Grooming on facebook

Here’s an interesting article from The Economist about facebook.  It points out that Facebook features such as commenting on photos or posting on walls are an online equivalent to the grooming behavior observed in primates, and the vast amount of data you make available to Facebook is likely to be studied with that in mind.  It also supplies some statistics, courtesy of Facebook’s “in-house sociologist“:

• 120: the average number of friends in a man’s Facebook network (women have “somewhat more”)
• 10: how many of a woman’s friends actually get that woman to respond to any of their postings (for men the number is 7)
• 26: for a woman with 500 Facebook friends, how many of them on average get that woman to respond (for men with 500 friends, the number is 17)

So as you grow your network, you’re mostly enlarging the number of people you monitor passively.

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Nature’s big data coverage

Big Data:
http://www.nature.com/news/specials/bigdata/index.html
http://media.nature.com/download/nature/nature/podcast/extras/big-data-2008-09-04.mp3

MatrixDB

Microsoft Plans Internet Scaling With MatrixDB For SQL Server After 2008

http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/windows_servers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207400585

Excerpt:
MatrixDB is an “enterprise scale-out solution”, a way to scale data workloads partially by allowing enterprises to add online database resources and by removing dependencies among servers through what’s known as a “shared nothing” architecture….MatrixDB is to be headed up by Bob Gerber, a former chief scientist at Informix who helped develop one of the first parallel databases, Gamma, in the 1980s. SQL Server 2008 is slated to be released in the third quarter, and there’s no set timetable for the following release, but Microsoft has committed to a two- to three-year release cycle for SQL Server, placing MatrixDB’s release somewhere around 2010 or 2011.