Ron-
Here's the link to the Christakis/Fowler
<http://worldhappinessmeter.com/links.php> paper on happiness
contagion I mentioned earlier...and a TEDx talk
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZAmkIp8aI4>.
Thanks... I was being a little flip when I suggested all this, but I'm
glad to see that there *is* work tied in already underway.
Are they building off of Epstein's work? He's not mentioned in the
citations.
I doubt it. I think we are talking somewhat separated paradigms. I
suspect there *could* be a tie in with some work, but I can tell already
that Doug is not going to be our Emissary over beer and ribs... <grin>.
I have worked on two projects that tie in to Fowler's talk and his
referencing of the Digital Village.
One was an early days(public) internet project ( entitled "Digital
Village", no kidding) to try to understand how the growing participation
in the internet of the first and third world population might change the
nature of these populations. I don't remember any amazing results, I
seem to remember that the project was overcome by events such that we
were running on pre-internet time trying to keep up with the actual
progress of the internet. A related project I think was to try to help
the USPS anticipate what the internet was going to mean to them... and
what they could do to remain relevant as the digital age overwhelmed the
atom-age.
The other was a paper on "Collective Intelligence" Circa 2001 which
involved some simple simulations to demonstrate that a connected group
could have more problem-solving ability than any individual (or small
subset?).
A lot of my research and contribution overlaps a lot of what Fowler is
saying in his TED talk... in particular our evolutionary roots as
nomadic tribal groups of order 100... and the potential implications for
our (future) social networks when they are no longer geographically,
familial, or job constrained.
I'm mildly disturbed by his verbage in the talk which seems to conflate
correlation with causation (are obese friends on facebook actually
influencing the others to become (more) obese or are they choosing
eachother because they are obese, or do obese people share common
interests (love food and sedentary pursuits while eschewing physical
activities?). I realize it is a popular talk jammed into a short period
of time... I'll get more out of the paper I'm sure.
I'm also interested in whether "Happiness" is considered a scalar, a
vector or even a tensor? And if there are iterated network models
(roughly ABMs or Network Automata) trying to simulate this?
So much for trying to be flip. Now I'm hooked (a little).
Happily hooked?
- Steve
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