ugnet_: Swing era was a very small world: Scientists, dolphins and jazz musicians are

[J Ssemakula]

  Swing era was a very small world: Scientists, dolphins and jazz musicians are connected.

  28 July 2003

http://www.nature.com/nsu/030721/030721-15.html

  PHILIP BALL

  Guitar virtuoso Eddie Lang   was the most  well-connected musician of  the early jazz era, say two  scientists in Spain1.

  Pablo Gleiser and Leon  Danon of the University of  Barcelona have analysed  the community structure of  the jazz world between  1912 and 1940, as  recorded in the Red Hot  Jazz Archive database. This  lists more than 1,000  musicians who collaborated  in a total of 198 bands.

  The pair find that the swing big band era had the same 'small  world' property as friendship networks, movie actors and  scientific collaborations. Any individual can be connected to  any other in the network by a surprisingly small number of  steps.

   The phenomenon was memorably summed up by a character  in John Guare's 1990 play Six degrees of Separation, saying:  "Everybody on this planet is separated by only six other  people."

   In fact, jazz musicians before 1940 enjoyed much closer links  than that: on average, any one was separated from another  by only 2.79 steps. As in most human networks, a few  individuals have very high degrees of connectivity. Lang, also  known as Blind Willie Dunn, collaborated with 415 musicians -  despite dying aged 30.

   Gleiser and Danon find some key differences between the  jazz scene and other human networks. In particular, it is  divided into distinct communities that interact only weakly.  Most notable are two branches corresponding to the black and  white musicians, a reflection of the strong racial segregation  of the time. Another subdivision relates to where the bands  recorded, splitting them to some extent into New York and  Chicago groups.

   Swim band

   Meanwhile, David Lusseau of the University of Aberdeen, UK,  has found that even dolphins swim in small worlds. He spent  seven years distinguishing the distinctive dorsal-fin markings  of around 60 bottlenose dolphins living in Doubtful Sound  fjord in New Zealand2.

  Lusseau concludes that the  dolphin swim-buddy  network features about five  degrees of separation.

   It is also very robust.  Unlike jazzers or scientists,  only a few dolphins have  very few connections: most   have an intermediate  number. Lusseau thinks  this helps to hold the  community together even if  the highly connected hubs  die. He calculates that the  network would remain  cohesive even if a third of  the population were wiped  out.

   References

      1.Gleiser, P. M. & Danon, L. Community structure in jazz. Preprint, http://xxx.arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0307434  (2003). 

     2.Lusseau, D.The emergent properties of a dolphin social network. Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B, published online, doi:10.1098/rsbl.2003.0057  (2003). 

  © Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

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Note:

(a) The url for Red Hot Jazz Archive is  www.redhotjazz.com

 

(b) I have posted a number of article on "human networks"  which, incidentally, also include other seemingly unrelated articles on the degree of separation for English words -- see article on language(s).  I have a selfish interest in this. I am hoping that folks who study politics will jump at this and do a parallel study on our politicians, going back to at least the 1940s.

 

Even the most casual of observers of our political scene surely has picked out a salient theme by now. And this is that, there seems to be a fairly small number of people, perhaps fewer than a couple of hunderd or so, that is or has been at the nexus of all the political groupings -- including military or quasi-military juntas. It'd seem that political ideology does not feature here as much as do the tangile benefits of simply holding power in this calculus.

 

I'd also hope that linguists or budding linguists, perhaps even people who are merely multi-lingual, might do similar studies on the connectedness of  words in a language like Luganda.

 

Any takers out there? If nothing else, some university just might throw a degree at you for your trouble, and maybe set you on a rewarding career path ...

 

 

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