Press

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.

Alles, was wir tun, beeinflusst die Freunde der Freunde unserer Freunde. Und was diese tun, beeinflusst uns. Nicholas Christakis und James Fowler über soziale Ansteckung. Originally published on April 26, 2010.

Cada vez es más fácil acercarse a ese ?sueño? de tener un millón de amigos. Las redes sociales en Internet -como Facebook, Tuenti, Twitter y MySpace- están cambiando totalmente la forma de relacionarnos con nuestros vecinos, conocidos, clientes, seguidores, compañeros de trabajo y aficiones, íntimos? Algunos ven riesgos de adicción y pérdida de privacidad y del verdadero sentido de la amistad, pero más de 900 millones de personas ya se han dejado seducir. Para muchos -como los nueve personajes que ilustran este reportaje- es la manera más novedosa de socializar y sentirse acompañados. Originally published on April 25, 2010.

Von der Börsenpanik bis zur Nächstenliebe: Netzwerkforscher wollen die Gesellschaft verstehen, indem sie unsere Verbindungen erforschen. Dafür sammeln sie digitale Spuren, die wir täglich hinterlassen. Originally published on February 26, 2010.

"Comment l’internet transforme-t-il la façon dont vous pensez ?" Telle était la grande question annuelle posée par la revue "The Edge" à quelque 170 experts, scientifiques, artistes et penseurs. Originally published on January 25, 2010.

From the brains behind Iran's Green Revolution to the economic Cassandra who actually did have a crystal ball, they had the big ideas that shaped our world in 2009. Originally published on November 25, 2009.

For those of us not actively toiling in a university, most modern writing in the social sciences can be placed into one of three categories. The first category, which is vast, consists of the arcane and the incremental — those studies so obscure, or which advance scholarship so infinitesimally, that they can be safely ignored by the general reader. (Not that this work isn’t important; it keeps academic publishing in business, and significant knowledge accretes in tiny drips on the way to tenure.) The second category consists of statistical proof of the obvious. (Some actual study findings published recently: “the parent-child relationship . . . commonly includes feelings of irritation, tension and ambivalence”; women are more likely to engage in casual sex with “an exceptionally attractive man”; and driving while text-messaging leads to “a substantial increase in the risk of being involved in a safety-critical event such as a crash.” Thank you, social science!) And in the third category, which is surely the smallest, are works of brilliant originality that stimulate and enlighten and can sometimes even change the way we under­stand the world. Originally published on October 10, 2009.

How do our friends, and friends of our friends, affect us? In their new book Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler describe research into how social networks tie into health and human behavior, including obesity, smoking, voting and happiness. Originally published on September 25, 2009.

A revolution in the science of social networks began with a stash of old papers found in a storeroom in Framingham, Massachusetts. They were the personal records of 5,124 male and female subjects from the Framingham Heart Study. Started in 1948, the ongoing project has revealed many of the risk factors associated with cardiovascular disease, including smoking and hypertension. Originally published on September 12, 2009.