Linked: The News Science of Networks (Review)
© 2002, Coert Visser Networks Nowadays, everybody talks about networks. Yet, what networks really are and how they function, often remains rather vague in conversations. Linked: The New Science of Networks , a new book by Albert-Laszlo Barabási, offers great insight into the evolution, the structure and the relevance of networks. The author, Albert Barabási, himself a creative and important contributor to network science, makes the rapid and fascinating advances made in this field comprehensible. The structure of complex networks Our world is filled with complex networks, webs of highly connected nodes. Not all nodes are equal, however. In fact, in many real-world complex networks, there is a typical hierarchy of nodes (called a POWERLAW DISTRIBUTION). This means there are a few extremely well connected nodes (these are called HUBS), there are quite a few moderately connected nodes and there are large numbers of tiny nodes (having very few connections to other nodes). The Internet,...