In the 1980's, James Gleick's Chaos introduced the world to complexity. Now, Albert-László Barabási's Linked reveals the next major scientific leap: the study of networks. We've long suspected that we live in a small world, where everything is connected to everything else. Indeed, networks are pervasive--from the human brain to the Internet to the economy to our group of friends. These linkages, it turns out, aren't random. All networks, to the great surprise of scientists, have an underlying order and follow simple laws. Understanding the structure and behavior of these networks will help us do some amazing things, from designing the optimal organization of a firm to stopping a disease outbreak before it spreads catastrophically.In Linked, Barabási, a physicist whose work has revolutionized the study of networks, traces the development of this rapidly unfolding science and introduces us to the scientists carrying out this pioneering work. These "new cartographers" are mapping networks in a wide range of scientific disciplines, proving that social networks, corporations, and cells are more similar than they are different, and providing important new insights into the interconnected world around us. This knowledge, says Barabási, can shed light on the robustness of the Internet, the spread of fads and viruses, even the future of democracy. Engaging and authoritative, Linked provides an exciting preview of the next century in science, guaranteed to be transformed by these amazing discoveries.From Linked: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.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
How is the human brain like the AIDS epidemic? Ask physicist Albert-László Barabási and he'll explain them both in terms of networks of individual nodes connected via complex but understandable relationships. Linked: The New Science of Networks is his bright, accessible guide to the fundamentals underlying neurology, epidemiology, Internet traffic, and many other fields united by complexity.
Barabási's gift for concrete, nonmathematical explanations and penchant for eccentric humor would make the book thoroughly enjoyable even if the content weren't engaging. But the results of Barabási's research into the behavior of networks are deeply compelling. Not all networks are created equal, he says, and he shows how even fairly robust systems like the Internet could be crippled by taking out a few super-connected nodes, or hubs. His mathematical descriptions of this behavior are helping doctors, programmers, and security professionals design systems better suited to their needs. Linked presents the next step in complexity theory--from understanding chaos to practical applications. --Rob Lightner
From Publishers Weekly
Information, disease, knowledge and just about everything else is disseminated through a complex series of networks made up of interconnected hubs, argues University of Notre Dame physics professor Barabasi. These networks are replicated in every facet of human life: "There is a path between any two neurons in our brain, between any two companies in the world, between any two chemicals in our body. Nothing is excluded from this highly interconnected web of life." In accessible prose, Barabasi guides readers through the mathematical foundation of these networks. He shows how they operate on the Power Law, the notion that "a few large events carry most of the action." The Web, for example, is "dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, or hubs... such as Yahoo! or Amazon.com." Barabasi notes that "the fittest node will inevitably grow to become the biggest hub." The elegance and efficiency of these structures also makes them easy to infiltrate and sabotage; Barabasi looks at modern society's vulnerability to terrorism, and at the networks formed by terrorist groups themselves. The book also gives readers a historical overview on the study of networks, which goes back to 18th-century Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and includes the well-known "six degrees phenomenon" developed in 1967 by sociology professor Stanley Milgram. The book may remind readers of Steven Johnson's Emergence and with its emphasis on the mathematical underpinnings of social behavior Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point (which Barabasi discusses); those who haven't yet had their fill of this new subgenre should be interested in Barabasi's lively and ambitious account.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
49 of 52 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Hardcover
With so much buzz about Wolfram's book, great to see a book that DOES talk about NEW science. Barabasi, the top guy in the new science of networks, talks about what he knows best: complexity and networks, and how they affect our life. While an easy read, it is full of so many thought provoking ideas, that I'd read for a while and then have to put it down to reflect over the details of what I'd just read. Gladwell's tipping point was an entertaining read, but light on true understanding. Linked makes up the difference: it breaks new ground, offering the reader insight and research into the structure of networks in just about all fields and aspects of life. While Gladwell chats about connectors, people who are incredibly sociable and well-connected, Barabasi is the one who really gets to the heart of the matter. He discovered these connectors (he calls them hubs) while looking at the www (Yahoo and Google are some of those), and he shows that they are present in the cell, in the business world (Vernon Jordan), in sex (Wild Chamberlain), in Hollyood (Kavin Bacon) and many other networks. These hubs are not accidents, but they appear in all networks as a simple rich gets richer process is responsible for them.
If you REALLY want to grasp how ideas spread, how to stop AIDS, how to break down the Internet, how to use your neighbor's computer, how to make your website matter or how to became a board member in a big company, Linked is a good place to start. Barabasi breaks down a complex world into very simple, clear concepts. While I have read several books about 'new' science, this one is really about something new, exciting, and hard to forget. Highly recommend it.
277 of 319 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Updated 28 Dec 07 to add links.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is coherent, thoughtful, and tells a story about the emerging science of networks that anyone, who can read, can understand. This is a non-trivial accomplishment, so 4 stars.
However, the book is also--being brilliantly designed to be understood by the lowest common denominator, an undergraduate--somewhat shallow and empty.... especially when compared with Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", 1197 pages not counting the index, which is at the other extreme.
Although there are good notes, there is no bibliography, and the author fails to use network methodology to illustrate and document the emerging literature on networks--called citation analysis, this would have been a superb appendix to the book that would have taken it up a notch in utility.
Among the key points that the author discusses and which certainly make the book worth buying and reading, my above reservations not-with-standing:
1) Reductionism has driven 20th century science (and one might add, all other knowledge), with the result being that we have experts who know more and more about less and less--and )as CIA and FBI recently found)while leaving us devoid of generalists and multi-disciplinary artists and scientists who can "connect the dots" across these fragmented foci.
2) Contrary to the prevailing wisdom about networks being equally distributed and thus largely invulnerable to catastrophic meltdown, the author does a fine job of documenting the importance of selected "hubs", so important that their removal ultimately breaks the network down into isolated pieces. The functionality of the network, its strength, is also its weakness--vulnerability to deliberate attack against the hubs (the author does not mention the Internet domain directories except in passing while discussing a table error, but MAYEAST and MAYWEST would be two obvious directory hubs that could be better protected through replication).
3) The author inadvertently makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how to defend America against terrorism--discussing why no single authority can close down the Internet by fiat, he notes "The underlying network has become so distributed, decentralized and locally guarded that even such an ordinary task as getting a central map of it has become virtually impossible." LOCALLY GUARDED--this is the key phrase. Federalizing counter-terrorism, and using federal agents and computers at the state and local levels, will not be effective against terrorists in civilian guise within the homeland--only a complete extension of counterintelligence and counterterrorism methods to the state & local level--teaching them to fish for terrorists, rather than trying to catch the terrorists with federal trawlers, is the way to go.
4) The author flirts with what is known as nomadic computing, making the point that nodes built around individual people are becoming as important--some would say more important--in a networked economy than nodes built around static organizations. There is a useful general discussion of how "fitness" in a networked economy is a combination of speed and scalability as well as diversity of linkages. As a general rule, as the FBI found (and also CIA, INS, and the State Department), systems with a single hub resistant to initiative from the field offices will tend to be slow and ineffective.
Missing from this populist overview is a discussion of the vital importance of geospatial information. While the author helpfully notes the Earth is increasingly covered by an electronic "skin" with millions of measuring devices, with experts predicting that by 2010 there will "around 10,000 telemetric devices for each human on the planet" (one suspects this refers only to privileged humans, not the billions of dispossessed that lack telephones, never mind computers), he does not take the next essential step, which is to note that in the absence of an XML-GEO standard and a global push to associate geospatial as well as temporal tags with all data, much of what we collect will, like the trillions of bits we have collected with secret satellites, never get processed in a meaningful manner.
This is a helpful book that will be of value to the general reader at the elementary (adult) level.
See also:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
World Brain (Essay Index Reprint Series)
The Wisdom of Crowds
An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it is coherent, thoughtful, and tells a story about the emerging science of networks that anyone, who can read, can understand. This is a non-trivial accomplishment, so 4 stars.
However, the book is also--being brilliantly designed to be understood by the lowest common denominator, an undergraduate--somewhat shallow and empty.... especially when compared with Stephen Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", 1197 pages not counting the index, which is at the other extreme.
Although there are good notes, there is no bibliography, and the author fails to use network methodology to illustrate and document the emerging literature on networks--called citation analysis, this would have been a superb appendix to the book that would have taken it up a notch in utility.
Among the key points that the author discusses and which certainly make the book worth buying and reading, my above reservations not-with-standing:
1) Reductionism has driven 20th century science (and one might add, all other knowledge), with the result being that we have experts who know more and more about less and less--and )as CIA and FBI recently found)while leaving us devoid of generalists and multi-disciplinary artists and scientists who can "connect the dots" across these fragmented foci.
2) Contrary to the prevailing wisdom about networks being equally distributed and thus largely invulnerable to catastrophic meltdown, the author does a fine job of documenting the importance of selected "hubs", so important that their removal ultimately breaks the network down into isolated pieces. The functionality of the network, its strength, is also its weakness--vulnerability to deliberate attack against the hubs (the author does not mention the Internet domain directories except in passing while discussing a table error, but MAYEAST and MAYWEST would be two obvious directory hubs that could be better protected through replication).
3) The author inadvertently makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how to defend America against terrorism--discussing why no single authority can close down the Internet by fiat, he notes "The underlying network has become so distributed, decentralized and locally guarded that even such an ordinary task as getting a central map of it has become virtually impossible." LOCALLY GUARDED--this is the key phrase. Federalizing counter-terrorism, and using federal agents and computers at the state and local levels, will not be effective against terrorists in civilian guise within the homeland--only a complete extension of counterintelligence and counterterrorism methods to the state & local level--teaching them to fish for terrorists, rather than trying to catch the terrorists with federal trawlers, is the way to go.
4) The author flirts with what is known as nomadic computing, making the point that nodes built around individual people are becoming as important--some would say more important--in a networked economy than nodes built around static organizations. There is a useful general discussion of how "fitness" in a networked economy is a combination of speed and scalability as well as diversity of linkages. As a general rule, as the FBI found (and also CIA, INS, and the State Department), systems with a single hub resistant to initiative from the field offices will tend to be slow and ineffective.
Missing from this populist overview is a discussion of the vital importance of geospatial information. While the author helpfully notes the Earth is increasingly covered by an electronic "skin" with millions of measuring devices, with experts predicting that by 2010 there will "around 10,000 telemetric devices for each human on the planet" (one suspects this refers only to privileged humans, not the billions of dispossessed that lack telephones, never mind computers), he does not take the next essential step, which is to note that in the absence of an XML-GEO standard and a global push to associate geospatial as well as temporal tags with all data, much of what we collect will, like the trillions of bits we have collected with secret satellites, never get processed in a meaningful manner.
This is a helpful book that will be of value to the general reader at the elementary (adult) level.
See also:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration
Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging World in Cyberspace
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
World Brain (Essay Index Reprint Series)
The Wisdom of Crowds
An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths
86 of 96 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
What do sexually transmitted diseases, the World Wide Web, the electric power grid, Al Queda terrorists, and a cocktail party have in common? They are all networks. They conform to surprising mathematical laws which are only now becoming clear. Albert-Laszlo Barabasi has helped discover some of those laws over just the past five years, and though they are some pretty abstruse mathematics, he has written a clear and interesting guide to them, _Linked: The New Science of Networks_ (Perseus Publishing). Not only has he attempted in this book to bring the math to non-mathematicians, he has shown why the work is important in down-to-earth applications.
It is important for those multitudes who have no taste for math to know that this is not a book full of equations; Barabasi knows that for most of his readers, doing the math is not as important as getting a feel for what the math does. He explains the basic history of network theory, and then shows how his own work has turned it into a closer model of reality, a model that most of us will recognize. Networks are all around us, and they are simply not random. Some of our friends, for instance, are loners, while others seem to know everyone in town. Some websites, like Google and Amazon, we just cannot avoid clicking on or being referred to, but many others are obscure and you could only find them if someone sent you their addresses. Barabasi calls these "nodes" with such an extraordinary number of links "hubs," and he and his students have found laws of networks with hubs, showing such things as how they can continue to function if random nodes are eliminated but they fragment if the hubs are hit. Barabasi is currently doing research to show what intracellular proteins interact with other proteins, and true to form, some of them are hubs of reactions with lots of others. Finding the hubs of cancerous cells, for instance, and developing ways of taking them out, show enormous promise in the fight against cancer. And finding the hub terrorists in Al Queda in order to take them out would be the best way to eliminate the network.
Barabasi obviously enjoys drawing examples from all over, and because of his ability to link them, his book is a pleasure to read. He also shows how this type of mathematics is being done, by conference in obscure European locales and by e-mail. He shows how "eureka" insights by his students have propelled the new science, and he is full of good stories from a teacher. In fact, he is a good teacher, and those who follow along here will have reason to be glad to join, if only in the role of isolated nodes, into this network of mathematical thought.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting but poorly written
This book has a lot of interesting information about the structure of the Internet. Unfortunately, it was poorly written. Read more
Published 10 days ago by Jason A. Griggs
5.0 out of 5 stars
great text - gets you thinking.
required reading for my Advanced GIS Class. But it is an easy read and thought provoking. Great on the Kindle. especially now that I have a Kindle Fire HD. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Daniel
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great Intro To Social Network Analysis
I read this book when taking a course on Social Network Analysis as an introduction to the various mathematical concepts explained in plain terms. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Chicago Reader
4.0 out of 5 stars
The presentation is conversational, mostly clear and enlightening.
I ordered this book for my Kindle. It was easy to order and I am enjoying reading about the "marvels" of network theory. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Myron Gottlieb
3.0 out of 5 stars
Read Bursts Instead
Good book, but not nearly as seminal as bursts. This book has great findings, but unless you're a mathematician, you'd need a lot of background work to understand this.
Published 3 months ago by Jason
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good read
Very interesting book on how everything is related to everything else. The author does a nice job explaining hubs, connections, and interrelated topics.
Published 3 months ago by Brandon D. Freeland
3.0 out of 5 stars
Novelty Wore Off
These nonfiction books are often times very enlightening and entertaining for all 300 pages, other times they only manage to do this for about 100 pages. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Jowanza
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but could be better.
The book gave me a pleasant surprise to his half where the subject is presented in a comprehensive and enjoyable way. Read more
Published 7 months ago by Joao C. Santiago Fh
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mapping the Internet
This book is about the peculiar results obtained when the author set out to "map the internet". Just as we have maps of cities and towns it would be useful to know how to get from... Read more
Published 12 months ago by Nick Danger
4.0 out of 5 stars
How everything is connected to everything else.
This book, while it discusses the research of Dr. Barabasi, is enjoyable and easily understandable to anyone regardless of their previous knowledge or math abilities. Read more
Published 13 months ago by Mary
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 58
books:
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49
books
cite this book:
See all 49 books citing this book
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell on page 55, and Back Matter
- Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig on page 173, and Back Matter
- Fragile Dominion: Complexity And The Commons (Stanislaw M. Ulam Lecture Series) by Simon Levin in Back Matter
- Discrete Mathematics (5th Edition) by Kenneth A. Ross in Back Matter
- The Mind and Society by Vilfredo Pareto in Back Matter
See all 58 books this book cites
- Google's PageRank and Beyond: The Science of Search Engine Rankings by Amy N. Langville on page 30, and Back Matter
- Information Technology: Strategic Decision-Making for Managers by Henry C. Lucas Jr. on page 405, and Back Matter
- Power Laws, Scale-Free Networks and Genome Biology (Molecular Biology Intelligence Unit) by Eugene V. Koonin in Front Matter, and page 83
- Critical Infrastructure Protection in Homeland Security: Defending a Networked Nation by Ted G. Lewis on page 71, and page 270
- New Wealth: Commercialization of Science and Technology for Business and Economic Development by George Kozmetsky on page 38, and Back Matter
See all 49 books citing this book
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