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Six Degrees of Francis Bacon is a collaboration between Georgetown University and Carnegie Mellon University to map out social networks in the 16th and 17th centuries. After data-mining the entire Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Professor Daniel Shore of Georgetown and Jessica Otis of CMU were able to digitize the social networks of the period between 1500-1700, and now the project is accepting contributions from the public.… Read the rest

A two-year long field study recently provided a large data set consisting of several trail networks built by the Australian meat ant to connect different nests spread over a wide territory.

By studying these networks, researchers at Uppsala University, Fordham University, and the University of Sydney, have found the basic rules that allow ants to build efficient and low cost transport networks that can scale to larger networks.… Read the rest

“One more step along the long road towards brain-to-brain interfaces” (PLOS Neuro blog)

http://blogs.plos.org/neuro/2015/09/24/one-more-step-along-the-long-road-towards-brain-to-brain-interfaces/… Read the rest

OpenStreetMap is an open-sourced mapping website, which is a website where anyone, anywhere can edit and add infrastructure, stores, traffic jams, and more. These different map layers can be taken off and on by an individual user depending on what they are looking for.… Read the rest

Letter from Silicon Valley about LinkedIn’s the founder and executive chairman, Reid Hoffman. In 2003, Hoffman and Mark Pincus, the founder and chief executive of the gaming site Zynga, bought the Six Degrees patent, a methodology for constructing social networks. When he started LinkedIn, “the most popular social-networking sites, like Friendster and MySpace, didn’t focus on business; and the most popular employment sites, like Monster.com, didn’t focus on social networks.”

LinkedIn currently has more than three hundred and eighty million members, and it is working on creating “the economic graph, which would track all employment activity in the world, for the 3.3 billion people who work, with LinkedIn as the platform”.… Read the rest

WIRED correspondent Nick Stockton claims that all 10 scientists receiving a 2015 MacArthur Genius Grant have one important unifying trait: network thinking. Thought the MacArthur Foundation claims to have no systematic bias beyond “exceptional creativity”, Stockton argues that, from policy to programming, each recipient’s work demonstrates “how individual parts affect a whole system, or how a network affects its nodes”, claiming “that’s where most of the big work in science is headed.… Read the rest