Facebook and data..

This is a post on Facebook data.. my Facebook friend list data..

Given I tell FB a lot, it was quite interesting to see how FB doesn't make it easy for me to even track what is going on with my Friend list and update me on what is changing. 

A few hours ago, I was trying to see how many of my friends post politial stuff on my feed. I could count 8 people off the top of my head and by skimming my feed over last week. Given it is holiday season, it is easy to spot the political posts.. My count was accurate. My entire feed is pretty much overwhelmed by these 8 people. Maybe the others dont post much? Maybe the most vocal ones are the ones that keep forwarding stuff to everyone on their timeline? Maybe the things they are forwarding are paid ads masquerading as meme's or just regular forwards? Maybe the people are not who they claim to be on FB and the account is hijacked? a lot of thoughts led me to try and find out again how after reducing my friend list to 150 two years ago, it is back at 318 now.. what has changed in the friend mix etc. etc.

Any analysis starts with the data set. Trying to export just the list of friends and the number of friends they have (or mutual friends) is not trivial. I did spend a lot of time copy pasting stuff from HTML to csv to JMP and had to do some clean up just to get the data in three Columns.. (Friends name, their friends total, mutual friends). Now why FB lists only Mutual friends in some cases I do not know. At first glance it looks like some folks do NOT want to even disclose how many friends they have!! I don't know what the point is of being on a social network if you are that worried. Let's move on..

Then I found that some of my friends have deactivated their accounts. Their pictures are blank and there was nothing listed. When I click on that friends page it says "this account is deactivated. you have the option to unfriend this person". WTH? This was for multiple people. So the person just left FB without a note of any kind to say they are deactivating it? 

72 of my friends show only a mutual friend count. So it makes it difficult to do a fair distribution.. that was a painful realization that there was no way to get the friend count. You have to go to that friends page and see if it will show up. Even my wife's page will only show we have 152 mutual friends. It wont tell me how many friends she has in total. Not that this count matters but if you are looking at data and you try to see patterns it makes sense to have apples to apples. 

Then I put in a classification by how they are my friends. 

F- Family (anyone related by blood or marriage)

HS- high school (PS. Senior)

C- college (classmates, juniors, seniors) from IT-BHU

GS - Grad school (All the Drexel and RPI connections)

FF- Family friends (this one is tricky because some of these people we met in social settings, my kids classmates, but Majority are spouses of friends from HS, C, GS or my wifes classmates and their spouses)

BL- friends from my Blogger days who I have managed to stay in touch with till now!

Y- Yoga (there are teachers and there are students, but I just lumped it into one)

W- Friends I made at Cypress Semi at work

Here are the distributions given this classification:

This one is the distribution of the friends my friends have (unfortunately for the 72 people out of 318 where it listed only mutual friends, that data is not included in this). 

If you read the anthropology books Guns Germs and Steel or Sapiens, the authors make a case that tribes split up into rival tribes or multiple tribes after their populations cross 140-150. The social structure at that point is unmanageable and the connections become meaningless. At any one point everyone closely interacts with 15 people on a day to day basis. In the last 2 years I have observed this at work, at home, at gatherings and on my social media feeds. People simply become inactive.

Given that there are some celebrities in my FB friend list (read star Yoga teachers, music teachers, public figures) I took them out of the distribution to see what it looks like for the bottom two bars in the previous graph.. ie, people with under 1000 friends.. The people who are between 600 and 1000 are mostly inactive but keep accepting friend requests and looking at some of their pages, I am seriously wondering if there are account issues. Again, companies that pride themselves on AI should be able to see patterns and alert people that one of their friends is multiplying on their friend count in an abnormal fashion that does not make sense.

117/212 still have <300 friends.. and 78/212 are within 200.. Gave this 150 number a lot of thought for the "average person".. read "not someone who is trying to get a following like a Business person or Brand ambassador)  and maybe given todays ability to connect more easily, that number can be 300.. It should be able to plot the number of active interactions between me and my friends to verify this. I am sure FB does this or has the capability to do this, but it would be nice for me to do it with data at least as it relates to my account and friends.

In the graph above the top four points on the Family (F) are wife, MIL, SIL and co-sister (see graph below) why it will only give the number of mutual friends for these four people is beyond me.  You can see that a lot of my High school and college friends are connected to each other by looking at the mutual friend count and it is the case with the Yoga community. I really don't have an apples to apples on this one as technically all the mutual friend counts are not available.

The graph below is the mutual friend list distribution where FB wont list their total friends but only mutual. Each bar is the number of friends who have a mutual friend list between those windows.. eg. 1 friend (wife) with 150-160 mutual friends, 1 with 50-60 (MIL), 2 friends with 40-50 mutual connections (SIL, co-sister), etc. etc.

The bottom 32 people with 0-10 mutual friends are mostly not sharing their friend list?

So what did I learn from all these exercises of graphing and charting and cleaning up data sets?

1- It is not easy to get exportable data out of Facebook.

2- There is no notification if your friends deactivate accounts or become inactive for prolonged periods of time

3- There is no warning if your friends account is showing abnormal increases in friend counts

4- A lot of my friends on the list have way more than 150 friends just like me. 

5- Never got to the actual reason why I started doing this.. which was to see what % of my friends post political stuff. That count is still 8/318 but there is no easy way to classify the posts on an excel file and put a code next to it and pareto it!  Out of almost 200 most recent posts in my feed, 50 were political and they came from 8 people.. They all seem to have posts on their pets, yoga, family which always seems to be anywhere between 50-70% of their posts. If there was a select way to mute that, I would be a happier person. 

The real question is "Am I seeing all their posts?" or "is FB only showing me select posts from these people that are political?" or "are these people deliberately posting this only to me and a select group?"

No way to tell. 

Majority of the posts are travel realated or family photos and pets. For that, I will gladly keep reviewing accounts periodically, clean up stuff and go explain to people why there is no point on being "friends" on FB when I don't get to see what they look like after 5 years but keep getting memes and political forwards for years. 

I am just having data withdrawal symptoms.. there is a lull at work and Christmas/New Year is coming.. next I will go look at my Yoga class graphs and charts.. Thankfully, that dataset was generated by me and is very accurate!

The end game..

A yoga post that was long coming.

2018 started with getting over the Flu. I was drinking Delsym at a minute before midnight on New Years eve. The last time I came back from Beijing, two days before X-mas, some bugs hitched a ride back with me or so I thought. So it took me till the 6th of January to go try Yoga again. Even on the 6th I was pretty weak and my plan was to go to anything but the front row and pace myself. There was a new teacher who keyed me in on the 6th and she had no idea it was my "come back class".

"A leopard cannot change its spots", or some such thing... Once I go through those double doors, I am like a new born that has been temporarily put back in the womb and I start kicking in my happy place. Put the mat in the last row and a second later move it to the third and after looking around the room and seeing there is a spot in the front row, moved it up to the mirror. My thoughts during those 90 or 100 seconds of mat moving cannot be summarized in this post. That could be a book in itself. You guys read this blog and you know I am good for it!

Came back the next day and my friend and teacher Jessica gave me a big hug and said "welcome back". She knew I was sick last two weeks but did not ask me anything more. That was probably her way of saying "you know what to do in the room, so I am not biasing you". At the end of the class, Jessica asks "60 day challenge?" like she was asking me if I would like some Gulab Jamun after a meal, and without giving it much thought, wrote my name on the sign up sheet. After that we didn't talk about it. I just came every day as usual, went to China as usual and did doubles on every weekend as usual, heard the sighs from wife and kids when they realized I was doing the challenge, as usual, and finished the Challenge.. and hopefully that becomes "as usual".

(there are better pics on BYSJ's Facebook page)

There was a Challenge party and we had some testimonials from folks who finished 60 classes in 60 days and they were all inspiring. We had to leave the party after an hour as the kids had to be taken to dinner.. as usual but this year we got to watch the other folks tell us about their journey on Facebook Live! I was telling the kids what Multiple Sclerosis was and after an inspiring story Jr. said she will come join me for classes again. Okay, she said "a class", but I am hoping it is going to be plural.

This year I am kicking out regularly in the standing head to knee pose and it is my new favorite pose.

There are alwasys graphs and charts for a 60 day challenge post..

There was a possibility of an earlier China trip, so I finished the challenge in 58 days and eventually did 61/60 when the trip was not pre-poned. If you think going to do Yoga more than 3 times a week is difficult think again. Coming back from a flu, going to Asia and back for a week in the middle of this, those were easy because I had done those before. One of the days, I had to drive past Sacramento area startign at 6AM, attend a meeting, come back at 5PM, chaired a meetign from 6 to 8 PM and still did yoga from 8:30PM-10PM just to keep challenge going. It is all doable. There are people who have debilitating issues who do the challenge and mine are nothing compared to those. Even if you don't do the challenge, it is okay. Come to the party to hear some really inspiring real life stories! 

Still tracking weight.. 

The excel file was started almost a year after starting Yoga and so far it has close to 2000 data points... (some of them blank)

Here is weight since 2012..

 If you notice the excel file there is a total class tracker. Have crossed 1500 classes and the best part is:

- Still suck at this

- Have not given up on it

- Even though my self assesment and self esteem take a beating in that mirror, the end result is positive because every day is usually better than the previous day

- this yoga keeps me grounded. Every now and then I get reminded that sooner or later gravity will win and I will be ashes, but till that day, going to fight gravity every day, every set.

- my teachers and fellow students seem to believe in me and root for me. they see more in me than I see myself and that is a blessing

- learn something new every day, be it class 1, 100, 1000 or 1506..always something new which brings me to class 1500

Have already posted about this special class with Yoga Professor Emeritus, Mary Jarvis. One class can sometimes change your view and attitude to things. This one definitely did for me.

It took me 4 classes after her talk, to give up water during Yoga class. The last one week have left the water bottle in the car. Sometimes I drink a sip or two on the way home. Mostly now I drink water a good 40 minutes after class is over. It is interesting.There is a sudden cool over my face and body and even on the insides while driving back after class. Kind of like what you feel when you drink regular water after chewing mint gum but it feels like ice water. Same thing except all over the body and this is new. Most likely has to do with the "no water during class".

Have also stopped fidgeting during class. No more subconscious wiping of sweat. No moving around mat with the bullshit excuse of trying to make it easy for people behind me who are also moving around, etc.

Currently trying to keep tummy sucked in from beginning of class till the first pose, and failing at it miserably. Confident that sooner or later that will change and can then go to other things that were taught.  

One funny thing Mary Jarvis mentioned during the special class which is replaying in my head?!

"the whole goal of doing this yoga is so you can sit in lotus pose without moving and meditate for long periods of time. This pose is almost a half lotus and this will eventually help you get to lotus!". She was telling the entire class that and I was thinking "What?! I can already sit in Lotus pose for long periods of time! Why am I doing this Yoga then? Shouldn't I do that instead?"

Maybe my Lotus sucks.. should make a bumper sticker that says "my lotus sucks" ? Maybe there is a market for it?  As a kid we used to sit in Lotus pose all the time. My kids here struggle because they are not used to sitting on the ground all the time. They have "criss cross applesauce" issues. Everytime we go visit the Livermore temple, I sit there for at least half an hour in silence before walking out. Used to do it at home also and manage to sit for 45 minutes. Two years ago I tried to time myself and made it once to 54 minutes. 

Maybe the key words were "long periods of time"! How long is long?!

After Mary's class, I wanted to try and see how long in lotus pose but with eyes closed and "no fidgeting". No movement "whatsoever".  Turns out it was 44 minutes 11 seconds as caught on timelapse video..

Technology is good. Daughter's iPhone for timelapse, my iPhone for timer, a clock in the background that catches the time "lapsing" and my legs that pretty much went blue after this time. Took me 3 minutes to be able to get up and walk again as the blood returned to my feet!

Doing 1500+ classes of 90 mintue Yoga and cannot even sit in one place without moving for one single hour! If that doesn't put things in perspective for you, don't know what will. There are folks who have stayed in the same place without moving for 1-3 days. I have been fortunate in this lifetime to meet multiple people who have done that and have heard from my grandpa that he has met people who have done the same. Folks who can slow down time... is how he put it.

Going to try doing this to see how long it takes to cross the one hour mark and eventually the 90 minute mark.

Yoga has helped me immensely this year. My stress at work is through the roof and if it were not for the Yoga to supplement the support from my wife and kids, I would not be functioning normally, or even functioning. 

A big heartfelt thanks to all my teachers at BYSJ for keeping me sane. You know who you are.. and if you don't know.. there is a graph for it also.

We have a lot of teachers, some are new, some traveling and teaching us for a month or for just one special class and the regular teaching staff. Every teacher gives it a 100% when it comes to doing the right thing for folks in class and all teachers who knew me, showed me no mercy during the challenge!

Well, it is almost time to go to one more Yoga class or as my wife would say "Kazhudhai ketta kutti suvaru!" ("if he is not home, he will be in Yoga class" is the loose translation).

Writing this post made me cheer up. Hope is you read this and are inspired to try a 60 day challenge!

Maps and settings

Recently I was asked to install an upgrade on my bluetootch connection in Prius when I got the new iPhone X. So I waited to go through the motions.

Now everytime I get out of my car, there is a "parked car update". That was interesting.

Also given I am a creature of habit, the phone would tell me "14 minutes to Bikram Yoga San Jose" if I ever sat in my car and started to drive at certain times.. or it would say "45 mintues to Home" when I leave office.

Sometimes I would have to go do a drop or pickup for the kids and skip yoga for a late class and the app would give me this bitter reminder that not everything goes like clockwork. 

Last 5 days has been interesting. I had left work and suddenly my phone pops a reminder that says 30 minutes to Felix labs. I was worried for a second. So called my office promptly and said "did you guys book me for some meeting with someone at something called Felix labs or copy me on calendar?" I just got instructions to drive there.

My guys said "no we dont work with any Felix labs or have plans to. Maybe your phone or outlook is hacked?".

Came home and checked. It was not a calendar thing. It was a "maps" thing. Someone has marked Felix Labs on one of the houses near my house and the maps is picking up that as the location instead of my Home! 

The same thing happened the other day when I was trying to drive to another known location. It gave a different name! 

This is really weird. Thought this should be posted out there to see if others are seeing similar things and why?!