From Degrees of Separation to Mirrors

How many people would it take to connect any two people on the planet? Via a friend of a friend…of a friend chain? In 1929, the answer was called out to be “six degrees of separation”. Recently they tested that via (what else?) Facebook! Laugh all you like, but Facebook’s sample size is 1.59 billion users which I am pretty sure is way bigger than whatever sample size they used in 1929. The answer? In 2011, Facebook analysis yielded an average of 3.74. Today, when even more people are on Facebook, the answer has shrunk to 3.57.

This isn’t the first time Facebook has been used to analyze social theories. The dataset that Facebook has is unparalleled for such analysis. On the other hand, that raises privacy concerns….

Talking of tech companies, they sure do weird things. Often out of paranoia. Like when Google got into mobile long before the iPhone based on their fear of Microsoft dominating mobile and locking Google out. Today, with the dominance of Android and iOS, that seems laughable but it was a valid fear back then. And now with the dominance of Android globally, Facebook has been fearful of Google locking Facebook’s app out. So much so that, sometime back, Facebook deliberately crashed its Android apps for weeks! Why? To see if users would still visit Facebook's mobile site or abandon the platform altogether. Thankfully, for Facebook that is, users kept coming back.

As Andy Grove once said, only the paranoid survive.

As we keep moving inexorably into a world of smart devices (phones, tablets, homes and watches), the next one in line seems to be the humble bathroom mirror. A Google engineer has created a prototype of such a mirror to show the time, weather and news snippets! He plans to add traffic and reminders next. I guess we are soon going to be able to ask our mirrors questions beyond the narcissistic “Who is the fairest of them all?”

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarFebruary 8, 2016 at 9:23 AM

    Reading your last line's end “Who is the fairest of them all?” I realized that at least in the technology of using mirrors to give accurate information, the fairy tale has beaten IT to it! :-) Even in the movie 'Snow White and the Hunter' the evil queen is told in no uncertain terms by no less a contraption than the mirror on the wall that it was Snow White who was fairer and beautiful, which broadly the viewers knew to be true anyway, but the evil queen was unwilling to accept.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more