Social Networks Experiment

In Huntsville (the city I live in), people often joke how "the world has six degrees of separation, but Huntsville has just two." In that spirit I decided to try a an experiment with SocialNetworks to see if I could get two people who didn't know each other to recognize each other as "on the network".

The experiment needed the following properties:

• A definitive way to determine who was on the network and who was not.
• A way for people in the experiment to recognize each other.
• A way to avoid false hits - i.e. people who already knew each other would not cause a hit.
• A way for a successful hit to be reported back to me.
• A way to include those without computer access.

To accomplish this, I did the following:

• I adapted my chainmail work and created literally hundreds of cheap "fidget toys" - out of 16g galvanized steel at about 0.05$ each to create, about 60$ total.
• I gave the fidget toys to everyone I knew for free with the instructions "If you see someone you don't know with one, talk to them, then report back to me"
• I distributed the toys for three months.

and. . . I finally got a hit! A girl who started working at a new restaurant recognized another playing with the toy and introduced herself - then reported the incident back to me.

I knew Huntsville was small. . .

Fidget toy pic

--LayneThomas

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There is a similar "experiment" (not in the scientific sense) being done with US and Canadian paper currency at http://www.wheresgeorge.com.

See http://directory.google.com/Top/Recreation/Collecting/Paper_Money/Tracking_Bank_Notes/ for the Euro and other currencies.

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See: SocialNetworks SixDegreesOfSeparationTheory

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CategoryInteraction