Penalty shoot-outs are tough, but the alternating order is fair.

We compare conversion rates of association football (soccer) penalties during regulation or extra time with those during shoot-outs. Our data consists of roughly 50,000 penalties from the eleven most recent seasons in European men's football competitions. About one third of the penalties are from more than 1,500 penalty shoot-outs.

Coaching legacies: influence propagation through temporal social networks in the Australian Football League.

We study the lineage network of coaches in the Australian Football League (AFL) using a novel process of influence propagation through temporal social networks. Coaching and being coached are considered major opportunities for learning, and the vast majority of AFL coaches are former AFL players. We, therefore, establish influence via two antagonistic components: as players, future coaches are influenced by their coaches, and later liberate themselves from these influences while being coaches themselves.

Legislators' roll-call voting behavior increasingly corresponds to intervals in the political spectrum.

Scaling techniques such as the well known NOMINATE position political actors in a low dimensional space to represent the similarity or dissimilarity of their political orientation based on roll-call voting patterns. Starting from the same kind of data we propose an alternative, discrete, representation that replaces positions (points and distances) with niches (boxes and overlap). In the one-dimensional case, this corresponds to replacing the left-to-right ordering of points on the real line with an interval order.

A Framework for Reconstructing Archaeological Networks Using Exponential Random Graph Models.

Reconstructing ties between archaeological contexts may contribute to explain and describe a variety of past social phenomena. Several models have been formulated to infer the structure of such archaeological networks. The applicability of these models in diverse archaeological contexts is limited by the restricted set of assumptions that fully determine the mathematical formulation of the models and are often articulated on a dyadic basis.

MotionRugs: Visualizing Collective Trends in Space and Time.

Understanding the movement patterns of collectives, such as flocks of birds or fish swarms, is an interesting open research question. The collectives are driven by mutual objectives or react to individual direction changes and external influence factors and stimuli. The challenge in visualizing collective movement data is to show space and time of hundreds of movements at the same time to enable the detection of spatiotemporal patterns.

Exploring Transformations in Caribbean Indigenous Social Networks through Visibility Studies: the Case of Late Pre-Colonial Landscapes in East-Guadeloupe (French West Indies).

This paper presents a study of the visual properties of natural and Amerindian cultural landscapes in late pre-colonial East-Guadeloupe and of how these visual properties affected social interactions. Through a review of descriptive and formal visibility studies in Caribbean archaeology, it reveals that the ability of visual properties to affect past human behaviour is frequently evoked but the more complex of these hypotheses are rarely studied formally. To explore such complex hypotheses, the current study applies a range of techniques: total viewsheds, cumulative viewsheds, visual neighbourhood configurations and visibility networks.

Reconstructing Archaeological Networks with Structural Holes.

Model-based reconstruction is an approach to infer network structures where they cannot be observed. For archaeological networks, several models based on assumptions concerning distance among sites, site size, or costs and benefits have been proposed to infer missing ties. Since these assumptions are formulated at a dyadic level, they do not provide means to express dependencies among ties and therefore include less plausible network scenarios.

Investigating human geographic origins using dual-isotope (87Sr/86Sr, δ18O) assignment approaches.

Substantial progress in the application of multiple isotope analyses has greatly improved the ability to identify nonlocal individuals amongst archaeological populations over the past decades. More recently the development of large scale models of spatial isotopic variation (isoscapes) has contributed to improved geographic assignments of human and animal origins. Persistent challenges remain, however, in the accurate identification of individual geographic origins from skeletal isotope data in studies of human (and animal) migration and provenance.

Efficient orbit-aware triad and quad census in directed and undirected graphs.

The prevalence of select substructures is an indicator of network effects in applications such as social network analysis and systems biology. Moreover, subgraph statistics are pervasive in stochastic network models, and they need to be assessed repeatedly in MCMC sampling and estimation algorithms. We present a new approach to count all induced and non-induced four-node subgraphs (the quad census) on a per-node and per-edge basis, complete with a separation into their non-automorphic roles in these subgraphs.

Probabilistic Graph Layout for Uncertain Network Visualization.

We present a novel uncertain network visualization technique based on node-link diagrams. Nodes expand spatially in our probabilistic graph layout, depending on the underlying probability distributions of edges. The visualization is created by computing a two-dimensional graph embedding that combines samples from the probabilistic graph.

Adaptive Disentanglement based on Local Clustering in Small-World Network Visualization.

Small-world networks have characteristically low pairwise shortest-path distances, causing distance-based layout methods to generate hairball drawings. Recent approaches thus aim at finding a sparser representation of the graph to amplify variations in pairwise distances. Since the effect of sparsification on the layout is difficult to describe analytically, the incorporated filtering parameters of these approaches typically have to be selected manually and individually for each input instance.

Asymmetric relations in longitudinal social networks.

In modeling and analysis of longitudinal social networks, visual exploration is used in particular to complement and inform other methods. The most common graphical representations for this purpose appear to be animations and small multiples of intermediate states, depending on the type of media available. We present an alternative approach based on matrix representation of gestaltlines (a combination of Tufte's sparklines with glyphs based on gestalt theory).

Map warping for the annotation of metro maps.

Schematic transportation maps usually contain little or no detail describing the environment of stations or their embedding in the surrounding area. The annotation of a distorted city map alleviates this deficiency and further improves the usability of schematic transportation maps by merging two different navigational spaces.

Summarizing dynamic bipolar conflict structures.

We present a method for visual summary of bilateral conflict structures embodied in event data. Such data consists of actors linked by time-stamped events, and may be extracted from various sources such as news reports and dossiers. When analyzing political events, it is of particular importance to be able to recognize conflicts and actors involved in them.

Efficient generation of large random networks.

Random networks are frequently generated, for example, to investigate the effects of model parameters on network properties or to test the performance of algorithms. Recent interest in the statistics of large-scale networks sparked a growing demand for network generators that can generate large numbers of large networks quickly. We here present simple and efficient algorithms to randomly generate networks according to the most commonly used models.