HelloWorld

Synchronicity

I have finally got around to Linked. As I was reading it this morning, the strangest thing happened, one of those 'you couldn't make it up' moments.

I was reading at the breakfast table in the restaurant of the San Diego Marriott Hotel (I'm currently at the Popular Culture Conference) and had just reached an account of Malcolm Gladwell's work on measuring social networks (p.55):

He gives you a list of 248 surnames compiled from a Manhattan phone book and asks you to give yourself a point if you know anybody with that name. Multiples count, too: If you know three people named Jones, one of the names on the list, you get 3 points. Running the list by college students in the City College of Manhattan, most of them recent immigrants in their early twenties, Gladwell recorded an average score of 21. In other words, they typically knew about twenty-one people with the same surname as somebody on the list.

At this point, my waitress arrived. 'Room number, Ma'am?'

I gave her my room number.

'Last name?'

'Thomas' I said.

'Oh', she replied, surprisingly unsurprised. 'That's my boyfriend's last name.'

'Linked: The New Science of Networks' by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

Thanks to Nicholas Frota on Media Ecology for pointing me towards Linked: The New Science of Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi.

The sneak preview says:

This book has a simple message: think networks. It is about how networks emerge, what they look like, and how they evolve. It aims to develop a web-based view of nature, society, and technology, providing a unified framework to better understand issues ranging from the vulnerability of the Internet to the spread of diseases. Networks are present everywhere. All we need is an eye for them... We will see the challenges doctors face when they attempt to cure a disease by focusing on a single molecule or gene, disregarding the complex interconnected nature of the living matter. We will see that hackers are not alone in attacking networks: we all play Goliath, firing shots at a fragile ecological network that, without further support, could soon replicate our worst nightmares by turning us into an isolated group of species... Linked is meant to be an eye-opening trip that challenges you to walk across disciplines by stepping out of the box of reductionism. It is an invitation to explore link by link the next scientific revolution: the new science of networks.

Download Chapter One from the same page.

07 Links

Page 54
To watch Engelbart's movie now, across that very network which has explanded beyond belief, is a thrilling moment. But it's also an opportunity to scrutinise the typist in action. [] For the most part, he is conscious of the audience and produces a smooth presentation but every now and then the computer claims all of his attention and private smiles and frowns and queries flow over his features as he engages wholly with the system, muttering to himself, talking to the machine...

In the book I provide three urls in relation to these 1968 movies but in fact all of them are intriguing. See http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html