Social networks

In the Jan. 6 Science, Gueorgi Kossinets and sociologist Duncan Watts of Columbia University describe a study in which the researchers analyzed 14,584,423 messages exchanged by 43,553 students, faculty, and staff at a large university over the course of a year. What they discovered was a turbulent sea of constantly changing relationships among individuals yet remarkable stability in the properties of the network as a whole.

It's almost as if people were behaving randomly, with individual changes more or less canceling each other out. "In the absence of global perturbations," Kossinets and Watts concluded, "average network properties appear to approach an equilibrium state, whereas individual properties are unstable."

Interesting article about how your email activities are a reflection of your social activities. In a way, this obvious, but now there's a large study that quantifies what you probably knew instinctively.