An interesting paradox of Social network

Every has a facebook account, you and your friends form the blow social network.But do you know the secret hide behind the facebook social network?

During the research of facebook, professor found that a user has an average of 190 friends but their friends have an average of 635 friends.

Maybe you would be a litter disappointed about the result. You spend plenty of your time on facebook. Every day you update your state and upload some photos or share some interesting things with your friends. You try to make friend online and maintain the friendship. Unfortunately, even though you have done so much, your friends are still less than your friends' friends.The same tendency was also found in offline social network.

However, we don't need to worry about it because the result is a statistic result, which has nothing to do with the personal character. The average number of your friends' friends are always more than yours. This phenomenon was called friends paradox.

Now I will try to explain the phenomenon. When you walk into a gym you may found everyone in the gym looks like this:

You may found that nearly everyone is stronger than you. But don't be shame of it. Because if you don't have ardent love for gym the result is right equals to expectation. Why? Because you didn't count in the person who stay at home.The people in gym doesn't represent the average level.

This also explain why people always think the congestion of airport, beach and other place are bad than the statistic average. Because when this places are empty, there exist no one to witness the moment.

Let use a small social network modle to explain it.

Abby, Becca, Chloe and Deb are four students and the edges between means the friendship. For Abby, she has one friends and Becca has three. We can easy calculate the average friends number is 8/4=2.

Now let calculate the average friends number of your firends.

For Abby, her friends Becca has 3 friends.

For Chloe, her firends Becca has 3 friends and her friends Deb has two friends. 

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At last ,we calculate the result is 2.25, a litter higher than 2.

Why this  phenomenon happen? Because the person like Becca contribution more to the result. Her contribution is more than liner. Becca has been mentioned for three times so her contribution is 3X3.

That's why our friends' friends are always more than our's. Our friends' scores are square after the weighted average' and it would be bigger than our score without square.

Communication and social behavior on the internet

    Last week， We have learned something about some social behavior on the internet， including Collaboration，epistemology and knowledge and especially Knowledge Building.

    The Knowledge Building (KB) theory was created and developed by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia for describing what a community of learners needs to accomplish in order to create knowledge. The theory addresses the need to educate people for the knowledge age society, in which knowledge and innovation are pervasive.

    Furthermore, there are 12 famous principles of knowledge building.
    I'll list some below：

    1.Real ideas and authentic problems. In the classroom as a Knowledge building community, learners are concerned with understanding, based on their real problems in the real world.
    2.Improvable ideas. Students' ideas are regarded as improvable objects.

    more details can be view in Scardamalia's knowledge building theory.

    Let's back to the interesting class activity we join last class. Last week we read an article <Social Cloud Computing:A Vision for Socially Motivated Resource Sharing>. We read the article and try to answer three questions,both individual and by group work:
   
    The first is "What is the definition of Social Cloud?"
    The second question is "What are the possible applications of a Social Cloud？"
    The third question is“Do you have any critiques against this article？”
   
    I think our epistemic aims at reading the article and understand it and then think about the opinions in the article.
    In the first two questions, we only approach at metacognition level so we don't have any difference.
    But for the third question, we have several different opinions on it.You can see it in the pictures follow:

    You can see, there are some difference ideas between us.It shows that there are some differences in the cognitive process by Individuals and groups.So the result is clearly  different.
    In the discussion, we follow three principles:

    1.Share openly what we do not understand, "What I need to understand..." or "What I need to know..."
    2.Respect each other's perspectives and tentative understandings.
    3.Express disagreement in a constructive fashion.
    in the course of discussion, we exchange views, eventually get some inspiration from the other party, to higher cognition level.

 

    I think in a team，our ideas can be analyzed, pointed at, talked about, and progressively refined over time. So I think work in a team will benefit more than by individual.