Scoutle: Why it will be successful

Today I signed up for Scoutle. Scoutle is a new take at social networking for bloggers. But, the cool aspect of it is that as a blogger I don’t have to do much while still attracting new visitors to my blog. Scoutle presents me with a ‘scout’ who visits other sites for me, and reports back potentially interesting sites. It’s like have my personal web-crawler. Other people’s scouts can meet my scout all over the web and report to their respective owners about my own nice weblog. This ‘meeting and greeting’ does happen without any activity from my side, hopefully attracting new visitors and perhaps even some subscribers. Did I hear anyone say ”rich while sleeping?”
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Collective curiosity?

Those of you who have ever attended a ‘Fête Nos’, a typical Brêton festival-type of gathering with music and people dancing, may immediately understand what I’m going to write about. All the others who have attended another gathering of a large number of people will also be completely familiar with my revived curiosity in a specific subject: The collectivity of human behavior and its occurrence in large masses of people.

Every time the music starts at a crowded ‘Fête Nos’, something peculiar happens: within seconds the mass of people all talking to each other and walking seemingly random suddenly are dancing all together in familiar patterns. This pattern is way too complex to be laid upon all those people: it must, somehow, emerge from the individual moves these people make. Interesting and intriguing, don’t you think?

Even before I started studying sociology I had read `Critical Mass’ (2004) by Philip Ball. I loved this overview of popular science and still do, but somehow it had moved to the back of my memory. I remembered the actor- or boid-based simulations, but I did not really understand how this could be related to the theory-driven sociology that I was studying. I recognized the possibilities offered by the described simulation techniques, but saw them as theories, rather than empirical tests: we can easily make assumptions about behavior and simulate the consequences of that, but then we still don’t know if these assumed behaviors indeed exist and happen in reality.
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Example multi-actor simulation

Recently, I discussed the M.A.R.S simulation models developed by Iannaccone and Makowsky. Based on what I read, I decided to try to work out a similar simulation myself. I did so using R-Project and it resulted in the simulation shown below. For more details on the syntax I used, visit the `my functions’ part of my site, which has a page on the syntax for this specific simulation. Please read further for some interpretation of this animation.

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Religious Life on M.A.R.S. ???

Sometimes, you just know that the authors of an article you are reading, have had a lot of fun while writing it. The amount of fun just radiates from the pages (or your screen, in the digital age), and somehow, these articles are often the really interesting ones as well. Perhaps this has something to do with the authors feeling certain about their work and their grasp on it.

It must have been pleasant days in the `laboratories’ of Iannaccone and Makowsky when they wrote their article in `Agent-Based Explanations’ of religious dynamics. They start their article with a thought-experiment concerning a magic trick, have named the model they propose MARS (multi-agent religion simulation), and titled their paragraphs with variations as `Life on MARS’ and `Exploring MARS’. 

Despite all the fun, the authors have addressed an important problem in the study of regional segregation of religious (and non-religious) people. Regarding this religious regionalism in America they describe an apparent paradox of persistent mobility and persistent regionalism. The standard-approach to tackle such a problem (variants of regression analysis) fails, for it does not provide a “coherent model linking individual behavior to aggregate outcomes and vice versa”, thereby “ignoring social structure”. I gave an example of this problem of aggregation earlier (in Dutch), which illustrated how one can easily be led to the wrong conclusions, when the social restrictions people act within are not taken into account. 
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