‘It seems, in fact, as though the second half of a man’s life is made up of nothing, but the habits he has accumulated during the first half.’ –Dostoevsky
Studying the interactions between people in ever increasing detail reveals entirely new patterns of human behaviour–and poses challenges for network science.
The study of networks has changed the way we think about our world and the way that societies organise themselves within it. In particular, the discovery that many real world networks can be thought as small worlds, in which most nodes are not neighbours but can be reached by a small number of jumps, has had a profound impact.
But until now, most studies have focused on networks as static affairs in which the links between nodes do not change in any significant way.
That is beginning to change as data becomes available from mobile phones and RFID tags that tease apart the nature of human behaviour and interaction in detail that has never before been possible.
Today, Lorenzo Isella at the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Turin and friends reveal an interesting example in which the interactions between humans in similar but not identical circumstances leads to subtle but important differences in the network of connections between them. (…)
Isella and co have examined data taken from RFID cards that recorded the interactions between people at two different events: an exhibition at the Science Gallery, a museum in Dublin, and a conference at the Institute for Scientific Interchange Foundation in Italy.
These data sets are quite different. At the Science Gallery, researchers recorded 230,000 interactions between 14,000 people over a period of three months. At the conference, they recorded 10,000 interactions between 100 people over three days.
People’s behaviour at these events were obviously different. At the museum, people arrived at different times and streamed through the gallery in just a few hours. At the conference, the attendees tended to stay on site and make repeated contacts over several days.
So it’s hardly surprising then that the average number of contacts made at the conference was more than double those made at the museum (roughly 20 v 8).
The networks were also different. It turns out that the pattern of interactions between attendees at the conference formed a small world network while the pattern at the museum often did not. So it is much harder to link visitors to the museum to each other using a small number of steps through the network.
These differences have an important implication which Isella and co were able to draw out by studying the way that infectious agents such as memes or viruses might spread through the respective networks.
{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }
Brain study shows that the opinions of others matters
Researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL (University College London) in collaboration with Aarhus University in Denmark have found that the ‘reward’ area of the brain is activated when people agree with our opinions.
The study, published today in the journal Current Biology, suggests that scientists may be able to predict how much people can be influenced by the opinions of others on the basis of the level of activity in the reward area.
photo { Marco Ovando }
