full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Nicholas Christakis: The hidden influence of social networks

Unscramble the Blue Letters


And this is one of the first ieagms we made to study this phenomenon. Again, a social network, but now we color the people yellow if they're happy and blue if they're sad and green in between. And if you look at this image, you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people, again, spreading to three degrees of separation. And you might form the intuition that the uhpnapy people opcucy a different structural location within the network. There's a middle and an edge to this network, and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges. So to invoke another mphteoar, if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity — I'm connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance — this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned amireacn qulit, and it has patches on it: happy and unhappy patches. And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a hppay patch.

Open Cloze


And this is one of the first ______ we made to study this phenomenon. Again, a social network, but now we color the people yellow if they're happy and blue if they're sad and green in between. And if you look at this image, you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people, again, spreading to three degrees of separation. And you might form the intuition that the _______ people ______ a different structural location within the network. There's a middle and an edge to this network, and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges. So to invoke another ________, if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity — I'm connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance — this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned ________ _____, and it has patches on it: happy and unhappy patches. And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a _____ patch.

Solution


  1. images
  2. occupy
  3. metaphor
  4. american
  5. unhappy
  6. happy
  7. quilt

Original Text


And this is one of the first images we made to study this phenomenon. Again, a social network, but now we color the people yellow if they're happy and blue if they're sad and green in between. And if you look at this image, you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people, again, spreading to three degrees of separation. And you might form the intuition that the unhappy people occupy a different structural location within the network. There's a middle and an edge to this network, and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges. So to invoke another metaphor, if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity — I'm connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance — this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned American quilt, and it has patches on it: happy and unhappy patches. And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
social networks 13
body size 5
human social 5
percent higher 3
weight gain 3
carbon atoms 3
start gaining 2
headline writers 2
obesity epidemic 2
emotional contagion 2
unhappy people 2
structural location 2
network structure 2
compare node 2
upper left 2
friends coming 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
human social networks 3

Important Words


  1. american
  2. blue
  3. clusters
  4. color
  5. connected
  6. degrees
  7. depends
  8. distance
  9. edge
  10. edges
  11. endlessly
  12. fabric
  13. form
  14. green
  15. happy
  16. humanity
  17. image
  18. images
  19. imagine
  20. intuition
  21. invoke
  22. kind
  23. located
  24. location
  25. metaphor
  26. middle
  27. network
  28. networks
  29. occupy
  30. part
  31. patch
  32. patches
  33. people
  34. phenomenon
  35. quilt
  36. sad
  37. separation
  38. social
  39. spreading
  40. structural
  41. study
  42. unhappy
  43. vast
  44. yellow