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Title: Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks by Mark Buchanan ISBN: 0-393-04153-0 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: May, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.32 (19 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A good introduction to an extremely important subject
Comment: Networks have become a very hot topic, as shown by the spate of recent books on the subject. Nexus, Mark Buchanan's recent work on "small worlds and the groundbreaking science of networks" is one of the more readable and less sensational takes on the theme.
Buchanan, a physicist, science writer and editor at Nature and New Scientist, has the credentials to know what he is writing about and the ability to present it coherently. He starts with the now famous "small world" or "six degrees of separation" observation, first made in the 1960s and since studied and demonstrated in a variety of important, real-world networks. Buchanan's thesis is that physicists and mathematicians are discovering some remarkably simple laws that describe a huge number of complex systems, quite independently of the elements that make up the system. For example, The linkages that connect everyone in the world with just six steps can be treated the same way as the linkages that connect neurons in our brains or web pages on the internet. "Some of the deepest truths of our world may turn out to be truths about organization," Buchanan writes, "rather than about what kinds of things make up the world and how these things behave as individuals."
Building on this theme, Buchanan systematically explores areas such as the spread of infections diseases, key social and governmental systems, brain organization, protein-based control networks within our cells, and even networks of sexual partners. Similar features, especially the "power-law" distribution, characterize all these systems. Whether the issue is the number of sexual partners, the number of chemical reactions, or the number of connected neurons, a few key elements account for a large percentage of the connections within each system. Buchanan shows how this grows out of a simple common dynamic characterized by the age-old observation that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Buchanan then goes on to trace some important implications of these emerging findings. These include the vulnerability of ecosystems to sudden collaps when a few key plants or animals are lost, the explosive transformation of a slumbering pathogen into a deadly epidemic, as seen in AIDS, and--economists and would-be-reformers take notice--the distribution of wealth. Buchanan shows that, although the exact percentages vary from country to country, the shape of the wealth-distribution curve is the same. And he demonstrates that this distribution can be shown to stem from a few extremely simple assumptions. I was struck by Buchanan's observation that economic polices that foster business and trade, including regressive taxation as a kind of enforced exchange, produce a flatter, more democratic distribution of wealth. On the contrary, an environment that fosters speculation inevitably transfers wealth from the poor to the rich. It turns out that the more volatile the investment markets, the more extreme the transfer. This certainly seems to match what the U.S. experienced during the savings-and-loan bust and the recent dot-com debacle. More people riding around in limos, for sure, but far more people trying to eke out a living flipping burgers. I'd sure like to see our economists and lawmakers pay attention to that finding.
In short, this is a clear, readable and fascinating introduction to the emerging science of networks. Since we are made of networks, and live embedded in them, it's hard to imagine a more relevant subject. Nexus certainly doesn't supply the last word on this complex subject, but it's a rewarding place to start.
Robert Adler, author of Science Firsts: From the Creation of Science to the Science of Creation (Wiley & Sons, September, 2002).
Rating: 5
Summary: Terrific book, Fascinating ideas!
Comment: Former Nature editor Buchanan (Ubiquity, 2001) takes an intriguing, accessible look at the mathematics behind the "six degrees of separation" theory. In 1998, Cornell mathematician Duncan Watts was focused on a seemingly non-mathematical problem. In New Guinea, male fireflies by the millions perch on trees at night and flash their lights to attract females in perfect synchrony. With his advisor, Steve Strogatz, Watts was working on "graph problems," a special mathematical term describing any collection of dots connected by lines. The fireflies are the dots. Their coordinated lighting indicates information transfer, which is the equivalent of connecting lines. Watts and Strogatz's breakthrough was to see the structural similarity between the fireflies and the theory that the world's six billion people are all connected by six degrees of separation. Degrees of separation are the number of steps needed to get from one randomly selected dot to another. Watts and Strogatz showed that when networks of connected dots have a high degree of order to their clustering, the degree of separation is correspondingly high; adding random links, however, radically shrinks the degree of separation. Networks, in other words, combine order and chaos to form "small worlds." Subsequent chapters maneuver through Watts and Strogatz's work as they explain the form of the Web, the food chain, epidemiology, income distribution, and many other disparate networks. By adding the evolution of the network as a second variable, Buchanan derives two basic types of small worlds: the "aristocratic," in which the concentration of connections goes through a few "hubs"; and the egalitarian, in which connections have no particular concentration. He suggests that small-worlds theory should change the way we think about social policy. Despite the author's penchant for distracting digressions, a terrific, essential addition to the library of popular-science books.
Rating: 5
Summary: Networks of sex partners and the Net-Are they really related
Comment: 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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Title: Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Albert-Laszlo Barbasi ISBN: 0452284392 Publisher: Plume Pub. Date: 29 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts ISBN: 0393041425 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: February, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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Title: Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order by Steven Strogatz ISBN: 0786868449 Publisher: Hyperion Press Pub. Date: 05 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson ISBN: 0684868768 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 10 September, 2002 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold ISBN: 0738206083 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: 15 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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