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January 2, 2004
Abnormal Friends
Posted by Ross Mayfield
Over at Richard Gayle's Corante Blog,
Living Code is a new study suggests that treating epidemics could do better than with than random immunuization. Take a random sample and ask them to list their friends, then immunize the friends:
"Friends just aren't normal," agrees Mark Newman, a networks specialist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. "Friends are, by definition, friendly people, and your circle will be a biased sample of the population because of it."
Makes you think about the good or evil potential of the Friendster database in scale-free situations.
Comments (2)
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1. Lucas on January 3, 2004 5:27 AM writes...
In a disease ravaged world I don't think I would like to be the most connected, personaly speaking.
Permalink to Comment2. Valdis on January 4, 2004 1:54 AM writes...
Remember in a disease network, like TB or SARS, with airborne contagions, it is not necessarily your social network that is important -- it is your contact network -- with whom you share the air and it's resident contagions!
During an extended business trip, your contact network may contain many strangers, and only a few members of your social/biz network.
Now, who do you immunize first?
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