Todo

1. Add the Deckers, Bigelows, (and Harriet Wheeler) to our list of people
   • Isaac Decker (and Harriet Wheeler)

Agenda

1. Get ids for the missing people
   • DS Daniel Spencer 36761
   • WdS Willard Snow 1496
   • WF Winslow Farr 19111
   • WH William Huntington 282
   • WnS William Snow 8744
   • ZC Zebedee Coltrin 12094
2. Static graphs (seen on Gephi) and measures

Notes

1. Questions to ask about the graphs
   • Who’s wife’s sister, cousin, or mother was sealed to her husband?
   • Which men were sealed to their sisters’ husband?
     • This would be an adoptive-like sealing
   • Who was sealed to someone from the same town?
   • Who was sealed to a missionary to England?
   • Who was sealed to someone from England?
   • Transfer of property or (change of) address at time of sealing?
   • People who left marriages?
   • Widows sealed time/eternity as plural wives?
   • Who was married within a pioneer company?
   • Who was maritally sealed to someone less than 18?
   • Which wives were older than their husbands?
   • What was the age difference between the first wife and subsequent wives?
   • Sorting of adoptions by age of adoptee?

To Do

Notes

Agenda Items

• How is adoption data cleaning going?
  • In picking a proxy marriage, I’m looking at (in order) eternal, time, civil. Is that correct?
  • Is “natural” non-marital sealing what we want to call an adoption to one’s parents?
• Inconsistencies in the database
  • Isaac Morley – Daughter? of Thomas Moon 22754
• New Sankey flow diagrams
  • Levels are now working
  • Full-size are available on the sandbox

Notes

• Look up
  • Stochastic actor-oriented model (Snijders)
  • Data linkage (problems)

To Do

1. Email Glenn
2. Think (hard) about evolving networks, and the representation and computation issues with regard to these measures that we’re interested in
   • Write down the measures we’re interested in
   • Create a list of the measures, the group of measures that we’re interested in and that make sense (in or out of our domains, but domain-specific relations would be helpful)
     • Along with the measures write down the computation issues that could arise with each
3. Write a list of the expanse of our domain and problems
   • Write down the modes of variation (what counts as evolution)
     • Characteristics of nodes change
     • Characteristics of edges change
     • Edges come and go
     • Nodes come and go
     • …
   • Types of Time
     • Event-driven time
     • Wall-clock time
   • Consider all temporal ways any measure could be computed over the evolving network
     • All time
     • One time point (snapshot)
     • Interval
       • Has a start point, end point, and temporal-width
     • Changing Interval (perhaps sliding over time, sliding window)
     • Contiguous intervals
     • Non-contiguous intervals
     • Union of intervals (contiguous and non)
   • Comparison across graphs
     • Variations that make comparison hard
     • Comparison of intervals
       • Are they in lock step?
         • Do the events happen at the same time?
         • Are they both using wall clock time with the same time-step?
         • Are they the same length?
       • Do the intervals in the two different graphs under comparison have different, independent trajectories?
     • If one is a fast-event time and the other is a slow-event time, is it fair to compare them? Is it able to compare them? Is it a fair comparison?
   • Get out the whole spectrum of evolving characteristics and variations that we are considering
     • What can people look at for their datasets and networks that will say whether or not our work is a reasonable thing to consider computing over their data. Or if it is even possible.
     • Getting out all the expanses could bring to light some good measures that will fit into these spaces
     • Also for the proposal: put some bounds on things
       • “We’re not doing this”
         • Limit what we’re considering
         • We’re not solving everyone’s network problems, only this subset of issues

Agenda

1. Committee Members: Dave, Alf, Gabe, Worthy, Glenn (need to email him)
   • Who would be a good person to add as a minor representative?
2. New diagrams
   • Thoughts?
   • Does it convey the story?
3. Sundry
   • Finding errors in the database: people mislabeled from data entry
   • Joseph should be finishing the adoptions, I still don’t have them yet
   • Should we alter the database to have this new marriage events table?
4. Proposal timeline
   • Would like to have the final draft to committee before wedding, no later than Nov 7, 2014.
   • Propose early-to-mid December
5. Research questions
   • Should I look into submitting viz to a CS conference, as Luther suggested? Would I need to present something different than the workshop?

Pre-Notes

Other great datasets to consider:

• Web graph, where nodes consist of companies
  • Companies come and go, also buy, create, and retire websites
• Citeseer citation graph, using universities/corporations as nodes, co-authorship as edges

Other notes:

• Rewrite chord to advance to next event
• Can we avoid storing snapshots? Using snapshots??

Notes

• Possible Committee Members and Ideas
  • Jeff Holt, in Statistics
  • Hongning Wang (New CS Faculty): would be good to talk to, but not necessarily add to the committee (discuss with him his work with Bing)
  • Dan Keenan, in Statistics
• Good contacts
  • Karen Kafadar (Chair of Statistics)
  • Amber Tomas, postdoc in Statistics interested in evolving networks
• Why stats would be interesting to work with
  • Wall clock versus event time
    • Intervals and measures over intervals
    • Intervals that change and have pieces/changes of the network fall off the beginning of the interval
    • Trajectories over the interval(s)
    • Distributions over times, and the characteristics of these distributions
• How much change in attributes (of a node or edge) needs to happen before there is a change in identity (of that node or edge)?
  • When does the node/eedge change it’s character?
    • This change is then an imposed event on the graph (the change is an event)
    • If we relax or tighten the identity changing function, then that affects the events in the graph
  • Identity change is a function of attributes in the node (or edge)
• What are the measures we’re talking about? This NEEDS to be hammered down NOW so that I can have a chance of proposing this fall and writing a proposal document before the wedding.
  • Measures over an interval
  • What about letting the interval move across time?
    • Incremental calculation sounds like a good candidate here
    • Obviously could naively recalculate the measure, but incremental updating would be much better
  • Expanding and contracting the window/interval. What would that look like?
• Proposal has two main functions
  • Working committee, giving ideas and engaged in the problem
  • One-sided contract: if you do what they’ve agreed on, it’s enough. But other things could also be considered enough if you continue discussions with the committee passed the proposal.
• Look toward writing a succinct statement of the thesis
  • After writing some measures and the computational issues therein, start thinking about combining them into a thesis:
    • This measure is interesting in this application, and you can do it in this manner.
      • Can become sort of an algorithms thesis at this point.
      • Do you want to move in the algorithms direction?
        • Ex: Statements of time complexity or lower bounds, “you can’t do it faster than $O(-)$
        • Ex: Can amortize the costs over …
        • Ex: If you have $V$ nodes and $E$ edges, then you can expect …
• Start writing down the list (see above)

• Most (professional) writers only write 4 hours per day, the rest is spent in research, etc. NOT the 10 or so hours that grad students work.
• Barriers to writing
  • Not being ready enough to write; Procrastination
  • Perfectionism
  • Impatience
• She’s a motivating speaker to prevent writer’s block
• “If you feel like you’ve read enough, chances are you have.” If you haven’t, that’s the job of your adviser to suggest missing references for you. This is not all on your shoulders.
• Most important thing to remember: keeping your dissertation adviser happy
• Fantasy writing in layers (in reality, you’ll go back and forth around these levels, cycling from the top to the bottom)
  • Focus Statement
  • One page outline
  • Long outline
  • Long outline with evidence
  • First draft
  • Final draft
• The dissertation should be the worst piece of research you ever do. Everything else should get much easier!
• Writing a focus statement
  • Write three of them (they’ll overlap, likely), then talk about them with a friend
  • There will be one that they can see a “twinkle in your eye,” and that’s the one
• Make it as easy as possible for your adviser to give you feedback
• One page outline
  • Each section will need a focus statement, because it will tell you where you’re going
• Puzzle Piece metaphor
  • You have a bunch of things you’re going to have to discuss (background, etc)… pieces in the puzzle
  • Write the pieces individually, then you can move them around and put them together in different ways later.
  • (Get down what you need, then organize them later)
• She suggests using the table of contents feature in Word
  • It can show your progress in a way that is similar to your outline
  • It also shows how much you’ve written in each section (shows how many pages are in each section)
    • Mark them as percent done. So, like if you have 6 pages in a section, mark it as 90% done, but may another that only has 1 page, mark as 60%.
    • Then, when you sit down, work on a few sections at a time, but only focus on those that are under 90%
    • You can top off all of them when every section gets to 90%
• You should never be thinking and drafting at the same time. Every step you take should be at the smallest possible. You should never go from bullet point to final text, or outline to full outline without focus statements for each section. “Never ever try to do it all at once.”
  • If you’re procrastinating, back up and do more reading
  • Share with your writing group
  • Educate your adviser on how to manage you
• Don’t write in isolation
  • No other authors have, don’t feel like you need to. Get a writing group.
• Your first draft should be exactly how you would tell it to a best friend.
  • It should be informal, and how you speak
  • Write as “I want to write this because…” and you have something very important to write down!
• Google scholar exercise
  • Read 2 dissertations that your advisor has advised
  • Every time you read an article, look how your field cites those sources.
  • Take 2 of your articles, write a longer outline about it. Write 2-3 citable notes for that article. Look up that article in Google Scholar, and use the “cited by” link on the search links and pull 5 articles that cite this article. Look at how they cite this article.
    • Then you can see how you should cite articles: phrasing, tone, how much to say about it.
    • Do you write sentences, or do you group 4-5 citations into one chunk?
• When you’re sick of it, that’s enough; you’ve done enough
• Propose the least you can propose to get by with, so make it the smallest you can
• If you’re stuck, read 2 more articles, then try again. Don’t go out and read 10 articles.
  • If you’re procrastinating, then you likely need to read more, so go read a few more.
• Graph all your time that you’re spending on your dissertation
  • You’re initially going to be spending tons of time without a product, and your inner critic will be going crazy