Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks Review

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(More customer reviews)The surprising answer is yes. I picked this book up after reading Steven Strogatz's Sync which mentions a great deal about the science of networks. Buchanan explains how networks exist everywhere - the net, the web, the power grid, our circle of friends, our sex partners - and that they are in fact very similar to one another.
The phrase "six degrees of separation" comes from the fact that two randomly chosen people, A and B, will on average be connected by six social links. A knows C who knows D who knows E who knows F who knows G who finally knows B. Considering the world has over 6 billion people, an average separation of 6 seems unbelievable small, but the explanation of this incredible phenomenon lies in the makeup of our social network. Our close friends know each other but our cluster of friends has weak ties to other clusters through acquaintances, people we really don't know that well - that's why when one is looking for a job, it's better to tell an acquaintance rather than a friend so that our inquiry can jump to other clusters. Our social network is essentially highly clustered but enough links exist between these clusters to allow us to jump from ourselves to any other person through just an average of six links. Buchanan shows us how this kind of network exists everywhere as mentioned above although he distinguishes between egalitarian networks where clusters are roughly the same size and aristocratic networks such as the WWW where gigantic hubs like Amazon.com exist that link to millions of websites.
One of the most interesting chapters in the book deals with sexual networks. It turns out that in the network of sex partners, certain people have a great many more links than the average person in the network. Buchanan explains how the structure of the sexual network actually accounts for the rapid spread of HIV. The virus spread quickly because the hubs in the network spread it to their numerous partners. In fact, it turns out that a significant percentage of the inital HIV cases had a sexual relationship with one particular flight attendant.
As I wrote in my review for Strogatz's Sync, we are entering an era of science where disparate fields of study are being linked because many phenomena that we used to regard as unrelated now appear to have very similar underlying bases. It is exciting to read books like Nexus because it illustrates this point. You should definitely read this book if your are interested in the science of networks and want to know how so many different phenomena are being explained by the same underlying principles.

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Evolution of Networks: From Biological Nets to the Internet and WWW (Physics) Review

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(More customer reviews)As a newcomer in the field of network theory I read first this book. It is quite easy to understand: clear and logical. However the calculations somewhere are too compact.

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Only recently did mankind realize that it resides on a world of networks. The Internet and the World Wide Web are changing our life. Our physical existence is based on various biological networks. We have recently learned that the term "network" turns out to be a central notion in our time, and the consequent explosion of interest in networks is a social and cultural phenomenon. The principles of the complex organization and evolution of networks, natural and artificial are the topic of this book, which is written by physicists and is addressed to all involved researchers and students. The aim of the text is to understand networks and the basic principles of their structural organization and evolution. The ideas are presented in a clear and pedagogical way, with minimal mathematics, so even students without a deep knowledge of mathematics and statistical physics will be able to rely on this as a reference. Special attention is given to real networks, both natural and artificial. Collected empirical data and numerous real applications of existing theories are discussed in detail, as well as the topical problems of communication networks.

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Social Network Analysis (Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences) Review

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(More customer reviews)A very good beginning text that presents an overview of social network analysis (SNA). It is an easy read that will allow one to understand the basics of SNA, including an overview of the mathematical elements. Also it has a nice reference list for the reader who desires a deeper understanding.

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In the thoroughly updated edition of Social Network Analysis, authors David Knoke and Song Yang take into account the vast number of changes in the field that have occurred in the 25 years since the first edition was published. They cover various issues in basic network concepts, data collection, and network analytical methodology. They succinctly illustrate the concepts and methods related to substantive social network research problems, citing examples ranging from children's play groups to organizations, communities, and international systems. Readers can also analyze the real and artificial datasets incorporated throughout the book.



Key Features of the Second Edition



· Expands on the previous edition by incorporating new basic social network developments



Provides a general overview of fundamental theoretical and methodological topics



Clearly presents concepts by using concise language and avoiding technical complexities



Intended Audience



The text's informal approach will appeal to both students and professionals in the humanities and social sciences.

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Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means Review

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(More customer reviews)Updated 28 Dec 07 to add links.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is coherent, thoughtful, and tells a story about the emerging science of networks that anyone, who can read, can understand. This is a non-trivial accomplishment, so 4 stars.
However, the book is also--being brilliantly designed to be understood by the lowest common denominator, an undergraduate--somewhat shallow and empty.... especially when compared with Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", 1197 pages not counting the index, which is at the other extreme.
Although there are good notes, there is no bibliography, and the author fails to use network methodology to illustrate and document the emerging literature on networks--called citation analysis, this would have been a superb appendix to the book that would have taken it up a notch in utility.
Among the key points that the author discusses and which certainly make the book worth buying and reading, my above reservations not-with-standing:
1) Reductionism has driven 20th century science (and one might add, all other knowledge), with the result being that we have experts who know more and more about less and less--and )as CIA and FBI recently found)while leaving us devoid of generalists and multi-disciplinary artists and scientists who can "connect the dots" across these fragmented foci.
2) Contrary to the prevailing wisdom about networks being equally distributed and thus largely invulnerable to catastrophic meltdown, the author does a fine job of documenting the importance of selected "hubs", so important that their removal ultimately breaks the network down into isolated pieces. The functionality of the network, its strength, is also its weakness--vulnerability to deliberate attack against the hubs (the author does not mention the Internet domain directories except in passing while discussing a table error, but MAYEAST and MAYWEST would be two obvious directory hubs that could be better protected through replication).
3) The author inadvertently makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how to defend America against terrorism--discussing why no single authority can close down the Internet by fiat, he notes "The underlying network has become so distributed, decentralized and locally guarded that even such an ordinary task as getting a central map of it has become virtually impossible." LOCALLY GUARDED--this is the key phrase. Federalizing counter-terrorism, and using federal agents and computers at the state and local levels, will not be effective against terrorists in civilian guise within the homeland--only a complete extension of counterintelligence and counterterrorism methods to the state & local level--teaching them to fish for terrorists, rather than trying to catch the terrorists with federal trawlers, is the way to go.
4) The author flirts with what is known as nomadic computing, making the point that nodes built around individual people are becoming as important--some would say more important--in a networked economy than nodes built around static organizations. There is a useful general discussion of how "fitness" in a networked economy is a combination of speed and scalability as well as diversity of linkages. As a general rule, as the FBI found (and also CIA, INS, and the State Department), systems with a single hub resistant to initiative from the field offices will tend to be slow and ineffective.
Missing from this populist overview is a discussion of the vital importance of geospatial information. While the author helpfully notes the Earth is increasingly covered by an electronic "skin" with millions of measuring devices, with experts predicting that by 2010 there will "around 10,000 telemetric devices for each human on the planet" (one suspects this refers only to privileged humans, not the billions of dispossessed that lack telephones, never mind computers), he does not take the next essential step, which is to note that in the absence of an XML-GEO standard and a global push to associate geospatial as well as temporal tags with all data, much of what we collect will, like the trillions of bits we have collected with secret satellites, never get processed in a meaningful manner.
This is a helpful book that will be of value to the general reader at the elementary (adult) level.
See also:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
World Brain (Essay Index Reprint Series)
The Wisdom of Crowds
An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

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Recursively Enumerable Sets and Degrees: A Study of Computable Functions and Computably Generated Sets (Perspectives in Mathematical Logic) Review

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(More customer reviews)This text was specifically written to replace Rogers as the standard graduate introduction. As you will see if you ask around, it wasn't completely successful. That is because, while Rogers is creaking with age, it is interesting. This book is not. It is a detailed and orderly presentation of what the author thinks is important, but that does not include any context, motivation, relations to other math, or applications. It is painfully dull. (There is a 2e in the works, but the excerpts I saw were about the same.) Also, it starts very fast and will be confusing if you haven't already done a book like Cutland. I think the problem is that he has been a master of the subject for so long that he can't put himself in the mind of someone coming to the material for the first time.

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The first part consists of an introduction to the theory of computation and recursive function theory, including definitions of computable functions, Turing machines, partial recursive functions, recursively enumerable sets, the Kleene recursion theorem etc. The second part is a comprehensive study of recursively enumerable sets and their degrees.

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Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition) Review

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(More customer reviews)Contrary to some recent remarks from an apparently aggrieved reader, I think Six Degrees is actually quite different from most books claiming to cover new and exciting scientific developments. Far from being self-aggrandizing, I found it's tone remarkably humble and generous to others. Watts, in fact, is the first person to call his subject the "new" science of networks, and goes to considerable lengths to acknowledge, even glorify, his intellectual predecessors. He doesn't mention every scientist who has made contributions: it's not meant to be a text book, thankfully.
Watts also has bigger fish to fry than simply the importance of networks in everything under the sun. His real message is that social reality has to be understood both in terms of the way people are connected and also the way they behave. So focusing on individual behavior to the exclusion of their interactions misses half the story, but so does just focusing on the interactions (as much of network theory has done). It's true that many of the ideas are quite old (and Watts again is the first to point this out), but the way they are put together is new, and that is what is so interesting about it.
The results are often quite deep and thought provoking, which means you have to actually read the book to understand what's in it, but Watts always comes up with an entertaining anecdote or analogy to make even the hardest concepts palatable and interesting. Overall, it's a great, fun read about a fascinating subject that really makes you think. And what more can you ask from a book?

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