So here we are, after a nice flight with the new A380 from Germany, I’m sitting front row to hear Mike Grehan opening the SES New York 2011 making some jokes about PageRank and announcing this year’s keynote speaker Duncan Watts. Duncan Watts is principal research scientist at Yahoo. In his keynote Duncan covered 4 experiments he did on social science.

Duncan starts mentioning Harold Lasswell who tried (back in 1940) to investigate the question: “Who talks to whom about what, through which channel, and with what effect?”. It’s a difficult question because especially in those days it’s tough to measure the “who talks to whom” and the “who influences whom” is even harder! (more…)