langreiter.com plain, simple: 2002-06-02-linked

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2002-06-02-linked

CREATED BY chris • LAST EDITED BY chris 8240 days AGO

In our popular dept. New Sciences senza fine, today Mr Albert-László Barabási: "For many decades we believed that networks are random. Whenever we had to face a very complex system, such as people are connected by social links (society), chemicals in the cell connected by chemical reactions, webpages connected by URLs, we assumed that the links are thrown randomly around. In the last few years we learned that this is not the case. Instead, networks hide wonderful order and are described by rather rigid evolutionary laws. These laws lead to the emergence of hubs, nodes with an extraordinary large number of links, that partly dominate real networks but they also keep them together. For example, on the Web most people point to a few webpages, such as Google or Yahoo!; the web within the cell is held together by a few very active chemicals; in the economy a few companies, such as IBM or Microsoft, have economic links to an extraordinary number of other companies. The number and the size of these hubs is fundamentally determined by the network's size, and they are responsible for a large number of rather unexpected phenomena. For example, sexual hubs are responsible for turning AIDS from a local epidemic into a pandemic and these hubs make the Internet and the cell extremely resilient against failures."