the explanation for why the sky is blue involves so much of the natural sciences: the colors within the visual spectrum, the wave nature of light, the angle at which sunlight hits the atmosphere, the mathematics of scattering, the size of nitrogen and oxygen molecules, and even the way human eyes perceive color.
it’s most of science in a question that a young child can ask.
”Out of the Mouths of Babes, or, Why is the Sky Blue?
my favorite explanation is one that I sought as a boy. it is the explanation for why the sky is blue. It’s a question every toddler asks, but it is also one that most great scientists since the time of Aristotle, including da Vinci, Newton, Kepler, Descartes, Euler, and even Einstein, have asked.
one of the things I like most about this explanation—beyond the simplicity and overtness of the question itself—is how long it took to arrive at correctly, how many centuries of effort, and how many branches of science it involves.
Computational Social Science
It’s sort of like when Galileo invented — or, didn’t invent — came to use a telescope and could see the heavens in a new way, or Leeuwenhoek became aware of the microscope — or actually invented — and could see biology in a new way.
…with this science, we can understand how exactly the whole comes to be greater than the sum of its parts. And actually, we can use these insights to improve society and improve human well-being.
One can leverage this social science to measure and track an epidemic in three ways:
1) Fully Passive — we don’t actually intervene in the population in any way
So, for example, we could use truckers’ purchases of fuel. So the truckers are just going about their business, and they’re buying fuel. And we see a blip up in the truckers’ purchases of fuel, and we know that a recession is about to end.
Or we can monitor the velocity with which people are moving with their phones on a highway, and the phone company can see, as the velocity is slowing down, that there’s a traffic jam. And they can feed that information back to their subscribers, but only to their subscribers on the same highway located behind the traffic jam.
2) Quasi-Active — where we get some people to nominate their friends and then passively monitor their friends
We tested this idea with an outbreak of H1N1 flu at Harvard College in the fall and winter of 2009. We took 1,300 randomly selected undergraduates, we had them nominate their friends, and we followed both the random students and their friends daily in time to see whether or not they had the flu epidemic. And we did this passively by looking at whether or not they’d gone to university health services. And also, we had them email us a couple of times a week. Exactly what we predicted happened.
The epidemic in the friends group has shifted to the left and the difference in the two is 16 days. By monitoring the friends group, we could get 16 days advanced warning of an impending epidemic in this human population.
Or another example would be, if you’re a phone company, you figure out who’s central in the network, and you ask those people, “Look, will you just text us your fever every day? Just text us your temperature.” And collect vast amounts of information about people’s temperature, but from centrally located individuals. And be able, on a large scale, to monitor an impending epidemic with very minimal input from people.
3) Fully Active:
People might globally participate in wikis, or photographing, or monitoring elections, and uploading information in a way we can pool to understand social processes and social phenomena.
