Social Networks Are an in Important Topic in Modeling the Behavior of People. Humans Are

Social Networks are an in important topic in modeling the behavior of people. Humans are inherently social and have relationships far more complex than the random encounters often seen in agent based modeling. These relationships can vary in strength and meaning – we see social networks that range from kinship networks, friendship networks to contact networks used in the study of epidemiology.

While the field of social networks is still quite young, perhaps one of the most well known ideas goes by the name of “six degrees of separation”. This is the idea that though there are many people in the world the social distance between any two people is actually quite small, having a shortest path of as many as six hops. Though the original study that coined this phrase has had many criticisms it does appear that social networks do have the interesting property that the shortest distance between people is remarkably small even in large networks of people.

This phenomenon is in part due to the fact that relationships are not strictly geographical in nature. Even though most of the people you know may live in the same place, because some people move around through immigration, school or employment every society has long-range connections to other societies. The impact of this interconnectedness is being studied in many fields including the history of pandemics.

In this unit we will study social networks. We will see that networks are at their simplest the study of how things are connected. Not all connections are the same, nor are they permanent. The Internet has driven a whole new form of communication and opportunity for people to meet. As a result social networks continue to evolve and become even more relevant every day as a tool to understand how our world works.

Week 1

·  Message on straw – network communication using string, straws and post-its.

·  Kevin Bacon Game – a small world network of film actors

Week 2

·  Detect the network – Cell phone network detection and drawing

·  netlogo – Social Network, network description file format, generate social network for phone game

Week 3

·  Build your own social network

Field Trip

·  Social Network researchers

Week 4

·  Bring your social network into netlogo and starlogo

·  Analysis of your network

Week 5

·  Adding network properties to TNG models

Week 6

·  Finish Model

·  Work on Model Presentation