In which I have a quarter-million friends of friends on Facebook

One of the privacy options Facebook allows is “restrict to friends of friends.”  I was discussing with Tom Scocca the question of how many people this actually amounts to.  FB doesn’t seem to offer an easy way to get a definitive accounting, so I decided to use the new Facebook Graph Search to make a quick and dirty estimate.  If you ask it to show you all the friends of your friends, it just tells you that there are more than 1000, but doesn’t supply an exact number.  If you want a count, you have to ask it something more specific, like “How many friends of my friends are named Constance?”

In my case, the answer is 25.

So what does that mean?  Well, according to the amazing NameVoyager, between 100 and 300 babies per million are named Constance, at least in the birthdate range that contains most of Facebook’s user base and, I expect, most of my friends-of-friends (herafter, FoFs) as well.  So under the assumption that my FoFs are as likely as the average American to be named Constance, there should be between 85,000 and 250,000 FoFs.

That assumption is massively unlikely, of course; name choices have strong correlations with geography, ethnicity, and socioeconomic thingamabobs.  But you can just do this redundantly to get a sense of what’s going on.  59 of my FoFs are named Marianne, a name whose frequency ranges from 150-300 parts per million; that suggests a FoF range of about 200-400K.

I did this for a few names (50 Geralds, 18 Charitys (Charities??)) and the overlaps of the ranges seemed to hump at around 250,000, so that’s my vague estimate for the number.

Bu then I remembered that there was actually a paper about this on the arXiv, “The Anatomy of the Facebook Graph,” by Ugander, Karrer, Backstrom, and Marlow, which studies exactly this question.  They found something which is, to me, rather surprising; that the number of FoFs grows approximately linearly in the number of friends.  The appropriate coefficients have surely changed since 2011, but they get a good fit with

#FoF = 355(#friends) – 15057.

For me, with 680 friends, that’s 226,343.  Good fit!

This 2012 study from Pew (on which Marlow is also an author) studies a sample in which the respondents had a mean 245 Facebook friends, and finds that the mean number of FoFs was 156,569.  Interestingly, the linear model from the earlier paper gives only 72,000, though to my eye it looks like 245 is well within the range where the fit to the line is very good.

The math question this suggests:  in the various random-graph models that people like to use to study social networks, what is the mean size of the 2-neighborhood of x (i.e. the number of FoFs) conditional on x having degree k?  Is it ever linear in k, or approximately linear over some large range of k?

Elliptic curves with isomorphic cyclic 13-subgroups?

I liked this MathOverflow question, which asks:  are there two non-isogenous elliptic curves over Q, each one of which has a rational cyclic 13-isogeny, and such that the kernels of the two isogenies are isomorphic as Galois modules?

This is precisely to look for rational points on the modular surface S parametrizing pairs (E,E’,C,C’,φ), where E and E’ are elliptic curves, C and C’ are cyclic 13-subgroups, and φ is an isomorphism between C and C’.

S is a quotient of X_1(13) x X_1(13) by the diagonal in the natural (Z/13Z)^* x (Z/13Z)^* action.

Is S general type, rational, what?

 

 

The fellowship of men whose household purchasing decisions are driven by their preschool-age daughters

Recently I was in Chicago, on the subway, and a big dude came up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder, and I turned around, and the big dude held up his index finger, to show me that he, too, was wearing a Hello Kitty band-aid.

So I guess Carl Rogers is the Hulk in this scenario

Separated at birth?

B.F. Skinner:

The Leader:

Random squarefree polynomials and random permutations and slightly non-random permutations

Influenced by Granville’s “Anatomy of integers and permutations” (already a play, soon to be a graphic novel) I had always thought as follows:  a polynomial of degree n over a finite field F_q gives rise to a permutation in S_n, at least up to conjugacy; namely, the one induced by Frobenius acting on the roots.  So the distribution of the degrees of irreducible factors of a random polynomial should mimic the distribution of cycle lengths of a random permutation, on some kind of equidistribution grounds.

But it’s not quite right.  For instance, the probability that a permutation is an n-cycle is 1/n, on the nose.

But the probability that a random squarefree polynomial is irreducible is about (1/n)(1-1/q)^{-1}.

The probability that a random polynomial, with no assumption of squarefreeness, is irreducible, is again about 1/n, the “right answer.”  But a random polynomial which may have repeated factors doesn’t really have an action of Frobenius on the roots — or at least it’s the space of squarefree monics, not the space of all monics, that literally has an etale S_n-cover.

Similarly:  a random polynomial has an average of 1 linear factor, just as a random permutation has an average of 1 fixed point, but a random squarefree polynomial has slightly fewer linear factors on average, namely (1+1/q)^{-1}.

Curious!

 

Imagery

Encouraging!

The introduction to the textbook States of Matter, by David L. Goodstein:

Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand.  Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933.  Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

 

Social media benchmark

Sometimes I share my post to various social media sites.  This morning, as it happened, I shared a post almost simultaneously to Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.  On my hit counter, I now see

• 80 hits via Facebook
• 30 hits via Google Plus
• 23 hits via Twitter

Wouldn’t you have expected G+ to come in a lot lower?  Despite the general sense that it’s a total failure, there really are a fair number of people using it. 

Just to reassure you the Earth is still on its axis, Google Search provided 58 hits and Bing 2.

 

More transitivity

I don’t really know anything about Amanda Palmer, but if there’s a picture of her hugging Robyn Hitchcock and Eugene Mirman, I guess that means I must like her?

Anti-TED

Cathy goes off on TED talks today, calling them shallow, one-directional, and slick.

I was thinking about TED the other day, while I was watching Jared Weinstein give a great lecture at the Arizona Winter School.  At AWS, they felt like people were leaning too much on prepped slides, and the rule is now that you have to handwrite your slides in real time, using an opaque projector to show the slides on the big screen.

Would TED talks be better if the speakers were restricted to visuals they could write or draw by hand in 18 minutes?