Archive for the ‘Networks’ Category
Genes and social networks: new research links genes to friendship networks
James Fowler, a professor at UC-San Diego, is engaged in highly innovative and important research at the crossroads of political science and biology. His recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “Correlated Genotypes in Friendship Networks“, represents an important new study in an emerging research field that is exploring the genetic and biological foundations for our political and social behavior.
In this paper, James and his colleagues Jaime Settle and Nicholas Christakis demonstrate that there is what they call “genotypic clustering in social networks“, by statistically examining the association between markers for six different genes and the reported friendship networks from respondents in data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the Framingham Heart Study Social Network. They show that one of these genes (DRD2) is positively associated with in friendship networks, meaning that those who have this gene are more likely to be friends with others who have this gene, controlling for demographic similarities and population stratification; another gene, CYP2A6 has a negative association in friendship networks.
The Elite Brain Network
That the brain is a powerful and complex organ is no mystery. But what researchers have begun to discover is that there are select areas of the brain that are so dense in their activity and interconnections that researchers have dubbed them the “rich clubs” of the brain. There are regions of the brain in which connectivity is extraordinarily dense — that’s been known for some time. What the present study set out to do was visualize how these dense regions might be connected to one another, possibly forming an elite network between these distinct and powerful regions of the brain.
They found exactly that: Twelve discrete hubs in the brain were interconnected with one another across hemispheres, forming what the researchers call a “rich club,” distinct from the regular or “lower” network of the brain.
Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
In “Reinventing Discovery,” Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world.
“Reinventing Discovery” tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science. We learn, for example, how mathematicians in the Polymath Project are spontaneously coming together to collaborate online, tackling and rapidly demolishing previously unsolved problems. We learn how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo tounderstand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. These efforts are just a small part of the larger story told in this book–the story of how scientists are using the internet to dramatically expand our problem-solving ability and increase our combined brainpower. This is a book for anyone who wants to understand how the online world is revolutionizing scientific discovery today–and why the revolution is just beginning.
