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Editor Login
Convener in chief:
David Lazer
(Methodology, Networked Governance)
Editors:
Stanley Wasserman
(Current Trends, Methodology, Social Networks)
Guy Stuart
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David Gibson
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Allan Friedman
(Simulations)
Jukka-Pekka Onnela
(Methodology, Social Networks, Technology)
Nathan Eagle
(Technology, Social Computing, Powerlaws, Current Trends)
Ben Waber
(Technology, Social Computing) Ines Mergel
(Knowledge Sharing, Social Computing, Social Software, Government 20)
Maria Binz-Scharf
(Qualitative Methodology, Knowledge Sharing, eGovernment)
Alexander Schellong
(Admin, eGovernment, Government 20, Citizen Relationship Management)
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Recent Entries
- Final thoughts for now on the Coburn attacks on the online townhall report
- Following the digital breadcrumbs...
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Recent Comments
- Re: Learning from Chemical Traces
By: Dan Dubli
Date: Oct 30, 2009 7:47 PM - Re: Learning from Chemical Traces
By: KC
Date: Sep 20, 2009 1:24 PM - Re: Learning from Chemical Traces
By: Mike
Date: Sep 20, 2009 5:04 AM
Notification
« The complexity of Government 2.0 | Main | Welcoming a new blogger to the team: Jukka-Pekka Onnela »
10 September 2009
Learning from Chemical Traces
A few weeks ago a really fantastic study got a lot of press about how researchers found that 90% of US bills have trace amounts of cocaine on them. This got me thinking about some of the other interesting currency studies that have been done.
Where is George? comes to mind as another brilliantly designed study. Researchers stamped thousands of bills with a URL where people who received the bill could go and enter its current location. The researchers got a huge number of responses, allowing them to use bill mobility patterns to approximate human mobility patterns. Of course with the recent availability of high quality cell phone and sensor data this may not be the best data collection method in the future, but at the very least it's a great study design.
But the cocaine study got me thinking: what else can we learn about people's habits from chemical traces on bills? Of course the reason cocaine can be detected is that it binds to the green dye in money, but a large number of other compounds would likely also bind to this dye. Can you learn about fast food consumption from bill traces? Could you gauge the "stress level" of the country by measuring the amount of certain sweat compounds?
You can potentially get this data from other sources, but often it's hard to get a large enough cross section of society to get a broad enough picture. By combining analysis of these physical traces with digital traces, we can get closer to having a complete view of how our society is behaving.
Posted by Ben Waber at September 10, 2009 3:17 PM
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