Progress Daily

Researchers from Save the Children UK, found a simple way of measuring child welfare, using (1) the mortality rate among under-fives; (2) the percentage of under-fives who are moderately or badly underweight; and (3) the proportion of primary-school-age children who are not enrolled in school — from 1990 to ‘94; 1995 to ‘99; and 2000 to ‘06. (See The Child Development Index.)

Almost every region of the world improved. Latin America and the Caribbean were the best performing area, with a 57% leap in child welfare between the first period and the third. China was the driver of a 45% improvement in East Asia. India’s poorish record with respect to malnutrition (at a time of impressive economic growth) dragged down the improvement (32%) registered by South Asia as a whole.

The worst-performing countries are mostly in Africa, though there was a 56% improvement in Malawi (and a 52% decline in war-ravaged Congo).

“The best places to breed,” The Economist

Howard Friedman and Margaret Kern compared 20 previous studies which together rated 8900 people for conscientiousness using a standard psychological survey, and recorded the age they died.

People who were less conscientious were about 50% more likely to die at any given age, on average, than those of the same age who scored highly. (See “Do conscientious individuals live longer? A quantitative review.”). This exceeds the effects of socioeconomic status and intelligence, which are also known to increase longevity.

“Conscientiousness is the secret to a long life” by Andy Coghlan

Nicholas A. Christakis & James H. Fowler studied about 4,700 people, followed from 1983 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. (See “Dynamic spread of happiness in a large social network”; .pdf file here.) These subjects were embedded in a larger network of about 12,000 people; they had an average of 11 connections to others in the social network (including to friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors); and their happiness was assessed every few years using a standard measure.

The researchers found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is correlated with the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends. Happy people tended to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. Each additional happy friend increased a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%. (For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income — in 1984 dollars — is estimated to increase the probability of being happy by about 2%.)

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In an unpublished follow-up study, the researchers examined a group of about 1,700 college students on Facebook. They coded who appeared in photographs with whom. The average student had over 110 friends on Facebook, but they had an average of only six “picture friends” (i.e., people close enough that they tagged the student).

They then coded whether the students were smiling in their profile photographs, and mapped the network of students and their picture friends, making note of who was smiling and who was not.

The figure above is a map of part of this Facebook network in 2007. It contains about 350 students, each represented by a node; each line between two nodes indicates that the connected individuals were tagged in a photo together. Students who were smiling (and who were immediately surrounded by smiling people in their network) are colored yellow. Students who were frowning (and who are immediately surrounded by such serious looks) are colored blue. Shades of green indicate a mix of smiling and non-smiling friends.

The blue nodes and the yellow nodes strongly cluster together. Statistical analysis of the network shows that people who smile tend to have more friends (smiling is correlated with an average of one extra friend, which is significant, since the average person has only about 6 close friends). Those who smile are measurably more central to the network.

“Social Networks & Happiness“

The Internet gives access to a huge market at very low marginal cost. This creates the possibility of success at very low participation rates.

Wikipedia works despite the fact that only about 0.01% of readers regularly contribute material. With 680 million annual visitors, that’s still 75,000 active contributors — who have created 10 million articles.

YouTube works with just 0.1% of users uploading their own videos.

And spammers can make a fortune with response rates of 0.00001%.

“The miraculous power of scale,” by Chris Anderson