Posted by
Steve Smith on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/pluralism-in-science-tp7582640p7582679.html
Ron-
Here's the link to the
Christakis/Fowler paper on happiness contagion I mentioned
earlier...and a TEDx
talk.
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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