Linked

The past few days, I’ve also had the chance to skim through Albert-László Barabási’s Linked: The New Science of Networks, and it’s definitely an interesting book. It studies the evolution of networks (Internet, economies, cells, etc) and identifies common characteristics and principles.

Some things I’ve registered as I glanced through the pages: in networks hubs emerge – that is, nodes with considerably many more links than other nodes; the author talks about networks as “scale-free”, and I’m not sure exactly what that is, but I think it’s got to do with the growth of the network: that it doesn’t simply scale as it grows, but grows more organically. Also, links doesn’t form between nodes in a completely random fashion; it seems that the fact that links form by preference of the nodes is an essential property.

While networks are resilient to attacks, the fact that networks have hubs makes them vulnerable (if you can identify those hubs). Barabasi talks about the September 11 attacks as an attack between networks: the al-Qaeda network versus the Western economy network – with the World Trade Center as a hub; the attack towards that hub was intended to bring down the economy.

The book also talks about fads as the spread of some thing (an idea, a movie, a particular style of clothing) in a network, and discusses what makes a hit and what makes a flop. In the same context, viruses are discussed, so apparently there are commonalities there. I’d guess that the hubs are involved here. In the introduction, he talks about how Paul (or Saul, as his Hebrew name was) played an important role in the spread of Christianity. Apparently it started, in Jesus’ time, as a small sect with quite high qualifications for entry. Paul travelled all his life, visiting large communities (hubs) and sowing the seeds of Christianity there, thus enabling one of today’s largest religions.

No doubt an interesting book.