I’ve had “Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World” by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg on my bookshelf for a few months now, and a conversation with a client reminded me that I hadn’t finished reading it (barely started really). It is available from Cambridge University Press, but also on the web and in PDF format.
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We had our first Graph Database Meet-up in Chicago yesterday!
16 Graphistas came out to learn more about the craft and get an introduction to Neo4j. Ryan Briones from Groupon gave us a venue and helped host the event. No worries if you missed it, your next chance to learn more about Neo4j is coming up on Tuesday February 7th @ 6pm, when Prasanna Pendse will share his experiences with Neo4j at ChicagoRuby: Downtown.
Our next Chicago Graph DB meet-up is tentatively scheduled for February 29th @ 6 pm. This will be a hands-on meet-up. I’ll help you get started with either Neo4j on your laptop or in the cloud with Heroku. We’ll create a few graphs, learn some basic traversals and get comfortable with Neo4j. I’ll have a GitHub repository graph for us to play with and see how you are connected to Kevin Bacon (err I mean Linus Torvalds). He is the center of the GitHub universe right? Right? We’ll let’s find out.
The slides of our first meet-up are available below:
Previously I showed you how to get Neo4j up and running with Ruby and how to find recommended friends on a social network. What about finding out how you are connected to someone outside of your friends of friends network? Do you remember the concept of six degrees of separation? No, how about six degrees of Kevin Bacon?
A credit card commercial explains how this works:
The actor, Kevin Bacon wants to write a check to buy a book, but the clerk asks for his ID, which he does not have. He leaves and returns with a group of people, then says to the clerk, “Okay, I was in a movie with an extra, Eunice, whose hairdresser, Wayne, attended Sunday school with Father O’Neill, who plays racquetball with Dr. Sanjay, who recently removed the appendix of Kim, who dumped you sophomore year. So you see, we’re practically brothers.”
Max De Marzi 