Bursts: the Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do
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J An NPR Best Science Book Pick J The Hidden Patterns Behind Everythin~ We Do, From Your Email to Bloody Crusades • • • • BURSTS • • • With A New Afterword Albert-Laszlo Barabasi Author of LINKED () 0 $26.95 u.s. $33.50 Can. Can we scientifically predict our future? Scientists and pseudoscientists have been pursuing this mystery for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. But now, amazing new research is revealing that patterns in human behavior, previously thought to be purely random, follow predictable laws. Albert-L3szl6 Barabasi, already the world's pre eminent researcher on the science of networks, describes his work on this profound mystery in Bursts, a stunningly original investigation into human behavior. His approach relies on the way our lives have become digital. Mobile phones, the Internet, and e-mail have made human activities more accessible to quantitative analysis, turning our society into a huge research laboratory. All those electronic trails of time-stamped texts, voice mails, and searches add up to a previously unavailable massive data set that tracks our movements, our decisions, our lives. Analysis of these trails is offering deep insights into the rhythm of how we do everything. His finding? 'We work and fight and play in short flourishes of activity followed by next to nothing. Our daily pattern isn't random, it's "'bursty." Bursts uncovers an astonishing deep order in our actions that makes us far more predictable than we like to think. Illustrating this revolutionary science, Barabasi artfully weaves together the story of a sixteenth century burst of human activity-a bloody medieval crusade launched in his homeland, Transylvania-with the modern tale of a contemporary artist hunted by the FBI through our post-9/11 surveillance society. These narratives illustrate how predicting human behavior has long been the obsession, sometimes the duty, of those in power. Barabasi's wide (continued on back flap) BURSTS Also by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi LINKED: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life BUR§T§ The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do I ~j Dutton DUTTON Pubhshed by Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Pengu1n Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2¥3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England; Pengu1n Ireland, 25 St Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, II Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, Ind1a; Penguin Group (NZ). 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. First printing, April 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 Copyright© 2010 by Albert· Laszlo Barabasi All rights reserved ~REGISTERED TRADEMARK-MARGA REGISTRADA LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA has been applied for. ISBN 978·0·525·95160·5 Printed in the United States of America Set in Dante Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part ofthis publication may be reproduced, stored in or mtroduced 1nto a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying. recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning. uploading. and distribution ofth!S book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated. While the author has made every effort to prov1de accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or !:heir content. Gyermekeimnek Conten1ts 11. The Best Bodyguard in the Business 1 2 A Pope Is Elected in Rome 15 J The Mystery of Random Motion 21 4 Duel in Belgrade 37 5 The Future Is Not Yet Searchable 43 6 Bloody Prophecy 55 i Prediction or Prophecy 61 8 A Crusade at Last 71 9 Violence, Random and Otherwise 77 11.(!) An Unforeseen Massacre 91 vii ~m 0 Contents Jl.Jl Deadly Quarrels and Power Laws 97 ll2 The Nagylak Battle 109 JI.J The Origin of Bursts 117 ll.4 Accidents Don't Happen to Crucifixes 129 ll.5 The Man Who Taught Himself to Swim by Reading 133 ll.6 An Investigation 147 ll/ Trailing the Albatross 155 ll.3 "Villain!" 165 ll.9 The Patterns of Human Mobility 171 21!]) Revolution Now 183 2ll. Predictably Unpredictable 191 22 A Diversion in Transylvania 207 2J The Truth about LifeLinear 213 24 Szekler Against Szekler 225 25 Feeling Sick Is Not a Priority 229 26 The Final Battles 243 27 The Third Ear 251 23 Flesh and Blood 263 Contents on Notes 271 Illustrations 297 Acknowledgments 299 Index 303 ... --· --·· -----;---------------~ ~ :·· ~ 2005 ~I I . ' . ! 1 ~ • . ! . 7-~EVE_N' 290 GE()RGE STREET NEW BRIJNS\JI{ICI< J .,•• . •.. l. I 4Jses·~~~S7~HJO 8~ a~RO ST I ! J', :• \ ', •• ' I • ·, ~ ~ l '·Nir.Ne~~K ~~YMONb Pt.AV. 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' 06108/08: 1 The Best Bodyguard in the Business fall goes well, by the time you close this book I will have con vinced you that, despite the spontaneity you may exhibit, you are far more predictable than you are willing to admit. This is by no means personal. I am just as easy to forecast, as is everybody with whom I live and work. In fact, algorithms built in my lab to dis- cover how predictable we are were tested on millions of individuals and failed only once. His name was Hasan. Hasan Elahi, to be precise. It was the anxiety in the air that caught Hasan's attention as he sized up the fifty or so foreigners detained by the Immigration and Naturaliza tion Services at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport. "You could just tell that this was their first day in the U.S., and you could see the fear in ev eryone," he recalls. "I was just confused-what am I doing here?" With a passport as thick as a cheap paperback novel, having been ex tended three times to fit the visas and the border stamps he collected during his travels, Hasan knew a few things about immigration. One of 1 2 BURSTS them was that U.S. citizens don't get pulled aside by the INS when they return home. At least, they don't normally. More puzzled than scared, Hasan tried to strike up a conversation with the guards, only to realize that they were just as confused as he was. Finally, a man in a dark gray suit walked up to him and, bypassing any introduction, said in a matter of-fact tone, "I expected you to be older." The man was in his fifties, and Hasan thought his greeting extraordi narily awkward, so, in an attempt to break the tension, he tried a light hearted response. "Sorry, I am trying to age as quickly I can." It didn't work-the time and place just wasn't going to accommodate humor of any sort. So he decided to get to the point. "Can you explain to me what is going on?" The man looked at him, paused as if trying to find the right way to put it, and finally just shrugged, replying in a voice devoid of emotion, "Well, you've got some explaining to do yourself." It was June 19, 2002, and Hasan Elahi, a thirty-year-old media installation artist, was on his way home after a grueling six-week-long trip that started with a flight from Tampa, Florida, to Detroit, hopping from there to Amsterdam, Lisbon, and Paris, to finally land in Dakar, Senegal. Ten days later he took a fony-eight-hour-long bus ride to Bamako, Mali, and then crossed over to the Ivory Coast. After visiting the largest church in Africa, built to hold three hundred thousand worshippers in a country with only forty thousand Christians, on May 28 Hasan arrived in Abidjan, a major port on the country's southern shore.