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Pastimes : IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Volsi Mimir who wrote (434)	4/24/2003 8:59:28 PM
From: Volsi Mimir	Respond to of 480

called "super spreaders". These are people who appear to have infected scores of others, triggering outbreaks in different parts of the world. It is not known why they are so infectious – possibly because they shed large amounts of the virus or carry a particularly virulent form of it. Or those that are in contact with many people either sought after or essential in crossing paths......that would put SARS in the "six degrees of separation" if traced back. Small Worlds by Duncan J. Watts "This is a remarkably novel analysis, with implications for a broad range of scientific disciplines, including neurobiology, sociology, ecology, economics, and epidemiology. . . . The results are potentially profoundly important."--Simon A. Levin, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University "Theoretical research on social networks has been hampered by a lack of models which capture the essential properties of large numbers of graphs with only a few key parameters. All the dyads, triads and acyclic mappings which fill the social network literature lead merely to a long enumeration of special cases. The random graph models introduced by Watts provide a rich foundation for future analytical and empirical research. The applications to dynamics in part 2 illustrate the richness of these models and promise even more exciting work to come."--Larry Blume, Cornell University Everyone knows the small-world phenomenon: soon after meeting a stranger, we are surprised to discover that we have a mutual friend, or we are connected through a short chain of acquaintances. In his book, Duncan Watts uses this intriguing phenomenon--colloquially called "six degrees of separation"--as a prelude to a more general exploration: under what conditions can a small world arise in any kind of network? The networks of this story are everywhere: the brain is a network of neurons; organisations are people networks; the global economy is a network of national economies, which are networks of markets, which are in turn networks of interacting producers and consumers. Food webs, ecosystems, and the Internet can all be represented as networks, as can strategies for solving a problem, topics in a conversation, and even words in a language. Many of these networks, the author claims, will turn out to be small worlds. amazon.com (I'm getting answers from Amazon.....call me authoritative <g>)

To: Volsi Mimir who wrote (434)	4/24/2003 11:24:02 PM
From: kinkblot	Respond to of 480

What, no discount? He'll have to apply a lot of network theory to sell it at that price. He does have one thing going for him, though: Duncan Watts is one of those names that just sounds familiar. <g> I had always thought the theorem was just that you could always construct a path from the two endpoints in six steps or less. Which was, I believe, how it was used in a Seinfeld episode. I didn't realize that the original experiment involved passing information that guides the process. This didn't take long: vil.mcafee.com