In May 1846, a year and a half before gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill, several extended families and quite a few unattached males headed with their caravans from Illinois to California. Due to poor organization, some bad advice, and a huge dose of bad luck, by November the group had foundered in the deep snows of the Sierra Nevada. They came to a halt at what is now known as Donner Pass, and, in an iconic if unpleasant moment in California’s history, they sat out winter in makeshift tents buried in snow, the group dwindling as survivors resorted to cannibalism to avert starvation.

From an evolutionary point of view, what makes the story interesting is not the cannibalism — which, in the annals of anthropology, is relatively banal — but who survived and who did not. Of the 87 pioneers, only 46 came over the pass alive in February and March of the next year. Their story, then, represents a case study of what might be termed catastrophic natural selection. It turns out that, contrary to lay Darwinist expectations, it was not the virile young but those who were embedded in families who had the best odds of survival. The unattached young men, presumably fuller of vigor and capable of withstanding more physical hardship than the others, fared worst, worse even than the older folk and the children. (…)

We are the descendants of those who had a competitive edge. The intricacies of intra-species cooperation (which can itself be exquisitely competitive) — of managing family and other ties — are a large part of the game. Indeed, they may be the largest part of the game in fostering survival, in nurturing the young, and in allowing us to out-compete other primates. This is where not only kin networks but social networks enter the picture.

Our big brains — in particular our species’ inordinately large neocortex — evolved, Dunbar argues, in lockstep with our ability to manage increasingly large social groups: to read motives, to keep track of who is doing what with whom, of who is a reliable sharer, who a likely freeloader, and so on. Many evolutionary biologists have made this point over the years, of course. Where Dunbar is unique is in having assigned a definite number to what constitutes a stable human group or community. The “Dunbar’s number” of his title is (drum roll…) 150. Extrapolating from the estimated size of Neolithic villages, of Amish and other communities, of companies in most armies, and other such data, Dunbar argues that this number is, more or less, the limit of stable social networks because it represents the limit, more or less, of our cognitive capacities.

The number is highly debatable, but it turns out that, Facebook aside, the average person has about 150 friends — people he or she might actually recognize and be recognized by at a random airport, 150 people he or she might feel comfortable borrowing five dollars from. As for how many friends we have evolved to “need” in a more intimate sense, that is a different matter. According to Dunbar, most of us have, on average, about 3-5 intimate friends whom we speak to at least weekly, and about 10-15 more friends whose deaths would greatly distress us.

{ LA Review of Books | Continue reading | previously }

The number of people we can truly be friends with is constant, regardless of social networking services like Twitter, according to a new study of the network.

Back in early 90s, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar began studying the social groups of various kinds of primates. Before long, he noticed something odd.

Primates tend to maintain social contact with a limited number of individuals within their group. But here’s the thing: primates with bigger brains tended to have a bigger circle of friends. Dunbar reasoned that this was because the number of individuals a primate could track was limited by brain volume.

Then he did something interesting. He plotted brain size against number of contacts and extrapolated to see how many friends a human ought to be able to handle. The number turned out to be about 150.

Since then, various studies have actually measured the number of people an individual can maintain regular contact with. These all show that Dunbar was just about spot on (although there is a fair spread in the results).

What’s more, this number appears to have been constant throughout human history–from the size of neolithic villages to military units to 20th century contact books.

But in the last decade or so, social networking technology has had a profound influence on the way people connect. Twitter, for example, vastly increases the ease with which we can communicate with and follow others. It’s not uncommon for tweeters to follow and be followed by thousands of others.

So it’s easy to imagine that social networking technology finally allows humans to surpass the Dunbar number. Not so say Bruno Goncalves and buddies at Indiana University.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

related { What Do People Actually Tweet About? }

photo { Isaac McKay-Randozz }

{ Craigslist’s traffic seems to be plateau-ing. Why? This graphic by VC Andrew Parker shows why. Could the same thing happen to Facebook? | Business Insider | full story }

Five reasons why I’m not buying Facebook

Excuse me for raining on the Facebook parade, but the $450 million investment by Goldman Sachs and $50 million from Russia’s Digital Sky Technology didn’t move me the way it seemed to move others. This despite the suggested $50 billion valuation, as big and beautiful a number as the stock market has seen in some time.

I am certainly not moved in the same way it appears to have moved Goldman’s own clients: the Wall Street firm has pledged to line up another $1.5 billion in sales to its high net worth investors, who are said to be champing at the bit to get a piece of the action, which starts with a $2 million minimum. Not that I have $2 million lying around, but I wouldn’t buy this stock if I did.

Reason #1: Someone who knows a lot more than I do is selling. While the identities of the specific sellers remain unknown, the current consensus seems to be that most will be from venture capital investors like Accel Partners, Peter Thiel, and Greylock Partners. Maybe Mark Zuckerberg will kick in $50 million or so himself, just for some fooling around money. (…) The way the social network is talked about these days, it’s the best investment opportunity in town. So why would anyone want to forsake it? And don’t give me that crap about VCs being “early stage” and wanting to cash out of a “mature” investment. These people are as money hungry as any other institutional investor, and would let it ride unless….they saw something that suggested that the era of stupendous growth was over. Facebook reached 500 million users in July. There’s been no update since, even though the company had meticulously documented every new 50 million users to that point. Might the curve have crested? And let’s not even talk about the fact that they don’t really make much money per user — a few dollars a year at most. (Its estimated $2 billion in 2010 revenues would amount to $4 per user at that base.)

Reason #2: Goldman Sachs. I’ve got nothing against Goldman Sachs. Hell, I worked there. But when Reuters’ Felix Salmon says that the Goldman investment “ratifies” a $50 billion valuation, he’s only half right. That is, someone, somewhere—perhaps the Russians at DST Global—might just believe this imaginary number. (It’s hard to see why, though: DST got in at a $10 billion valuation in May 2009. Facebook’s user base has more than doubled since then. So its valuation should…quintuple?) But concluding that Goldman Sachs believes in a $50 billion valuation is poor reasoning. (…)

Reason #5: Warren Buffett cautions those looking at outsize valuations to consider one’s purchase of company stock in a different way than price of an individual share, whatever it may be. He suggests one look at the total market valuation – in this case, a sketchy $50 billion – and to consider: Would you buy the whole company for that price, if you had the money? The market value of Goldman Sachs is just $88 billion. I’d take more than half that company over the whole of Facebook any day of the week.

{ Duff McDonald/CNN Money | Continue reading }

related { For News Sites, Google Is the Past and Facebook Is the Future | Google’s stealth multi-billion-dollar business }

and { The Next 10 Years Will Be Great For Both Founders And VCs }

…SCVNGR, a $100-million company that makes location-based apps to rival Foursquare and Groupon. (…)

Priebatsch is 22 years old. He’s also worth millions. And not just because he’s had a “Projects” folder on a hard drive since he was 8, made tens of thousands of dollars every month on a startup when he was 16, and dropped out of college after freshman year. He’s the man in charge because he sensed something three years ago that most of the rest of us did not: that a generation raised on video games would want to keep playing a game in real life. “I found out that basically the real world was essentially the same game as Civilization [an old computer game], just with slightly better graphics, maybe, and slightly slower.”

The story of SCVNGR begins with the story of Priebatsch and that game of Sid Meier’s Civilization. His aunt gave it to him when he was a kid, and its premise was simple: Build an ancient civilization strong enough to take over the world. Priebatsch, the son of a biotech entrepreneur and Morgan Stanley VP, was forbidden from watching TV, but could play on the computer. Spending hours with the game, he quickly became addicted not to conquering the world but conquering the game. “The fact that the game was designed by someone always made me think that someone had built it with their own biases,” he says, “I would essentially mine the game into a series of algorithms and know exactly what to do at any given time.”

Priebatsch, like an undergrad reading Marx for the first time, started to look at everything through this new worldview. “I have a much broader definition of game than most other people,” he says, explaining that games are just systems of challenges, rewards, and biases. After years of playing games, Priebatsch felt ready to actually build one.

{ Fortune | Continue reading | Thanks Tim }

“I’ve never felt threatened by Facebook. (…) Facebook has the most to lose because it has a history of altering its privacy policies and not doing the most to protect the privacy of its users,” said Priebatsch. “Facebook will be like Google, Microsoft and IBM before them – they’ve been dominant for maybe a year and I’d give them maybe four more years.”

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

related { 18 months ago, Groupon didn’t exist. Today, it has over 70 million users in 500-odd different markets, is making more than a billion dollars a year, has dozens if not hundreds of copycat rivals, and is said to be worth as much as $25 billion. What’s going on here? | Reuters | full story }

JamesMTitus was manufactured by cyber-security specialists in New Zealand participating in a two-week social-engineering experiment organized by the Web Ecology Project. Based in Boston, the group had conducted demographic analyses of Chatroulette and studies of Twitter networks during the recent Middle East protests. It was now interested in a question of particular concern to social-media experts and marketers: Is it possible not only to infiltrate social networks, but also to influence them on a large scale?

The group invited three teams to program “social bots”—fake identities—that could mimic human conversation on Twitter, and then picked 500 real users on the social network, the core of whom shared a fondness for cats. The Kiwis armed JamesMTitus with a database of generic responses (“Oh, that’s very interesting, tell me more about that”) and designed it to systematically test parts of the network for what tweets generated the most responses, and then to talk to the most responsive people.

After the first week, the teams were allowed to tweak their bot’s code and to launch secondary identities designed to sabotage their competitors’ bots.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

Remember Paul Ceglia? He’s the fellow in upstate New York who sued Mark Zuckerberg last July, claiming that, way back in 2003, Zuckerberg had agreed to give him a 50% ownership in the project that became Facebook.

That claim seemed preposterous at the time, not least because Ceglia had waited 7 years to file it. And there was also the fact that Ceglia was a convicted felon, having been charged with criminal fraud in connection with a wood-pellet company he operated. (…)

But now Paul Ceglia has refiled his lawsuit. With a much larger law firm. And a lot more evidence. And the new evidence is startling.

{ Business Insider | Continue reading }

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.

A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an “online persona management service” that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

painting { Jean Leon Gerome }

We are now looking at a situation where electronic communication is with us at all times and the boundaries between internet and real life communication are becoming increasingly blurred. (…)

Facebook users have a mixture of what would be termed as weak ties (friends a user has a marginal link to), and close ties (friends with whom they maintain a close relationship) in one place. Developing weak ties is one of the primary sources for people using Facebook. Romantic relationships may only represent a small part of a person’s Facebook usage it is nevertheless the most public place a couple will represent themselves. Muize found there was a correlation between the time a user spends on Facebook and relationship jealousy, while Boyd and Lewis showed Facebook to be an environment that can impact upon an intimate relationship.

Much of the literature, however, has focused on the value of maintaining weak ties and enhancing social capital. This paper will take a different stance and compare how certain rituals on Facebook can impact a person’s intimate relationships on the offline environment.

{ Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, | PDF }

image { Nam June Paik, Homage to Stanley Brown, 1984 | Stedelijk Museum }

Evolutionary biologists suggest there is a correlation between the size of the cerebral neocortex and the number of social relationships a primate species can have. Humans have the largest neocortex and the widest social circle — about 150, according to the scientist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar’s number — 150 — also happens to mirror the average number of friends people have on Facebook. Because of airplanes and telephones and now social media, human beings touch the lives of vastly more people than did our ancestors, who might have encountered only 150 people in their lifetime. Now the possibility of connection is accelerating at an extraordinary pace. As the great biologist E.O. Wilson says, “We’re in uncharted territory.”

{ TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg | Continue reading | A map of the world, as drawn by Facebook }

AlphaSigma
Hey Guys,
I need some ideas for what I could do with a group of Senior High girls for a ‘girls night’ out on a Friday night.
Time: 5-6 Hours (6:00 pm - Midnight)
Has to be affordable (No professional sports games, etc.)
Thanks.

jthomas1600
Every time there’s been a progressive dinner for any group we’ve been involved in the kids seem to have a good time. It can be all restaurants, homes, or a combination of the two. One thing nice about going to peoples homes is it gives them a chance to be involved with the youth. Often times it will be parents of kids in the youth group and it gives everyone a chance to get to know eachother a little better. Six hours is a long time for a progressive dinner so you could just start with that and then end the night with a late movie, bowling, mini golf etc.
Scavenger hunts seem to be pretty popular too.

{ Christian Guitar Forum }

Conversations on news sites show how information and ideas spread.

There’s a science behind the comments on websites. It’s actually quite predictable how much chatter a post on Slashdot or Wikipedia will attract, according to a new study of several websites with­ large user bases. (…)

The findings give hope to social scientists trying to understand broader phenomena, like how rumors about a candidate spread during a campaign or how information about street protests flows out of a country with state-controlled media.

{ ScienceNews | Continue reading }

photo { Michael Casker }

Researcher Soraya Mehdizadeh (2010) proposes that sites like Facebook and MySpace have contributed to the rise of narcissistic tendencies. (…)

She defines narcissists as individuals who seek superficial relationships with high status individuals who can contribute to public glory (2010: 358). Online social networking sites encourage these sorts of relationships:

First, this setting offers a gateway for hundreds of shallow relationships (i.e., virtual friends), and emotionally detached communication (i.e., wall posts, comments). While these sites do indeed serve a communicative purpose among friends, colleagues, and family, other registered users can initiate requests to be friends, and one’s social network often snowballs rapidly across institutions in this fashion.

One way this sort of relationship is achieved is through the presentation of an attractive self—the user must reveal something that encourages the connection.

This connection may be emotionally appealing (e.g., a shared history: attending the same high school or college) or physically appealing (e.g., an enticing photo, a pleasant demeanor).

The latter seems particularly important once the user moves past first tier connections and begins to add connections from the second tier (i.e., friend of a friend) and beyond. According to Mehdizadeh, this opens the door for a showing of the “hoped for possible self,” which “emphasizes realistic socially desirable identities an individual would like to establish given the right circumstances.”

{ Anthropology in Practice | Continue reading }

photo { Milos Gazdic }

The world is more complex and less controllable than ‘rational’ planners believe. There are two main reasons for this. First, as behavioural economics tells us, agents - be they individuals, institutions or governments - do not necessarily behave rationally; their responses when confronted by new information or a different set of incentives may be hard to anticipate.

Second, as the study of networks shows, our tastes and preferences can be altered directly by the behaviour of others and can change over time. Natural selection is now believed to favour social learning strategies that specify when and whom to copy. It seems that humans are particularly adept at this. (…)

In the late 1990s, a group of epidemiologists, sociologists and physicists analysed a database of individuals and their sexual contacts. The results were published in Nature, one of the world’s leading scientific journals. They found that most people have only a few sexual partners, but that a small number have hundreds or even thousands. The real originality of the paper was its finding that the structure of the pattern of the contacts closely reflected a recently discovered type of network that is described as ‘scale-free’.

Such networks are important in the natural sciences, and more of them - at least, good approximations of the scale-free pattern - have been discovered in the human world. The internet, for example, has these properties. A few sites receive a massive number of hits, while most get very few. A whole industry has grown up in American marketing circles trying to find these influential ‘hubs’. (…)

Another important type of network that makes life even more complicated is the ‘small-world’ network. When we delve into the maths, there are considerable similarities between a scale-free and a small-world network. But their basic social structure is different. In the scale-free network, there are a few agents who have huge potential influence. The small world is much more like overlapping sets of ‘friends of friends’. The additional feature is that, while no one has a large number of connections, a few agents may have ‘long-range’ connections to others who are remote from their immediate cliques. However, these individuals may be even harder to identify in practice than the hubs of a scale-free network, precisely because they themselves are not distinguished by having an unusual number of connections.


{ RSA Journal | Continue reading }

The World Wide Web, with its potential to connect people globally, was paradoxically a technology that connected people locally.


{ RSA Journal | Continue reading }

Rumors of the web’s memory are greatly exaggerated.


Jeffrey Rosen has an engaging piece in the Times about privacy and the web that touches on issues of forgiveness and reputation and how the Internet has basically screwed that up for all of us; the upshot being that because your Facebook profile never really goes away, your sins are plastered on the world’s largest wall for all to see forever. 

Here’s the thing. They’re probably not. Forever, that is.

{ Big Questions Online | Continue reading }

As data volumes continue to grow, it’s clear that the Internet’s infrastructure needs upgrading. What’s not clear is who is going to pay for it.

{ Der Spiegel | Continue reading }

photo { Manuel Vazquez }

{ 50cent | Twitter }

We are about to get a very different kind of Internet, one replete with huge potential and danger. The spread of cloud computing will allow much greater personalisation and mobility, constant real time connection and easier collaboration. Cloud computing will give rise to a cloud culture. (…)

In the world of cloud computing our data — emails, documents, pictures, songs — would be stored remotely in a digital cloud hanging above us, always there for us to access from any device we like: computer, television, games console, handheld and mobile, embedded in our kitchen table, bathroom mirror or car dashboard. We should be able to access our data from anywhere, thanks to always on broadband and draw down as much or as little as and when we need. Instead of installing software on our computer we would pay for it only when we needed it.

The most familiar early version of a cloud based service is web mail — Googlemail and hotmail — in which email messages are stored on remote servers which can be accessed from anywhere. Google also provides ways for people to store and then share documents and spreadsheets, so many people can access the same document. Facebook and Twitter are like vast clouds of personal information held in a cloud. Wikipedia is a cloud of self-managed, user generated information. Open source software platforms like Drupal are software clouds which coders can draw down from and add to.

Sharing our programmes and data makes a lot of sense, at least in theory. Pooling storage and software with others should lower the cost. Cloud computing would turn computing power into just another utility that we would access much as we turn on a tap for water.

As computing becomes a utility it will power many more devices, many of them with no user interface, more of them mobile and handheld. The cloud should also encourage collaboration. Different people, using different devices should be able to access the same documents and resources more easily. Work on shared projects will become easier, especially as collaboration software and web video conferencing becomes easier to use. This should allow far more of what Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist calls “combinatorial innovation” as developers mash-up data from different sources, as many people are doing already with Google maps. It is more sensible not to think of the cloud but clouds taking different shapes and forms.

{ Charles Leadbeater, Cloud Culture: The promise and the threat | Edge | Continue reading }

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.

{ Interview with Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO | Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too: Social Network Effects on Divorce in a Longitudinal Sample Followed for 32 Years

Divorce is the dissolution of a social tie, but it is also possible that attitudes about divorce flow across social ties. To explore how social networks influence divorce and vice versa, we utilize a longitudinal data set from the long-running Framingham Heart Study. We find that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers, and there are clusters of divorcees that extend two degrees of separation in the network. We also find that popular people are less likely to get divorced, divorcees have denser social networks, and they are much more likely to remarry other divorcees. Interestingly, we do not find that the presence of children influences the likelihood of divorce, but we do find that each child reduces the susceptibility to being influenced by peers who get divorced. Overall, the results suggest that attending to the health of one’s friends’ marriages serves to support and enhance the durability of one’s own relationship, and that, from a policy perspective, divorce should be understood as a collective phenomenon that extends far beyond those directly affected.

{ Social Science Research Network | via The Situationist }

photo { Bill Owens }

“The step after ubiquity is invisibility,” my old friend from Apple Al Mandel explained to me years ago. And it’s true. Telephone service was once rare but is now universal and anything truly universal eventually become a commodity. No wonder phone companies no longer make money from long-distance calling nor — as Verizon’s sale of its New England landlines business confirms — even make enough money from local phone service. Now it is all about mobile and thank God for texting and ringtones, the telco execs say… for awhile. Well I think the same thing is about to happen to Facebook — privacy issues or no.

Facebook is huge with 350 million members but that’s not the problem. The problem is that my Facebook friends list is too long and so is yours. I have 809 Facebook friends. My wife has friend envy because she thinks my friends are generally more interesting than her friends. I wouldn’t know because I’m only on Facebook once or twice a week for a few minutes. But even that’s enough to know my friend list is too long. (…)

Facebook is being really stupid lately about making money from its traffic by violating user privacy. (…) If Facebook really wants to get profitable it needs to get smaller by kicking-off users who don’t make it money. (…)

Facebook is useless to me. We’re all too connected to really connect.

{ Robert X. Cringely | Continue reading }

video { Thanks Tim }