Weekend edition: SWMSNA seeks SWF

It is the great tradition of science that our biggest discoveries often emerge from the smoldering ashes of our most disappointing failures. See antibiotics and special relativity for a couple of the 20th century's biggest examples of this.

Or consider this image from NetMiner:

What is a social network analyst to make of this? The network structure is more obscured than enlightened by the 3D effect. And no amount of tweaking can make more than a quarter of the node labels intelligible at any one time.

I sat with my laptop in a cafe recently, pondering this seeming waste of technology. When suddenly the woman at the table behind me said, "Excuse me, but what are you working on?"

Yes. I had unwittingly stumbled into the SNA "Axe Effect."