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Title : Nicholas Christakis how social networks predict epidemics 1/2
Title :
Nicholas Christakis: How social networks predict epidemics

Original website : http://www.TED.com

http://www.ted.com/talks/nicholas_christakis_how_social_networks_predict_epidemics.html

Description :
After mapping humans’ intricate social networks, Nicholas Christakis and colleague James Fowler began investigating how this information could better our lives. Now, he reveals his hot-off-the-press findings: These networks can be used to detect epidemics earlier than ever, from the spread of innovative ideas to risky behaviors to viruses (like H1N1).
Nicholas Christakis explores how the large-scale, face-to-face Social Networks in which we are embedded affect our lives, and what we can do to take advantage of this fact

Full biography :

http://www.ted.com/speakers/nicholas_christakis.html

Video source file :

http://video.ted.com/talks/podcast/NicholasChristakis_2010S_480.mp4

Video Under Creative Commons License : Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

Background music : Green Sun – The First Birth

http://www.jamendo.com/en/track/302165

by Tunguska Electronic Music Society

http://www.jamendo.com/en/artist/Tunguska_Chillout_Grooves_vol.1

Album : Tunguska Chillout Grooves vol. 2

http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/41217

Song under Creative Commons License : Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode

Duration : 0:9:51

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This is the VOA Special English Health Report.

Loneliness has been linked to depression and other health problems. Now, a study says it can also spread. A friend of a lonely person was fifty-two percent more likely to develop feelings of loneliness. And a friend of that friend was twenty-five percent more likely to do the same.

Earlier findings showed that happiness, obesity and the ability to stop smoking can also spread like infections within social groups.

The findings all come from a major health study in the American town of Framingham, Massachusetts.

The study began in nineteen forty-eight to investigate the causes of heart disease.

Since then, more tests have been added, including measures of loneliness and depression.

The new findings involved more than five thousand people in the second generation of the Framingham Heart Study. The researchers examined friendship histories and reports of loneliness. The results established a pattern that spread as people reported fewer close friends.

For example, loneliness can affect relationships between next-door neighbors. The loneliness spreads as neighbors who were close friends now spend less time together. The study also found that loneliness spreads more easily among women than men.

Researchers from the University of Chicago, Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, did the study. The findings appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The average person is said to experience feelings of loneliness about forty-eight days a year.

The study found that having a lonely friend can add about seventeen days. But every additional friend can decrease loneliness by about five percent, or two and a half days.

Lonely people become less and less trusting of others. This makes it more and more difficult for them to make friends — and more likely that society will reject them.

John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago led the study. He says it is important to recognize and deal with loneliness. He says people who have been pushed to the edges of society should receive help to repair their Social Networks.

The aim should be to aggressively create what he calls a “protective barrier” against loneliness.

This barrier, he says, can keep the whole network from coming apart.

And that’s the VOA Special English Health Report. You can find transcripts and MP3s of all of our reports at voaspecialenglish.com. You can also post your comments and read what others are saying. And you can find us on YouTube and Twitter at VOA Learning English.

(Adapted from a radio program broadcast 06Jan2010)

Duration : 0:4:3

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Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/11/15/Amy_Goodman__Denis_Moynihan_Breaking_the_Sound_Barrier

“Democracy is a messy thing,” says Amy Goodman. The Democracy Now! host revisits her controversial arrest while covering a protest at the 2008 RNC. She praises social media sites like YouTube and Twitter as guardians of free speech.

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In the Gallery: Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan talk about Breaking The Sound Barrier. Amy Goodman, award-winning host of the daily internationally broadcast radio and television program “Democracy Now”, breaks through the corporate media’s lies, sound bites, and silence in this wide-ranging new collection of articles.

In place of the usual suspects—the “experts” who, in Goodman’s words, “know so little about so much, explain the world to us, and get it so wrong”—this accessible, lively collection allows the voices the corporate media exclude and ignore to be heard loud and clear.

From community organizers in New Orleans, to the courageous American soldiers who’ve said “No” to Washington’s wars, to the victims of torture and police violence, we are given the extraordinary opportunity to hear ordinary people standing up and speaking out. – Book Passage

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!. She is co-author of the national best-seller The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media that Love Them written with her brother David Goodman.

Democracy Now! is a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 300 stations in North America.Pioneering the largest public media collaboration in the U.S., Democracy Now! is broadcast on Pacifica, community, and National Public Radio stations, public access cable television stations, satellite television (on Free Speech TV, channel 9415 of the DISH Network), shortwave radio and the internet.

Duration : 0:5:35

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