Heavy SoNIA movie in the New York Times

..although in a minor supporting role ;-)
thumbnail of obesity movieJames Fowler used the SoNIA software to create an animated movie of the core of the social network in the Framingham Heart Study as part of a paper that came out in the New England Journal of Medicine last week.
The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network Over 32 Years (NEJM)

The story (that heavy people have heavy social contacts) has been all over the media and showed up in the Health section of the Paper of Record. Find Yourself Packing It On? Blame Friends

[original in high quality .mov format w/o voice over]
It is a good nudge to me to get the newer version of SoNIA released. One criticism I have of the animation is that the multiple components of the network are overlapping, making it difficult to see the structure well. Some of the newer features funded by the CSDE help with this, but at the cost of a much longer running time to compute the movie.