Professor of Sociology Nicholas A. Christakis, a graduate of both Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School, takes the time to sit down with FM. Originally published on October 20, 2011.
Exploring the weblike structures that underlie everything from friendship to cellular behavior. Originally published on May 1, 2011.
Our ideas, our emotions, our politics, our sex lives – even our weight and life spans – invisibly guided by network effects. Now it’s on Facebook, and in the streets of Egypt and beyond. Originally published on February 23, 2011.
When historians look back to the moment when the post-Cold War reign of American power ended, they may well settle on 2010 as a crucial year. Everywhere, it seemed, there were signs that the long-predicted “rise of the rest” had finally occurred, whether in the newfound assertiveness of fast-growing China or the impatient diplomacy of new powers like Brazil and Turkey. Foreign Policy‘s second annual list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers fully reflects that new world. Originally published on November 23, 2010.
The flu season is just around the corner. Sorry, but it's true. Even though H1N1 isn't creating the panic it did last year, any sensible person wants to do whatever they can to know about any outbreak and avoid it if at all possible. Some new research may provide assistance in the effort to detect a potential epidemic before it spreads. Originally published on September 20, 2010.
IS your social network making you fat? Are your friends and family influencing you to smoke and drink more, or to sleep less?And if our relationships contribute to behaviors that erode our health, can social networks be harnessed to improve it? These are seminal questions in “network science” — an emerging field that examines how behavioral changes spread through social networks. By social networks, I don’t mean virtual, will-you-“friend”-me? simulations, but old-fashioned, flesh-and-blood relationships. You know, people you actually see in person regularly — friends, relatives, co-workers, neighbors. Originally published on September 18, 2010.
If you want to know when you'll catch the flu, just look at your friends. Researchers who tracked flu symptoms in the friends of a group of college students during the 2009 H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic predicted the flu outbreak in the general college population with at least 2 weeks' advance notice. Originally published on September 15, 2010.
The old folk concept that our personal health behaviors rub off on those around us has received a staggering amount of scientific support of late. Over the last few years, study after study has shown that weight gain, drug and alcohol use, even loneliness and depression aren't islands unto themselves but are powerfully contagious — capable of spreading within our social networks just as germs scatter after a sneeze. Originally published on September 13, 2010.
For hormone-addled teenagers, finding a date can often seem to be a matter of life and death. As it turns out, that may not be so far from the truth. In a paper in the August issue of Demography, a team of researchers led by Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University reports that men who reach sexual maturity in an environment with few available women are at risk of dying sooner than their luckier confrères. The team points out that this finding may have important implications for public health in countries such as India and China, where sex ratios are skewed against women. Originally published on August 11, 2010.
Chances are your friends are more popular than you are. It is a basic feature of social networks that has been known about for some time. Consider both an avid cocktail party hostess with hundreds of acquaintances and a grumpy misanthrope, who may have one or two friends. Statistically speaking, the average person is much more likely to know the hostess simply because she has so many more friends. This, in essence, is what is called the “friendship paradox”: the friends of any random individual are likely to be more central to the social web than the individual himself. Originally published on May 13, 2010.