“Over the next few years, Christakis and Fowler managed a team that painstakingly sifted through the records. When they were done, they had a map of how 5,124 subjects were connected, tracing a web of 53,228 ties between friends and family and work colleagues. Next they analyzed the data, beginning with tracking patterns of how and when Framingham residents became obese. Soon they had created an animated diagram of the entire social network, with each resident represented on their computer screens as a dot that grew bigger or smaller as he or she gained or lost weight over 32 years, from 1971 to 2003. When they ran the animation, they could see that obesity broke out in clusters. People weren’t just getting fatter randomly. Groups of people would become obese together, while other groupings would remain slender or even lose weight.”
-By CLIVE THOMPSON (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/magazine/13contagion-t.html?em), p.3
From an article about the sociology of group behavior. Specifically about how happiness is infectious. A fascinating piece. I would really like to see some of the diagrams they created to illustrate the social networks. I’m trying to track them down.
