

The Urban Village: Data Viz of How Human Interactions Scale with City Size - dzkanner
http://senseable.mit.edu/urbanvillages/

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rflrob
It seems odd to me, assuming I'm reading the blue plots right, that the single
most common number of contacts to have is one. I also wonder if it's just
phone calls, or if texts are included, since it now seem to call far fewer
people than I text, and probably in different ways.

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dzkanner
The white paper
([http://senseable.mit.edu/urbanvillages/img/manuscript.pdf](http://senseable.mit.edu/urbanvillages/img/manuscript.pdf))
gives the assumptions to explain why call data is representative: "Mobile
phone communication data are not necessarily a direct representation of the
underlying social network. For instance, two individuals may maintain a strong
tie through face-to-face interactions or other means of communication, without
relying on regular phone calls [23]. Nevertheless, despite such a po- tential
bias, a recent comparison with a questionnaire-based survey has shown that
mobile phone communication data are, in general, a reliable proxy for the
strength of individual- based social interactions [25]. Moreover, even if two
subscribers maintain a close relationship and usually communicate via other
means, it seems reasonable to assume that both individ- uals have called each
other at least once during the relatively long observation period of 15
months, thus reducing the chance of missing such relationships in our network
[21, 26, 27]"

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jamesaguilar
Then it's even more odd. You mean to tell me there are a significant number of
people who have only called one other person in 15 months? Seems fishy to me.

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lifeisstillgood
But the old advice still seems to stay true - know (and stay in contact with)
lots of different poeple - you will become a hub through which communication
between networks occurs.

In short, routers are more likely to be able to extract a percentage than a
node in a homogeneous network.

