November 06, 2009

Things to read while the simulator runs; part 8

1.
While chatting with Jake Hofman the other day, he pointed me to some analysis by the Facebook Data Team about the way people use online social networks. One issue that seems to come up pretty regularly with Facebook is how many of your "friends" are "real" in some sense (for instance, this came up on a radio show this morning, and my wife routinely teases me for having nearly 400 "friends" on Facebook).

The answer, according to the Facebook Data Team, is that while it depends on how you define "real," with access to the underlying data, you can pretty clearly see how much interaction actually flows across the different links. One neat thing they found (within a lot of interesting analysis) is that the amount of interaction across all your connections scales up with the number of connections you have. That is, the more friends you have, the more friends you interact with. (It can't be a linear relationship, though, since otherwise, people with 1000s of friends would be spending all of their free time on Facebook... oh wait, some people actually do that.)

2.
A related point that I've found myself discussing several times recently with my elders (some of whom I think are, at some level, alienated and befuddled by computer and Web technology), is whether Facebook (or, technology in general) increases social isolation, and thus is leading to some kind of collapse of civil society. I've argued passionately that it's human nature to be social and thus extremely unlikely that technology alone is having this effect, and that technology instead actually facilitates social interactions, allowing people to be even more social overall (even if they may spend slightly less time face-to-face) than before. Mobile phones are my favorite example of social facilitation, since they allow people to interact with their friends in situations when previously they could not (e.g., standing in line at the bank, walking around town, etc.), even if occasionally it leads to ridiculous situations like two people sitting next to each other, but each texting or talking on their phones with people elsewhere.

And, just in time to bolster my arguments, The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study this week (also discussed in the NYTimes) showing that technology users are more social than non-technology users, and that other, non-technological trends are to blame for the apparent decrease in the size of (non-technology using) Americans' social circles over the past 20 years. Of course, access to and use of technology often correlates with affluence, so what really might be going on is that, like with nutrition, the affluent are better positioned to lead physically and socially healthy lives than the poor.

3.
Recently, for a project on evolution, I've been reading pretty deeply in the paleontology and marine mammal literature (more on that in the next post). The first thing that I noticed is how easy it is now to access vast amounts of scientific literature from the comfort of your office. Occasionally, I had to get up to see Margaret, our librarian, but most of the time I could get what I needed through electronic access. But, sometimes I would encounter a pay wall that my institutional access wouldn't allow me to circumvent.

At first, it was extremely irritating and induced open-access revolutionary spirits in me. Then, I did what I suspect many of you have done, too, which is to ask my friends at other universities to try to get access to the paper using their institutional access, and to send me a copy. On a small scale, this is like asking your friends to share individual musical tracks with you. So, naturally, the logical solution to the problem is to make a P2P sharing system for scientific papers, right? Exactly. There's apparently already such a system for mainly medical papers, but I think the time is ripe for something more ambitious. Given what's been learned about how to run a good P2P system for music, it should be pretty simple to develop a good system (distributed, searchable, scalable) for sharing PDFs of journal papers, right? I can't wait until the academic publishing industry starts suing researchers for sharing papers...

4.
If you're male, when you use a public restroom, what do you think about for those seconds while your body is busy but your mind is free to wander? Randall Munroe, of xkcd fame, apparently, thinks about the mathematics of restroom awkwardness and minimum awkward-ness packing arrangements for men using urinals. Who knew something so mundane could be so amusing?

5.
Finally, this next bit is already almost a year old, but it's just so good. Remember last year when the media when predictably bonkers over two studies, by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, showing that happiness and obesity were (socially) contagious? That is, if you're depressed, you can blame your friends for not cheering you up, and if you're fat, you can blame your friends for making you eat poorly. (Or, wait, maybe it's that misery loves company...?) Shortly after those studies hit the media, a wonderful followup study was published by Cohen-Cole and Fletcher. Their study used the same techniques as Christakis and Fowler and showed that acne, headaches and height are also socially contagious! If only we had the data, I'm sure social network analysis could be show that hair color, IQ and wealth are socially contagious, too. Their concluding thoughts say it all, really:

There is a need for caution when attributing causality to correlations in health outcomes between friends using non-experimental data. Confounding is only one of many empirical challenges to estimating social network effects, but researchers do need to attempt to minimise its impact. Thus, while it will probably not be harmful for policy makers and clinicians to attempt to use social networks to spread the benefits of health interventions and information, the current evidence is not yet strong enough to suggest clear evidence based recommendations. There are many unanswered questions and avenues for future research, including use of more robust empirical methods to assess social network effects, crafting and implementing additional empirical solutions to the many difficulties with this research, and further understanding of how social networks are formed and operate.

E. Cohen-Cole and J. M. Fletcher, "Detecting implausible social network effects in acne, height, and headaches: longitudinal analysis." BMJ 337, a2533 (2008).

Update 10 Nov.: Oh jeez. Olivia Judson, please get a clue.

posted November 6, 2009 08:19 AM in Things to Read | permalink | Comments (4)

October 21, 2009

Machinima meets science geekery

Very poetic.

We are all connected (ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye)


Tip to Cris Moore.

posted October 21, 2009 10:27 AM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)

April 10, 2009

Social Bacteria

Quorum sensing in bacteria isn't new news, but Bonnie Bassler's lab (Princeton) is doing some pretty cool work in figuring out how it works, and how it plays a role in bacteria ecology or social behavior among bacteria. Her TED talk about it is a good one.

posted April 10, 2009 09:17 AM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)

March 11, 2009

Pattie Maes

The more I think about this, the cooler I think it is.

Eons ago when I was looking at different grad schools, I remember liking Pattie Maes's work on software agents. Her "fluid interfaces group" seems just as interesting.

posted March 11, 2009 05:27 PM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)

February 20, 2009

Barry Schwartz on Wisdom

It was a little more than ten years ago that I first met Barry Schwartz, sitting in his Psychology 101 class at Swarthmore College. He was just as powerful a speaker then, and if anything I think he's gotten better. This clip is his second TED talk, and I see he's still using New Yorker cartoons to illustrate his points. In this one, he hits the nail on the head about the trouble with creeping bureaucracy -- not just government bureaucracy, but everyday bureaucracies: more rules, more incentives, less judgement, less thinking, less wisdom. Surely, this is a talk for our times.

(Tip to onegoodmove)

posted February 20, 2009 08:50 AM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)

January 30, 2009

Running the Numbers

Wow.

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibililties of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

~chris jordan, Seattle, 2008

Here's the piece entitled "Plastic Cups, 2008":

Depicts one million plastic cups, the number used on airline flights in the US every six hours.


Tip to Sabine.

posted January 30, 2009 03:55 PM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)

February 11, 2008

Food for thought (1)

posted February 11, 2008 08:31 PM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)

November 04, 2007

We're #1

Via Biocurious, Uncertain Principles and originally The World's Fair comes a cute little blog-and-google game. The idea is, you find five queries to google for which your blog is the #1 hit. Here are some for Structure+Strangeness:

posted November 4, 2007 12:05 AM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)

October 26, 2007

Equations as expression

The Edge and the Swiss Serpentine Gallery have posted the results of asking scientists and artists "What is your formula?" The results are various scribblings and typesettings of physical and social relationships, put in the form of a mathematical equation.

There's a wide diversity in the set -- some are kind of banal, some ideas make several appearances, and some are contentious opinions dressed up in math -- but some are both suggestive and interesting. I particularly liked Sean Carroll's hierarchy of fundamental scales in physics, spanning 60 orders of magnitude, David Deutsch's self-consistent time-traveling quantum computer, Lisa Randall's 5-dimensional solution to Einstein's equations for gravity, and Drew Endy's "mutation without representation" .

posted October 26, 2007 07:45 AM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (1)

October 24, 2007

Turning a sphere inside out

If you hang out with math nerds enough, you might eventually hear them talk about crazy things like turning a sphere inside out, without cutting or pinching its surface. In some circles, I think this is the math-nerd equivalent of a pissing contest. Well, I've hung out with them enough to hear it, but never gotten a good answer about how to do it. This very nicely produced little video (complete with Pixar-esque animation and human narration) explains it in a very accessible way.

(Tip to Scott Aaronson.)

posted October 24, 2007 01:13 PM in Pleasant Diversions | permalink | Comments (0)