Linked: The New Science of Networks [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)

by Albert-László Barabási (Author) "FEBRUARY 7, 2000, SHOULD HAVE BEEN a big day for Yahoo..." (more)
Key Phrases: more connected nodes, topological robustness, random network theory, World Wide Web, United States, New York (more...)

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st edition (May 14, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0738206679
• ISBN-13: 978-0738206677
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (99 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #70,059 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

223 of 256 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Cotton Candy--Lots of Air, Some Sugar, No Bibliography, June 3, 2002

By	Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)

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

75 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A New Mathematics and Its Applications, June 18, 2002

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

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.

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking, May 27, 2002

By A Customer

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.