Knowing someone who is happy makes you 15.3% more likely to be happy yourself, the study found. A happy friend of a friend increases your odds of happiness by 9.8%, and even your neighbor’s sister’s friend can give you a 5.6% boost.
“Your emotional state depends not just on actions and choices that you make, but also on actions and choices of other people, many of which you don’t even know,” said Dr. Nicholas A. Christakis, a physician and medical sociologist at Harvard who co-wrote the study.
…quoth the LA Times; and there’s more coverage over at the NY Times (including a full size of that great image).
As a follow up to this previous post with an image of the relationship between people mentioned in the news, I’ve been asked to provide more detail.
First, why bother at all? Exploring the implied relationships may tell us about the individuals in question, but certainly provide more context to each of the other topics at hand. This context not only provides additional understanding the of topic, but can also be a valuable research tool in quickly determining which other topics may impact the one at hand.
What are the relationships shown? Shown are names occurring in the same news articles, which implies a relationship. This relationship may a formal relationship, e.g. the working relationship of Bush (8) and Condoleezza Rice (10). Or, the individuals may be related to a common topic such as Michael Phelps (4) and Babe Ruth.
Following are the top 20 names, by centrality, and the number of different implied relationships for each.
People in the News (detail)
Barack Obama 1128
John McCain 902
Sarah Palin 405
Michael Phelps 237
Pervez Musharraf 95
Kwame Kilpatrick 103
Hillary Clinton 270
Bush 158
Joe Biden 218
Condoleezza Rice 107
Steve Jobs 160
John Edwards 101
Clark Rockefeller 69
Britney Spears 122
Brett Favre 65
Bernie Mac 60
Miley Cyrus 70
Bill Clinton 148
Anwar Ibrahim 34
Stephenie Meyer 27
What’s the data set? A random sampling of news sites including NYTimes, Google, Yahoo!, CNN, Drudge, and the like.
Is this an accurate reflection of news? I am polling a number of the big news sites, so hopefully it’s not far off.
Integration of Email, Contacts, Tasks, and Calendar. Supporting your network requires all of those, so a tool to help you manage it should too. (I refer bellow to an entry in any one of these as an event.) My favorite piece of integration is the automatic add of new contacts to my contact lists.
Reminders for events relevant to your contacts. Any good calendar should do this. Unfortunately, most require the calendar to be open to perform this. Hosted calendars like Google’s and Yahoo’s, allow you to be reminded by email. A handy function for those of us on the run.
Reminders to reach out to your contacts. You can do this manually now through tasks or using your calendar, but this is ripe for automation.
Provide context about each contact. This should be presented when you are reading or creating a task/email/meeting in your system. How you know the person, and the last time you saw them, etc., are usually available through searching your contacts and calendar if you keep track of these, but again, ripe for automation.
Provide context about each conversation. Latest emails, events, etc. each time you are creating a task/email/meeting in your system.
Show tasks outstanding and recently completed for the individuals in each action. A summary of the tasks you owe someone can help define a productive conversation.
Show tasks outstanding and recently completed by the individuals in each action. A summary of what you are owed, similarly can help define a productive conversation.
Automatic tagging of actions and participants. With all of the natural language processing developments over the recent years, it would be relatively simple to pull themes from the content of each event and record those along with the participants. When you create new events, the tag database could be polled as you are creating a new event to recommend people who may be interested, and other relevant topics. Would be a helpful plugin for your word processor too.
Most of these are available today, but not in an automated fashion and often not available at the same time. I primarily use GMail with a Firefox plugin called GTDInbox which together provide good integration of email, contacts, tasks, and calendar.
Google Calendar provides good reminders of events relevant to my contacts, but requires me to set them up.
The more recent version of GTDInbox provides an increasing level of context about the participants, and I hope they keep pushing in that direction. The unfortunate thing today is that it does this by learning association of special labels it uses. This is indeed helpful for labeling, but the more I communicate with someone, the less I need the context. Since it’s a Firefox plugin, they could create a side panel, which would also allow showing the tasks owed and outstanding.
As for autotagging? Please, this is a desperate cry for help…. If there are any creative programmers out there, take a look at OpenCalais, and make a pluggin for FireFox + GMail!
