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Online "Guilds" Mirror Real Life Gangs

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the you-can't-quit-the-bloods dept.

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."

2 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. to everything, churn, churn, churn... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    dubai? do buy? boeing, boeing, gone? planet core overheating? an upside DOWn kingdumb? (no personal reference intended)

    stay tuned, the lights are coming up all over now.

  2. Re:Without SEEING the formula, it's rather difficu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Amen. You have no idea how sick and tired I get of the software architects who think every single problem can be solved by "modeling" it. Fucking idiots, all of them.

    I saw one of these pricks spent three days "modeling" a script to retrieve some emails from an SMTP server, and save them to some files. After the third day, I got fed up and wrote the script in a few lines of Perl. No, I didn't use any "design patterns" or "best practices", but it got the goddamn job done, and done quickly.

    I can only imagine that models from the social sciences are far, far less useful than software models.