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

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

Customer Rating:
Summary: awesome read
Comment: This book describes networks and every thing about them. Duncan watts makes the subject accessible to everyone. I enjoyed it greatly.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The end of the beginning of a new science
Comment: "Six Degrees" is, above all, a story, told from the perspective of one of its personages: the story of the "newborn" science of networks. The narration counterpoints the development of the author's arguments, which are served in an appealing dish flavored with entertaining views on the backstage of academic research.

The author's "Odyssey" departs from his Ithaca, the actual town where Watts was studying crickets' synchronization, at Cornell University. While trying to understand the phenomenon, he applied the concept of network and unexpectedly, a new, vastly uncovered research field opened in front of him.
Key concepts as "emergence" and "networks" are introduced in the first chapter, followed by a passionate perspective on the precursors of the new science, from mathematical graphs to sociological structuralism and phenomena emerging in quantum physics (Chapter 2.)

Watts outlines the new insights that an interdisciplinary perspective can offers on different issues - from cultural fads to financial crises, from biological epidemics to technological systems breakdowns or organizations robustness and vulnerability - in terms of patterns of interaction between the elements of the networks of complex systems (Chapters 6-9.)

The first question that Watts tried to answer in this perspective is the Small-World Problem (Milgram, 1967.) An experiment, conducted by Milgram in the 60s, showed that the average path length (the hops between two elements in a network) in the USA social network is six: there are just six degrees of separation between anybody and anybody else. In absence of further data and power of calculation, the small-world problem remained a paradox for thirty years.

Watts and Strogatz created a network model balancing order and chaos to understand the dynamics underneath small-world networks, commencing a prolific academic debate on real-world networks (Chapters 3-5.)
Ink flowed since the first paper Watts and Strogatz wrote about it in 1998. They realized that different dynamics of very heterogeneous contexts (actors, micro-organism and power grid) could be interpreted as "small-world networks," where ordered links forming organized clusters alternates a few long distances shortcut links (in social networks, they are created by people affiliation to multiple different networks.)

As counterintuitive as it can be from a personal local perspective, the result is that, at a global level, each human being on the globe is actually connected with any other within a few hops. This is the main thought that Watts offers us to take the measure of the new findings that the science of networks could offer to an increasingly connected world.

Easily readable and stimulating, Watts' work might deceive just in a few passages that sound almost obsolete in the intellectual framework he's depicting as an epochal shift. People's interactions are "more real" then physic particles or galaxies; a "taxonomy" of networks is needed; social sciences and biology can bring some knowledge on the "essence" of the real phenomena in order to understand which network is more "useful"...

Useful to who, at which level? Are we broadening our awareness of phenomena interdependence just to be able to design, for instance, a better strategy for the enhancement of a firm efficiency? Well, probably that too, and future researches could focus both on the emergence of local phenomena as well as on their interconnections at multiple levels. As Watts writes toward the conclusion of his story, it's "the end of the beginning" of a new science: stay tuned.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Powerful introduction to network theory
Comment: This text is an introduction to the science of networks, addressed to the layman. In it, Duncan Watts sums up the most recent (until 2003) developments in network theory, offering summaries of actual scholarly papers written by him or other network scientists that an ordinary Joe would not otherwise have had the technical means to understand.
This text goes a little deeper into theory than [[ASIN:0393324427 Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Theory of Networks], a feature which - in my view - puts it in the "introductory science books" category rather than in the "popular science" one.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Real-world networks are the result of nonrandom structure
Comment: Random Graph Theory: Image throwing a box full of buttons on a table and then choosing a pair of buttons at random and connect them with a piece of string. What would the buttons look like over a period of time. "In particular, what features could we prove that all such networks must have?" If you pickup one of the buttons what would be its connected component? "The fraction of the nodes connected in a single component change suddenly when the average number of links per node exceeds one." If we add enough thread so each button has one thread the fraction of the graph that occupied by the largest component suddenly jumps from almost zero to one. A phase transition from unconnected to connected and the point this happens is called the critical point. "Phase transitions of one sort or another occur in many complex systems and have been used to explain phenomena as diver as the onset of magnetization, the explosion of disease epidemics, and the propagation of fads. In the particular case, the phase transition is driven by the addition of a small number of links right near the critical point that have the effect of connecting many very small clusters into a single giant component, which then proceeds to swallow up all the other nodes until everything is connected." "So the presence of a giant component means that whatever happens at one location in the network has the potential to affect any other location." "The line between isolation and connectedness is thus an important threshold for the flow of information, disease, money, innovations, fads, social norms, and pretty much everything else that we care about in the moder society. The global connectivity should arrive not incrementally but in a sudden, dramatic jump tells us something deep and mysterious about the world." Almost everything we know about complex networks tells us that "they are not random." "Nevertheless, if we would like to understand the properties and behavior of real-world networks, the issue of nonrandom structure is one that eventually has to be faced."

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Opens up the world
Comment: We used this book in a doctoral seminar addressing shifting practices of "meaning making" in a networked society. It was the one book that everyone agreed was outstanding in all areas: aside from the depth and level of scholarship in Watts's work, he also has an extremely approachable style, one that will make the book useful to scholars and laymen alike.

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