links for 2009-04-09

• Value of Social Network — A Large-Scale Analysis on Network Structure Impact to Financial Revenue of Information Technology Consultants
  A large body of literature on social networks in organizations demonstrates that certain types of network topology are optimal. However, little research leverages the ample data created by people‘s electronic communications to refine and verify theories. This gap is problematic, because the literature on organizational networks suffers from the same deficits as much of the social network literature: both tend to be focused on small, static networks. In this study, we mitigate this gap by collecting and mining the largest organizational social network ever collected. We find that not only does the population level topology of social network correlate with performance, attributes of the nodes in a social network such as human capital and status that can be beneficial to work performance. In addition to an individual‘s own human capital and network position, the human capital and status in one‘s network can be instrumental to one‘s success.
  (tags: social_media graph_theory)
• David MacKay: Sustainable Energy – without the hot air: Download
  (tags: environment books climate statistics physics)
• Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air: the Freakonomics of conservation, climate and energy – Boing Boing
  This is to energy and climate what Freakonomics is to economics: an accessible, meaty, by-the-numbers look at the physics and practicalities of energy. MacKay, a Cambridge Physics prof, approaches the subject of carbon and sustainability with a scientific, numeric eye.
  (tags: books environment statistics physics climate)
• Sosius launches a zoomable fractal map of data pleasure and pain
  (tags: visualization datamining)
• pjg's responds_to_parent at master – GitHub
  Rails plugin to allow AJAX file upload imitation (via IFRAME).
  (tags: rails plugins ajax)