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Social Physics - How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter (Paperback)
Loot Price: R358
Discovery Miles 3 580
You Save: R155
(30%)
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Social Physics - How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter (Paperback)
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List price R513
Loot Price R358
Discovery Miles 3 580
You Save R155 (30%)
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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"From one of the world's leading data scientists, a landmark tour
of the new science of idea flow, offering revolutionary insights
into the mysteries of collective intelligence and social
influence"
If the Big Data revolution has a presiding genius, it is MIT's
Alex "Sandy" Pentland. Over years of groundbreaking experiments, he
has distilled remarkable discoveries significant enough to become
the bedrock of a whole new scientific field: social physics. Humans
have more in common with bees than we like to admit: We're social
creatures first and foremost. Our most important habits of
action--and most basic notions of common sense--are wired into us
through our coordination in social groups. Social physics is about
"idea flow," the way human social networks spread ideas and
transform those ideas into behaviors.
Thanks to the millions of digital bread crumbs people leave behind
via smartphones, GPS devices, and the Internet, the amount of new
information we have about human activity is truly profound. Until
now, sociologists have depended on limited data sets and surveys
that tell us how people "say" they think and behave, rather than
what they actually "do." As a result, we've been stuck with the
same stale social structures--classes, markets--and a focus on
individual actors, data snapshots, and steady states. Pentland
shows that, in fact, humans respond much more powerfully to social
incentives that involve rewarding others and strengthening the ties
that bind than incentives that involve only their own economic
self-interest.
Pentland and his teams have found that they can study "patterns
"of information exchange in a social network without any knowledge
of the actual "content "of the information and predict with
stunning accuracy how productive and effective that network is,
whether it's a business or an entire city. We can maximize a
group's collective intelligence to improve performance and use
social incentives to create new organizations and guide them
through disruptive change in a way that maximizes the good. At
every level of interaction, from small groups to large cities,
social networks can be tuned to increase exploration and
engagement, thus vastly improving idea flow.
"Social Physics" will change the way we think about how we learn
and how our social groups work--and can be made to work better, at
every level of society. Pentland leads readers to the edge of the
most important revolution in the study of social behavior in a
generation, an entirely new way to look at life itself.
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