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Aine Seitz McCarthy
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Why all the Illinoisans are sitting together in the cafeteria

9/26/2011

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Picture
The landscape is composed of a series of mountains, each representing an academic subject or homophilous social category. The relative degree of in-group preference is represented by the height of each mountain... The relative size of a category corresponds to the volume of the corresponding mountain.  Finally, the social distance between the various categories- calculated on the basis of the number of actual versus expected ties between category numbers- is plotted on a two- dimensional space.

A fascinating paper by Andreas Wimmer and Kevin Lewis decomposes homophilic social ties through THE social network (book of faces) using picture tags of a freshman class at "a selective New England private college."  Interestingly, they find that racial homophily is trumped by both proximity (sharing a dorm) and academic major, specifically economics and biology (no surprise there, social capital is a survival tool).

In case you haven't interacted much with that mountain, the Select 16.
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    Aine Seitz McCarthy

    International development, economics and some pretty ambitious ideas from a stubborn graduate student clinging to her sense of adventure.


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