来源：新东方

Electronic communications may have shrunk, rather than expanded, horizons
电子通讯可能使我们的视野变窄了，而非扩大了。

Babies' names and the internet

The rise of the internet was supposed to create a global village, in which people would be as likely to have friends in the antipodes as in their own street. Poppycock, of course. But the idea that it might instead have shrunk people’s horizons is truly counter-intuitive. Yet that is what Jacob Goldenberg and Moshe Levy of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem suspect. Their evidence is indirect, and from a strange source—the spread of babies’ names. But it does suggest that something worthy of investigation is going on.

The two researchers’ study of the spread of new names was prompted by their discovery that the relationship between the number of private e-mails sent in America and the distance between sender and recipient falls off far more steeply than they expected. People are overwhelmingly e-mailing others in the same city, rather than those far away.

That says something about human relations, but not how they have changed since e-mail became ubiquitous. So Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy needed to find something pertinent that bridged the period in question and might thus shed more light on their result. In an inspired piece of lateral thinking, they decided to look at how babies’ names spread.

America’s Social Security Service keeps a register that contains the 100 most popular names in each state every year and the number of babies given them. Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy speculated that when parents chose a name for a child, they were influenced by their interactions with other new parents, so the spread of the names the babies were given was a proxy for the pattern of those interactions.

The researchers took data from 1970 to 2005 and traced the propagation of names in and between states over that period. They did this by calculating what they called a “proximity-effect index” for each of the 100 most popular names in each state. For each name, they divided the country into two groups: one consisting of states in which the name was already popular and their immediate neighbours; and one consisting of states in which the name was relatively unknown.

They then counted how many babies had been born in each state, and the proportion given a certain name. For example, if an eighth of babies born in America were delivered in California then, all other things being equal—in particular, if geography made no difference—you might expect an eighth of all babies with any given name to be Californian.

What Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy found was that the proportion of babies given a certain name in a state where that name was already popular or in a neighbouring state was 20% higher than would otherwise have been expected. This was true from the 1970s to the early 1990s.

From 1995 to 2005, however, the effect became even more pronounced. The proportion of newborns with common names in any given state and its immediate neighbours became 30% higher than would have been expected if there were no geographic effect. Dr Goldenberg and Dr Levy ascribe this rise to the internet. It certainly correlates with the emergence of the web, though whether the correlation reflects causation is unproven. But whatever the reason, it is a curious result.

婴儿的名字和互联网
 
随着互联网的兴起，人们认为我们会住在地球村里面，在这里人们可以和澳大利亚以及新西兰的人交朋友就像在他们自己所在的大街上一样。当然，这是废话了。不过认为互联网使人们的视野变窄了的观点确实有些和直觉相反。不过，这就是来自耶路撒冷希伯来大学（Hebrew University in Jerusalem）的Jacob Goldenberg以及Moshe Levy的研究发现。他们的证据是间接的，而且证据的来源也很奇特——婴儿名字的传播。不过这的确说明了一些目前正在发展的情况（指互联网——译者注）值得研究。

这两名研究者对新生婴儿名字传播的研究始于他们的一项发现。他们发现，在美国，随着私人电子邮件的发送者和接受者之间的距离增大，邮件发送的数量的下降要比他们预想的多得多。人们大部分发送的邮件是给在同一城市中的人，而不是那些和他们距离遥远的人。

这说明了一些有关人们联系的问题，而没有说明自从电子邮件普及以来人们的联系是如何改变的。因此Goldenberg博士和Levy博士需要找出一些相关的证据，这些证据能把问题中不同的时间段串接起来，这或许可以为他们的结果给出更好的解释。经过富有创造性的横向思维，他们决定研究婴儿的名字是如何传播的。

美国的社会保险部门有一份登记，它记载了每个州每年最流行的100个名字以及新生儿出生后取这些名字的数目。Goldenberg博士和Levy博士猜测，当父母亲给孩子选名字的时候，他们会受到与他们交往的那些刚刚为人父母的人的影响，因此这些新生婴儿所取名字的传播可以看成是这些交往的形式。

研究者们选取了从1970年到2005年的数据，然后跟踪了在这段时期内，这些婴儿的名字在各个州内以及州之间的传播情况。他们是通过计算在每个州的这100个最流行名字的所谓“邻近-影响指数”来了解这些名字的传播。对于每个名字，研究者把全国划分为两组：其中一组由样的州构成，在该州，这些名字已经很流行以及它们直接邻近的州；另外一组由这样的州构成，在这些州，这些名字相对来说还不为人所知。

他们然后算出在每个州出生的婴儿数，以及取某个名字的婴儿的比例。比如，如果在美国出生的婴儿中有八分之一的婴儿生于加利福尼亚州，在所有其它情况相同的情况下---尤其是如果地理位址不会带来区别的时候---你可能会预测对于任何一个名字，有八分之一是“加州名字”。

Goldenberg 和Levy博士的发现是，在一个州内，取某个在该州或者邻近州已经流行名字的婴儿的比例要比预测的高20%。从上个世纪70年代到90年代，情况都如此。

不过，从1995年到2005年，这种影响甚至变得更加明显。在任何一个州以及它邻近的州，取这些大众化名字的婴儿的比例要比预测值高30%（预测是在假设没有地域影响的时候做出）。Goldenberg和Levy博士把这种情况归因于互联网。这与互联网的出现有相关性，但是这种相关是否反应了因果关系还没有得到证明。不过，不管是什么原因，这个研究结果是令人好奇的。

Vocabulary:

Horizon: 视野；水平线
Antipodes: （幽默说法）澳大利亚和新西兰
Poppycock: 废话；胡说
Counter-Intuitive: 与直觉相反的
Prompt: 促进；促使
Overwhelmingly: 压倒性地
Ubiquitous: 无处不在的
Pertinent: 相关的
Lateral thinking: 横向思维（即用想象力寻求解决问题的新方法）
Speculate: 猜测
Proxy: 代理
Propagation: 传播
Proximity: （时间或空间）接近
Pronounced: 明显的
Geographic: 地理的
Ascribe: 把…归因于
Correlate: 相关
Emergence: 出现
Causation: 原因
Curious: 好奇的；不寻常
 
（注：英文原文来自The Economist 《经济学人》http://www.economist.com/）