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conflux

The New York Times First Cells, Then Species, Now the Web
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"As the Internet continues to proliferate, it has become natural to think of it biologically � as a flourishing ecosystem of computers or a sprawling brain of Pentium-powered neurons. However you mix and match metaphors, it is hard to escape the eerie feeling that an alien presence has fallen to earth, confronting scientists with something new to prod and understand.

The result has been an eruption of papers scrutinizing this artificial network and concluding, to many people's surprise, that it may be designed according to the same rules that nature uses to spin webs of its own. The networks of molecules in a cell, of species in an ecosystem, and of people in a social group may be woven on the same mathematical loom as the Internet and the World Wide Web."

redux [07.27.00]
MSNBC Experts probe Net�s natural defenses
"The Internet�s organic structure explains why it�s so resistant to random failures, but researchers now say those same features make it vulnerable to cyberattacks. The findings could help security experts strengthen weak links in the Net�s chain.

"They found that samples of the World Wide Web didn�t have a random structure: Instead, the connections exhibited a hierarchy similar to that found in naturally occurring networks such as trees and living cells, with a small proportion of highly connected nodes branching off to a large number of less connected nodes. The structure was the same at different scales, meaning that the results could be extended to the Web as a whole, they said."

"Although the structure is particularly well-suited to tolerate random errors, it�s also particularly vulnerable to deliberate attack, they said. If just 1 percent of the most highly connected Internet routers or Web sites are incapacitated, the network�s average performance would be cut in half, said Yuhai Tu of IBM�s T.J. Watson Research Center.

�With only 4 percent of its most important nodes destroyed, the Internet loses its integrity, becoming fragmented into small disconnected domains,� he wrote in a commentary published in Nature."
Nature : Science Update The missing links
"In an exponential network, there is a well defined �average connectivity� for the nodes: most are connected by a certain number of links, and only a very few differ substantially from this average.

Barab�si�s team says that there is another common kind of network that has hitherto been neglected: the �scale-free� network, in which there is no meaningful average number of links - no �scale� to it, in other words. In a scale-free network the number of nodes with a given number of connections simply declines as that number of nodes increases. Many nodes are linked to the network via just one connection; fewer have two, even fewer have three, and so forth. Unlike an exponential network, there remain small but significant numbers of nodes with many connections."

"...a cyber-terrorist armed with a map of a scale-free network could deliberately focus their attack on the few most highly connected nodes. Knocking just a few of these out would disable just about all flow of or access to information for other users, breaking up the webs rapidly into isolated fragments. This is the Achilles� heel of the net, say the researchers, and defences against e-terrorism need to concentrate on making key nodes invulnerable."

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“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

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