From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Aug 08 2002 - 09:11:13 MDT
Thanks to MaxM, I have now made 3D sociograms of the traffic on this
list. Snapshots can be viewed at
http://akira.nada.kth.se/~asa/Extropians/
As a warm-up, I made
http://akira.nada.kth.se/~asa/Extropians/extropiansaug1.gif
This shows the activity on the list on Aug 1, with node radius based on
the number of posts and color on the number of new threads created by
the person during this time. Two persons were linked if one responded to
the other's post; multiple responses created a stronger link, and then I
let a force distribution algorithm distribute the nodes so that the
repulsion and attraction balanced each other.
As you can see, there was a heavy posting core consisting of Samantha,
Spudboy, Mike Lorrey, Charles Hixon and Brian D Williams involved in a
somewhat heated exchange. One can also see a few other clusters, with
people like Spike and Robert bridging them.
It is interesting to compare with
http://akira.nada.kth.se/~asa/Extropians/extrojul1.gif which was a
decidedly calmer day.
OK, what about Max's data? He gave me data from january, which I turned
into http://akira.nada.kth.se/~asa/Extropians/emails3edges.gif The
extropian explosion! :-) There is a core of frequent heavy posters,
surrounded by regulars and then a halo of occasional posters. Since this
data did not deal with people making first posts or posts, there are
quite a few people left out and underestimated.
http://akira.nada.kth.se/~asa/Extropians/emails3nodes.gif might be
slightly clearer (it is taken from another run, so the nodes are in
different positions).
It is hard to make out what is going on in the core in this plot, so I
ported my program to the KTH VR Cube
(http://www.pdc.kth.se/projects/vr-cube/) and added some code to enable
manipulation. WOW! The experience of standing *inside* the list
sociograph was fascinating. I could grab a person and move him or her
around, seeing who was strongly attached and who was not. I could string
up different points of view and see how everybody else related to them.
I really wish you were here so that I could show it to you!
In lieu of VR and augmented reality, I did a 2D simulation where
everybody were constrained to a single plane, resulting in
http://akira.nada.kth.se/~asa/Extropians/emails3nodes2D.gif
Roughly the same structure. A closeup of the core
http://akira.nada.kth.se/~asa/Extropians/emails3nodes2Dclose.gif
shows the usual suspects :-) It also shows who is the most central
extropian, the guy who nearly always end up in the center of the
visualisations: Damien Broderick!
To sum up, this list does apppear to have a fairly small core of
voluminious posters that respond strongly to each other. But many of the
really influential posters like Greg Burch are outside the cluster. I
think this shows that "power" on this list is not very centralized even
if activity is.
I will make my software ("Legba") available later on, it should be
fairly portable OpenGL and C (for VR, I'm using CaveLib). It really
works best if you have a mainframe running VR, but even as a desktop app
it is nice for one day of list traffic. Maybe one should do a crontab
job that images the list each day or so, so that one could judge list
"weather" at a glance.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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