Why is Facebook so popular?

Washington, April 24 (IANS) The popularity of social networking websites like Facebook is based on the phenomenon of social searching where people are keen to get information about a person, group or event.

Facebook.com boasts of more than 350 million users worldwide. With so many people interacting with one another online daily, a Missouri University researcher was interested in the cognitive and emotional implications of social browsing versus social searching.
Kevin Wise, assistant professor of strategic communication at the university's School of Journalism, studied people's habits when they navigate Facebook.
Wise says previous studies on social networking sites involved merely surveying study participants. Wise conducted his study differently.
'Rather than asking people to report their uses of Facebook, we wanted to see them in action,' Wise said. 'We wanted to see if there is a way to categorise Facebook use, not based on what people say about it, but what they actually do when they are using it.'
During the study, participants were seated at a computer and told to navigate Facebook for a determined amount of time. They could view anything they wished during that time, as long as they stayed on the Facebook website.
Using screen-capturing software, Wise was able to view every action that each participant made while on the site. The researchers attached sensors to various parts of the participants' bodies to measure potential emotional responses as they navigated Facebook.
Wise categorised participants' actions into two groups: social browsing and social searching.
He defines social browsing as navigating the site without a targeted goal in mind. Wise says people use social browsing when they survey the general landscape, such as their newsfeed or wall, without looking for specific information.
Wise defines social searching as searching the social networking site with the goal of finding certain information about a specific person, group or event.
Wise found that participants tended to spend much more time on social searching than social browsing. They seemed to enjoy it more as well.
'We found a more positive response from participants during social searching or when they had homed in on a particular target,' Wise said, according to a university release.
His research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Communication Research and Media Psychology.

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Brains, worms and chips have a lot in common

Washington, April 23 (IANS) Scientists have discovered striking similarities between the human brain, worm's nervous system and a chip.

'Brains are often compared to computers, but apart from the trivial fact that both process information using a complex pattern of connections in a physical space, it has been unclear whether this is more than just a metaphor,' said Danielle Bassett, who led the study.
Bassett is a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Physics at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
The team of scientists from the US, Britain and Germany has uncovered novel quantitative organisational principles that underlie the networking of the human brain, high performance computer circuits, and the nervous system of the worm known as nematode C. elegans.
Using data that is largely in the public domain, including magnetic resonance imaging data from human brains, a map of the nematode's nervous system, and a standard computer chip, they examined how the elements in each system are networked together.
They found that all three shared two basic properties. First, the human brain, the nematode's nervous system, and the computer chip all have a Russian doll-like architecture, with the same patterns repeating over and over again at different scales.
Second, all three showed what is known as Rent's scaling, a rule used to describe the relationship between the number of elements in a given area and the number of links between them.
Worm brains may seem to have very little in common with human brains and even less in common with computer circuits, explained Bassett.
In fact, each of these systems contains a pattern of connections that are locked solidly in a physical space, similar to how the tracks in a railway system are locked solidly to the ground, forming traffic paths that have fixed GPS coordinates.
A computer chip starts out as an abstract connectivity pattern, which can perform a specific function. Stage two involves mapping that connectivity pattern onto the two-dimensional surface of the chip.
This mapping is a key step and must be done carefully in order to minimize the total length of wires -- a powerful predictor of the cost of manufacturing a chip -- while maintaining the abstract connectivity or function, said a UCSB release.
'Brains are similarly characterized by a precise connectivity which allows the organism to function, but are constrained by the metabolic costs associated with the development and maintenance of long 'wires,' or neurons,' said Bassett.
She explained that, given the similar constraints in brains and chips, it seems that both evolution and technological innovation have developed the same solutions to optimal mapping patterns.
The finding is reported in the journal PloS Computational Biology.