Tifanie's Blog

Blog 3

2007-06-06T19:56:00.000-07:00

The last five chapters talks about viruses and fads, Internet, web pages, maps, network economy, and learning complexities.
In the chapter 10 the author keeps expressing that we are all linked to one another. Barabasi uses the AIDS epidemic as a example of this process. Then he goes back and talks about the well-traveled Paul, with his extended circle of friends and followers, was one of the most influential hubs of early Christianity. Then he talks about how some fads and viruses disappear and others appear, so social scientists and epidemiologists developed a very useful tool called threshold model. In every threshold model has a spreading rate and critical threshold. With this model in hand the Internet helped discover scale free networks. This gave a gateway to antivirus technology and navigation.
In 1997 the Internet was born. They never predicted that it would be a living thing. It grows and evolves at an unparalleled rate while following the same laws that nature uses to spin its own webs. The surprising thing is that some of this information is very difficult to find. That brings us to yet another network: the World Wide Web.
Our lives is increasingly dominated by the Web. Yet we do not spread a lot of time understanding it. By the virtue of its digital nature and enormous size the World Wide Web offers a model system whose every detail can be uncovered. "It will continue to be a source of inspiration and ideas to anybody aiming to grasp the properties of our web like universe"(Barabasi).
In 2000, the dot.com bubble started where the startup companies like, AOL, SixDegrees, and eBay. Many of the companies that started then do not appear on the Web. Most startups were based on the simple philosophy that offering things online was sufficient to replicate the success stories of the new economy.
Barabasi states that the most important thing we have learned the laws of the web cartography, allowing us to draw new maps whenever we are faced with new systems. Now we must follows these maps to complete the journey, fitting the pieces to one another. We have ninety-eight years to succeed at this, and make the twenty-first the century of complexity.

Blog #2

2007-05-28T19:12:00.000-07:00

The next five chapters talk about hubs, The 80/20 Rule, Power Laws renormalization, and viruses. A hub is a highly connected nodes and the World Wide Web has them in its architecture. Hubs dominate the structure of all networks in which they are present, making them look like small worlds. The average separation between two randomly selected people on Earth is six, the distance between anybody and a connector is one or two people. So two web pages are only nineteen clicks away, Yahoo.com, a giant hub, is only two to three clicks away from any webpage.
In 1900’s, Vilfredo Pareto an Italian economist and avid gardener discovered that only 80 percent of his peas were produced by only 20 percent of the peapods. This lead him to take a closer look to see if this applied to other things like economics. To his surprise he observed that 80 percent of the land was owned by 20 percent of the populations. So the scientist expected to find that Webpages are connected to each other randomly. Those Webpages should show a peaked distribution, telling us that most documents are about equally popular. This was not the case at all, they found that a few hubs with an extraordinarily large number of links. The Webpages show a law called Power laws. Power laws are a continuously decreasing curve, implying that small events coexist with a few large events. Networks obey a simple power law.

First Blog

2007-04-30T19:46:00.000-07:00

“Linked: The New Science of Networks”
By
Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

The author started out talking about how we are all connected in some way or another. Even an early Jewish man named Paul used a community to community way of transmitting his beliefs and views about Christianity. He traveled from one community to community to persecuting Christians because they put Jesus, condemned by the authorities as a blasphemer, on the same level as God. He new how to choose certain communities to get the most bang for his buck. Also he passed his message on to others that he never met. Today we use the internet to get our message across with just one click of a button. Also we do not need to know these people to give them our message.
Sociologists estimate that we know between 200 and 5,000 people by name. In 1929, Frigyes Karinthy’s wrote about people are linked by at most five links was the first published appearance of the concept we know today as “six degrees of separation.” Six degrees was rediscovered in 1967, by Stanley Milgram a Harvard professor that was studying on our interconnectivity. Milgram’s goal was to find the “distance” between any two people in the United States. He used his wife in Sharon, Massachusetts and a stock broker in Boston, both of these people where randomly picked. He sent out a 160 letters randomly chosen residents of Wichita and Omaha. Only 42 letters came back to Milgram for his study. After receiving the letters he found the median of the intermediate persons was 5.5, a very small number. So he rounded it up to 6, to get the famous “six degrees of separation.” Six degrees is the product of the modern society, a result of our insistence on keeping in touch.