gender Parity Can Help Your Hiring Plans

Facebook says they plan to double the number of women it employs globally and Black and Hispanic employees in the USA. So, the team at Thinknumn run a gender analysis on the company’s current job listings.

Turns out that Facebook is doing pretty well coding feminine language into job postings to reach their diversity goals. If you’re looking to appeal to new demographics then maybe the article will give you a few insights.

Read the full article here.

SpoilerNet will Spot Dangerous Reviews Before You Read Them

Something we’ve observed over the past year is that we tend to use someone’s name when we deliver bad news. We’re geeks about language and we’ve found another team who love language too.

The researchers over at SpoilerNet fed a neural network 1.3 million Goodreads reviews into their system, letting it observe and record the differences between ordinary sentences and the ones with spoilers in them.  They found that the sentences with plot details in them are constructed differently to sentences with no spoilers.

Read more about SpoilerNet here.

What R’s Most Popular Tools Say About the State of Data Science

For the analysts amongst us who use R alongside their commercial social data tools, you’ll like this article from Quartz.

If you’re an R user it’s likely that you rely on packages (or libraries).  These are plugin's for R that makes it simpler to complete tasks. Looking at the most downloaded packages, we can tell a lot about what is going on with data science.  The most downloaded pages are the ones that make R work more effectively.  But, the third most popular download is for a package to simplify data manipulation – it reflects the fact that data scientists spend most of their time on data cleaning and preparation.

Dum, dum, dum… more time is spent on cleaning and preparation.  What does that say about how you should be analyzing social data?

Read the full article here.

Hackers, Social Media and Company Break-Ins

Next time that your higher-ups say that there’s no value in social data (or in this case social media), show them this article.

It’s a bit on the scary side, but this elite team of hackers within IBM known as the X-Force Red use social media to find gaps in security (before the real bad guys do).  The article gives a good round-up of potential security breaches to worry about, but it also goes to show the hidden insights in social data.

While we’re not looking to hack companies, the article goes to show the semiotic and cultural insights that are shared via social media every day.

Read the full article here.

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