Wash Your Hands...

As long as we're on the subject of NPR, I thought I'd share another networks story I heard this morning on NPR. Researchers at Harvard Medical School and UC San Diego recently completed a study on the nature of happiness is social networks and found that happiness tends to be contagious. The authors found that people with happy friends tended to be happier, thus creating happy social clusters. In fact, the researchers found that a person who is close to someone who becomes happy has a 25% chance of becoming happier themselves. Additionally, the authors found that happiness tends to be more contagious within social networks than unhappiness is. You can see the social network of happiness clusters on the NPR website.

Image of the happiness network from CNN story.
The nodes are colored for average mood. Yellow is
happy, blue is sad, and green is in-between.

Newman's Map of the "Real World"

I know that most of you are on holiday but this is worth posting on the blog. During my trip to NYC last week, I was listening to NPR which happened to come across an interview with Mark Newman, a co-author of the book The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live. Newman says that the regular map that we see is not the "real world" representation. He was quoted:

"Maps can be misleading, absolutely...Your standard map of the world makes the North Pole look huge and the equator look very small. And we just accept it the way it is."

The book could be used for so many reason's including, which part of the world has more health expenditure versus which accumulate disease which kill millions of people, importers and exporters of automobiles, population densities and so on. All this things might have been already represented in different maps but Newman is applying to the whole globe which will help us see the world in different perspectives. So the largest countries that we know of could be invisible and vise verse:

The reality is that New York has more than 10 times the number of electoral votes, because its population is so much bigger. "If you just counted the amount of color, you might think the Republican Party won by a landslide," Newman tells NPR's Andrea Seabrook. "The way we do it is we change the sizes of the states to represent how many people are living in each one."

There are photo galleries of some maps on NPR website.