An Un-Social Network


Networks involving people have been around since the dawn of civilization. The apparent democratization of the social network scene is an interesting demonstration of how far reaching they can get, as daily global contact is simple and cheap. But global networks are not new and they can have strong effects on us even though we haven’t signed up.

Large global corporations have grown larger in both wealth and power and the illusion is that each corporation has a global network competing with a large number of other similar independent networks. Now, a recent paper by Vitali et al from Zurich and published in the Public Library of Science has taken a peek inside the kimono of the global corporate control network built up from a group of 43,060 trans-national corporations (1).

It’s not a pretty sight. Like any network, some nodes are bigger than others, but in this case we need to think in terms of ownership/control ties. There is a strong core in this network that contains three-quarters of all the nodes and represents 94% of the operating revenue.

More explicitly, the topology has the classic “bow-tie architecture” with very few inputting control to the core, which in turn controls a very large number of entities. The core consists of 147 global corporations and they control 40% of the economic value of all of the world’s global corporations, but it is important to note that 75% of the core are financial intermediaries (those sleek investment bankers).

The authors suggest that this small strong core is an “economic super-entity” and, as this is the first time that this type of global analysis has been done, our policy makers should broaden their outlook.

It is nice to see the anatomy of this global control network laid bare and confirm our intuition, but the real question now is “how are we going to merge the universe occupied by the guys in the control of the core with the one that the rest of us live in?” Are we going to need a financial black hole to warp the structure sufficiently to bend what were parallel tracks so that they merge?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025995#pone.0025995.s001

The Money Game


Our social psychologist friends love to play games to see how we behave. One of the games of choice used to study social cooperation is known as the Dictator Game. The game shows how benevolent your dictatorship is going to be. The player is offered an asset and asked if they would care to share it and how much of it they would care to share. Of course, the social psychologist is looking at average group responses and not just you or me, so they can draw broad expansive conclusions that help with our stereotyping.

Nettle et al from England’s old Geordie city of Newcastle upon Tyne have turned their social psych’s magnifier on their hometown (1). They chose two areas of the city, one comfortably off and the other somewhat deprived and offered to send them a £10 note through the mail if they filled in a survey.

This is where they turned to game play and asked if they would like to give some or all of it away. It could be to an anonymous person, a friend or a charity, but the recipient had to live at another address. Note that each “Dictator” had only one type of “Recipient” to consider. They had no choice. As sweeteners, those who had a charity choice were offered a matching donation from the organizers. For those that could be generous to friends, if they donated the whole amount, their friend would receive £20.

The results? Well, to me the big surprise was that there were 40 people who had the “help your friend” offer out of the 118 who played the game and they didn’t do a deal with their friend to share £20 in a 50/50 split.

In fact, in the comfortable neighborhood, the average donation to a friend was the lowest of the three donations at about £4 compared to almost £5 to a stranger and nearly£8 to a charity.

In the deprived area, giving cash to a stranger didn’t seem a good idea – maybe a cup of tea, but probably not. About 50p to a friend was average and about £3 to charity was about it.

What conclusions can we draw? If you’re on hard times, you don’t throw your money about, but you can still have your arm twisted for charitable purposes. If you’re sitting comfortably in Geordieland, you’d give more to a stranger than a friend. Maybe your “friends” are your competitors? But, the big question, the elephant in the room, is why didn’t the Geordies get together with their friends and share a £20 dinner?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026922

Just One More Cigarette


The more we delve into our DNA, the more we find that we are predisposed to some disease, condition, or behavior. The latter predisposition is the most difficult one to get to terms with as it can suggest an excuse or lack of responsibility for that behavior.

So what about habit forming behaviors such as smoking? Well, a predisposition to smoking does seem to lurk along those twisted strands of amino acids. Verde et al took 206 Spaniards and unraveled their DNA. 126 of these were regular smokers in the age range 20 to 84. Half were women. Nearly half of the smokers were diagnosed with lung cancer, so they certainly shouldn’t have been smoking. The 80 controls were people who had never smoked, ever.

After sifting through lots of candidate sections of DNA, the common thread appeared as the gene that is responsible for the metabolism of nicotine through the production of the enzyme nicotine C-oxidase. A deficiency of that enzyme correlated with the smoking behavior.

Interestingly, the variations around the genes affecting the brain that interact with nicotine, serotonin, opioids or cannabinoids are not correlated with smoking status. It is just our difficulty in metabolizing it that makes us open the pack.

Maybe cursing the polymorphism of our CYP2A6 phenotype might help salve our conscience short term when we yield to temptation, but it will weaken rather than strengthen our resolve.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026668

Teen Drinking– One Can A Day Is Too Much


Kids fight, sometimes, and some high school kids fight more than others. Some new research by Solnick and Hemenway has shown that with Boston public high school students, the degree of violence correlates with their drinking habits (1,2).

Not alcohol, of course, as they are high school students, but their tendency to down cans of soda. For example, those just hitting a level of 5 cans a week were more likely to be violent with their peer group and were more likely to be carrying a weapon.

The survey size was 1,800 students, so not a small number. Those that had carried a weapon at some time in the past year, had chosen a knife or a gun. Only 23% of those who had one can or less of full-strength soda, not that wimpy diet stuff, said that they had carried a weapon, but for those hitting the 5+ can mark, the percentage rose to 43%.

Numerous other studies have linked bad behavior to nutrition (2), and there are some indications that glucose metabolism problems may be a major factor. There is a legal precedent from 1979 in a San Francisco court where a homicide charge was downgraded to voluntary manslaughter due to the defendant washing down his junk food with Coke (2).

I will have to take care next time I visit a bar. Myer’s rum and Coke, or a Plymouth gin and tonic may lead to less than my best behavior. The synergism between the ethanol, glucose and, maybe caffeine, will have to be carefully monitored. The study could take some time!

  1. http://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/early/2011/10/14/injuryprev-2011-040117
  2. http://news.discovery.com/human/soda-violence-teens-111024.html

Developing Self-Control


As the universities settle into their routines of lecture, tutorials and maybe labs for some students, the frequency of wild parties has decreased and normality is returning to university towns. The muttering from the older population about the lack of self-control of the young has also faded to its normal background level.

Self-control has been an active area of psychological and cognition studies for some time. The frontal lobes of your brain are where the struggle goes on. The more you have to struggle, the greater the degree of tiredness – just like your leg muscles as you climb up stairs – or so the received wisdom goes.

The technospeak is that you experience self-regulation depletion after experiencing a bout of self-regulation demanding activity. Universities are, of course, great places to study this. They have adequate supplies of eager lab rats to try things on among the continuously renewed supply of undergrads shipped in each year.

Dahm et al have recognized a problem with this source of lab rats, though, and have just published a study which illustrates it (1). They point out that our pre-frontal lobes are not fully developed until we are 25 or so, and thus the 20-year olds rushing into the labs to be experimental subjects are not well-armed for the self-control battle. It’s not just that they may be lacking in practice but their ‘self-control muscle’ is still in the building stage.

The experimental program for their paper used a cohort of  40-60 year olds as well as undergrads and exercised their self-control muscles using a Stroop test. That’s the one where subjects have to read the words for a series of colors that are printed in inks of a different color to the one that the word describes. They were then subjected to an autobiographical memory test in which accuracy was measured. Of course control groups made sure that they wouldn’t draw false conclusions.

The undergrads showed much greater self-regulatory depletion than the ‘oldies’ who didn’t show very much, confirming our prejudice that we oldies have more self-control than those noisy youngsters. The authors warn their colleagues about the possible bias lurking in a large number of cognitive studies because their subject’s brains were not fully matured.

So next time you lie awake at 2 A.M. listening to the student bacchanalia next door, just remember that they are still in the process of strengthening their resistance to self-regulatory depletion by beefing up their frontal lobes. Dousing them with alcohol makes the exercise more challenging, just like increasing the weights on the exercise machine in the gym.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0026351#pone-0026351-g001