Slashdot Mirror
Online "Guilds" Mirror Real Life Gangs
j-beda writes "In June 2009, Dr. Neil Johnson published a paper titled 'Human group formation in online guilds and offline gangs driven by a common team dynamic' in Physical Review E that found the way in which WoW 'guilds' form can be described by a mathematical model that can also be applied to an unrelated group of people: street gangs in Los Angeles. Since 'Any group that satisfies these fairly autonomous, competitive criteria would also (fit the model),' said Dr. Johnson, the findings are of interest to those combating international as well as local terrorist cells."
About the students in Physics bit: The results are often somewhat unfortunate; but there is an entire genre of papers, across a variety of subjects, generated by physicists' belief that, as long as they can develop a mathematical model, they can write on just about anything. There is a similar behavior in economists, who figure that, if they can assign dollar values to the major variables, they are on safe ground.
Sometimes the results are genuinely interesting, or even downright superior, if the area has been bogged down in excessive qualitative handwaving. Other times, you get breathtaking exercises in over-reduction, ignorant of a variety of messy details that have been common knowledge, among people who actually study the subject, for decades.