Day7: Paul Adams

The reason: The one of earliest example of BIG DATA

He wrote the book “Grouped -How small groups of friends are the key to influence on the social web (Voices That Matter) -” This book describes the social behavior of human being on social networking service. He is Paul Adams who is working for Google service and Facebook. As far as I know, he has the best knowledge in this field, and this idea is one of earliest example of BIG DATA. Throughout reading this book, I strongly realized that it is difficult for Japanese to think in this way. For everyone, it is good chance to know we have to ask first what kind of the scale would be applied to discuss the subject.

Now, the web is entering its third phase of the development. The first phase was documents linked together. When we found the website, we couldn’t interact with other. On the second phase, we started seeing the opportunity for interacting with each other. Some website had reviews, give the readers opportunity to leave comments. Now, the web is entering the third phase, where websites are being rebuilt around people on social networking services. Social behaviors became key feature on this stage.

The data on the web are becoming structured, so then now easy to be analyzed both human and A.I. Now, people started looking at the overview of human behavior by looking at vast amount of data on the web.

On this book, what I would love you to know is how the framework to see the data is important. This is the example from this book. This book can give you the overview how you are communicating with people.

First things you have to remember are the numbers of people we are interacting with in our life. There are clear boundaries how many people we are communicating. The important numbers are 5, 15, 50, 150, and 500. We interact with 5 people as strongest ties. They are the people who we care most, like parents, partners, children, and so on. Next, the number is 15, this group is known to social psychologist as the sympathy group. The people we care very much closest friend, important colleagues.  The death of these people would leave you distraught. Beyond this, the number is 50. These are the people who you communicate with on at least semi-regular basis. Beyond this is 150 people these are the people whom you can maintain stable social relations. You know each other, and you know which of them know each other. How much the communication technology has advanced, this is psychological boundary of human beings. The next group is about 500. These are our weak ties friend of friend, people we meet occasionally, or people who met recently. These are people you know but don’t feel close to.

The next thing we have to think is how these groups influence us. The strongest ties are 5 people, with whom you are talking for the 80 percent of all time you talk.  Next, I want to focus on smaller than 15 closest, people, we connected with strong tie, such as family, closest friend. They are the people we trust the most. Strong tie is very important for maintain our well-being. So, we need to focus on them to have good relationship to stay happy. I also want to focus on more than 150 people, even though they are weak ties but the data showed that they can be strong information sources because they are sometimes specialists on something.

The biggest problem on BIG DATA is it isn’t always easy to point out that the correlation and causation is different. The Target can know who becomes pregnant by analyzing the buying pattern of customer. They can send advertisement automatically. Do you think this is appropriate? As far as, human analyzing the data might be fine, we might be able to regulate the way they treat the data though, how about A.I.? The Google’s A.I. keeps reading the whole information on the web. Do you think what will happen when A.I. started reading and analyzing the data by itself. It doesn’t care whether or not correlation or causation. For example, A.I. will be able to know who has tendency to commit crime though, it will not know why, until when it will be fully developed. So, we have to check the technology closely, like nuclear power, it can be bad or good. But, anyways, Paus Adams opened the possibility of BIG DATA.