Today’s Puzzle “Lateral Thinking Puzzles, unlike most puzzles, are inexact. In a sense, they are a hybrid between puzzles and storytelling. In each puzzle, some clues to a scenario are given, but the clues don't tell the full story. Your job is to fill in the details and complete the story. Obviously, there is usually more than one answer to any given puzzle, but, in general, only one solution is truly satisfying.” “Lateral Thinking Puzzles, unlike most puzzles, are inexact. In a sense, they are a hybrid between puzzles and storytelling. In each puzzle, some clues to a scenario are given, but the clues don't tell the full story. Your job is to fill in the details and complete the story. Obviously, there is usually more than one answer to any given puzzle, but, in general, only one solution is truly satisfying.” Brain Food Website

Lateral Thinking Puzzle A woman had two sons who were born on the same hour of the same day of the same year. But they were not twins. How could this be so?

Class Discussion: Your First Blog Post Cartoon ©

First Posts: My Observations The Good Quality of writing Quality of writing Good use of links and formatting Good use of links and formatting Strong opinions Strong opinions The Bad Paragraph 1 = Article 1 and Paragraph 2 = Article 2 Paragraph 1 = Article 1 and Paragraph 2 = Article 2 Phrases Phrases “The article … was very interesting” “The article … was very interesting” “What I learned…” “What I learned…” “My question is…” “My question is…” Length Length

Housekeeping Reminder: Two Week Comment Period Read Posts in Your Blog Circle Four Comments over next Two Weeks

Social Capital, Six Degrees, and Social Network Analysis

Blog Talk

Topic: Social Capital

What is Social Capital? “Social capital refers to the collective value of all "social networks" [who people know] and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other ["norms of reciprocity"].” – Saguaro Seminar

Social Capital (Continued) “Not just any set of…norms constitutes social capital; they must lead to cooperation in groups and therefore are related to traditional virtues like honesty, the keeping of commitments, reliable performance of duties, reciprocity, and the like.” - Fukuyama Francis Fukuyama, The Institute of Public Policy, George Mason University

Cross’ Connectors Central Connectors Unsung Hero Unsung Hero Bottleneck Bottleneck Boundary Spanners Information Brokers Peripheral People

Gladwell’s “3 Types” Connectors: Those with wide social circles. They are the "hubs" of the human social network and responsible for the small world phenomenon. Mavens are knowledgeable people. While most consumers wouldn't know if a product were priced above the market rate by, say, 10 percent, mavens would. Bloggers who detect false claims in the media could also be considered mavens. Salesmen are charismatic people with powerful negotiation skills. They exert "soft" influence rather than forceful power. Their source of influence may be the tendency of others, subconsciously, to imitate them rather than techniques of conscious persuasion.

Paul Revere: The Connector The same night that Revere made his midnight ride, a man named William Dawes went galloping off in the other direction to muster the militias to the west of Boston. Revere's ride stirred up an army, while something like three people showed up from the towns Dawes visited. Why? Revere was a connector: He knew everybody, and so was able to storm into one village after another, banging on all the right doors and calling out all the right people by name.

Time for Hands-On Photo © Charles Darwin University 2005

Are You a Connector? One point for every surname shared by someone you know Multiple points for multiple people with the same surname (e.g. you know 3 people named Johnson) The definition of "know" here is very broad -- you know their name and they know your name.

Class Discussion: Are You a Connector? Cartoon ©

Topic: Six Degrees

Six Degrees There is a theory that anyone in the world is connected to any other person through a chain of no more than six people…

Six Degrees The great social psychologist Stanley Milgram devised an ingenious experiment in the late 1960s to test the hypothesis. Milgram and his graduate student Jeffrey Travers gave 300 letters to subjects in Boston and Omaha, with instructions to deliver them to a single target person (a stockbroker from Sharon, Mass.) by mailing the letter to an acquaintance who the subject deemed closer to the target. The acquaintance then got the same set of instructions, thus setting up a chain of intermediaries. Milgram found that the average length of the chains that completed (64 of them) was about six. Source: Scientific American “Ask the Experts”

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon “The game requires a group of players to try to connect any film actor in history to Kevin Bacon as quickly as possible and in as few links as possible.” (source:wikipedia)

About the Math Manfred Kochen (a mathematician) and Ithiel de Sola Pool (a political scientist), proposed a mathematical explanation of the problem. Assuming that individuals choose 1,000 friends at random from a population as large as 100 million, Kochen and Pool showed that no more than two or three intermediaries (hence three or four degrees of separation) would be required to connect any two people. Source: Scientific American “Ask the Experts”

More on the Math The sixth root of the CIA’s July 2006 world population estimate of 6,525,170,264 is 43. Do you know at least 43 people that don’t know each other?

Facebook: Put the Theory to a Test “After more than forty years, it’s status as a description of social networks still remains an open question. Little research has been done in this area since the publication of the original paper.”

Class Discussion: Six Degrees – Reality or Myth? Cartoon ©

Intermission Artwork © Jan’s Courtyard

“Trendspotting” from The Daily Show

Social Network Analysis aka The “Social Graph”

It’s all about Visualizing Networks Visual Complexity Twitter witter-social-network-analysis/ witter-social-network-analysis/ witter-social-network-analysis/ witter-social-network-analysis/ Neural Stem Cells s/Zhang_neural_stem_cells04.jpg s/Zhang_neural_stem_cells04.jpg s/Zhang_neural_stem_cells04.jpg s/Zhang_neural_stem_cells04.jpg

Facebook (again) New terminology: “Social Graph” aka Social Network Analysis (SNA) aka Social Network Analysis (SNA)

What does all this mean for business?

Time for Hands-on in the LAB Photo © Charles Darwin University 2005