Ebook Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts
For everyone, if you intend to begin accompanying others to check out a book, this Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts is much recommended. As well as you should obtain guide Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts right here, in the web link download that we give. Why should be right here? If you really want other type of books, you will certainly always discover them as well as Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts Economics, national politics, social, sciences, faiths, Fictions, as well as much more publications are provided. These offered publications are in the soft documents.
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts
Ebook Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts
New updated! The Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts from the very best writer and publisher is currently offered right here. This is the book Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts that will certainly make your day checking out ends up being completed. When you are seeking the published book Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts of this title in the book shop, you could not discover it. The troubles can be the restricted versions Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts that are given up guide store.
Well, book Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts will make you closer to exactly what you are ready. This Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts will be always good buddy whenever. You may not forcedly to constantly complete over reading a book simply put time. It will certainly be just when you have downtime and investing few time to make you really feel pleasure with just what you read. So, you can get the significance of the notification from each sentence in guide.
Do you recognize why you should read this site as well as exactly what the relation to checking out publication Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts In this contemporary era, there are several means to acquire the e-book as well as they will certainly be a lot easier to do. One of them is by getting the book Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts by on-line as exactly what we inform in the web link download. Guide Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts could be a choice considering that it is so correct to your requirement now. To obtain guide on-line is extremely simple by only downloading them. With this chance, you could read guide wherever and also whenever you are. When taking a train, waiting for list, as well as awaiting somebody or other, you can read this on-line e-book Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts as a good pal again.
Yeah, reviewing an e-book Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts can add your close friends checklists. This is among the solutions for you to be effective. As recognized, success does not suggest that you have great things. Recognizing as well as understanding greater than various other will provide each success. Close to, the message as well as impression of this Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, By Duncan J. Watts could be taken and also selected to act.
The pioneering young scientist whose work on the structure of small worlds has triggered an avalanche of interest in networks.
In this remarkable book, Duncan Watts, one of the principal architects of network theory, sets out to explain the innovative research that he and other scientists are spearheading to create a blueprint of our connected planet. Whether they bind computers, economies, or terrorist organizations, networks are everywhere in the real world, yet only recently have scientists attempted to explain their mysterious workings.
From epidemics of disease to outbreaks of market madness, from people searching for information to firms surviving crisis and change, from the structure of personal relationships to the technological and social choices of entire societies, Watts weaves together a network of discoveries across an array of disciplines to tell the story of an explosive new field of knowledge, the people who are building it, and his own peculiar path in forging this new science.
- Sales Rank: #85704 in Books
- Brand: W. W. Norton & Company
- Published on: 2004-02-17
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.30" h x 1.00" w x 5.50" l, .73 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Features
Amazon.com Review
You may be only six degrees away from Kevin Bacon, but would he let you borrow his car? It depends on the structures within the network that links you. When the power goes out, when we find that a stranger knows someone we know, when dot-com stocks soar in price, networks are evident. In Six Degrees, sociologist Duncan Watts examines networks like these: what they are, how they're being studied, and what we can use them for. To illustrate the often complicated mathematics that describe such structures, Watts uses plenty of examples from life, without which this book would quickly move beyond a general science readership. Small chapters make each thought-provoking conclusion easy to swallow, though some are hard to digest. For instance, in a short bit on "coercive externalities," Watts sums up sociological research showing that:
"Conversations concerning politics displayed a consistent pattern .... On election day, the strongest predictor of electoral success was not which party an individual privately supported but which party he or she expected would win."
Six Degrees attempts to help readers understand the new and exciting field of networks and complexity. While considerably more demanding than a general book like The Tipping Point, it offers readers a snapshot of a riveting moment in science, when understanding things like disease epidemics and the stock market seems almost within our reach. --Therese Littleton
From Publishers Weekly
Watts, a Columbia University sociology professor, combines his own research in network theory with summaries of the work of others who he says are "collectively solving problems which cannot be solved by any single individual or even any single discipline." The result is a dizzyingly complex blend of mathematics, computer science, biology and social theory that, despite the best efforts at clarification, often remains opaque, buried in scientific language and graphs. The book also assumes a high level of unfamiliarity on the reader's part with the subject, treating phenomena like the 17th-century tulip craze or the "Kevin Bacon game" as fresh news. Even more surprising, however, are the significant omissions- there is not a single mention of "tipping points," for example, the subject of a recent bestselling book. The parts of the book dealing with the author's own research are strong on science, but frustratingly vague on the social network of scientists with whom Watts has worked. There are intermittent highlights in the scientific account, such as an explanation of why casual acquaintances are more likely to provide life-changing opportunities than best friends, or a look at how New York City's reaction to September 11 illustrates current thinking on network connectivity and disruption, but, despite an admirable effort to syncretize discoveries in several fields, the book as a whole is too dry to compete effectively with the popularized accounts that exist for each separate field. Illus.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Columbia sociology professor Watts sums up his groundbreaking work on the networks, from computers to terrorist cells, that shape contemporary life.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
I Liked It
By Calvin Professor
I picked up the book to get an introduction into social network theory. Unlike the other critics, I enjoyed the descriptions of his working relationships with others. The book provides good food for thought for the uninitiated, which includes me. I particularly liked his historical description of what was known prior to his research (graph theory, random graphs, Milgrams work). In particular, his use of contemporary events provided a foundation for understanding the significance to his work. I detected, and the author admits, that there were a few areas not fully substantiated yet.
There was one aspect particularly exciting for me. As a Christian, I revisited the Book of Acts after reading this book. I thought about the fact that if Christ had lived the 12 apostles might not have dispersed - they would have remained clustered in one group. Their disbursement was crucial to the proliferation of a network and in a sense provides another form of validating the author's thoughts on thresholds and cascading effects. An incredible mind was certainly at work!
I gave one start less than five, though, due to the author's tendency for age discrimination in the area of people doing graduate work. I started graduate school well into my forties. :-)
35 of 38 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent for its audience
By Michael Bishop
I wrote this book review as an assignment for a class. Its intended audience was sociologists unfamiliar with network theory. The intended audience for the book though is much wider. If you want the math, read academic journals.
In the first chapter of Six Degrees Duncan Watts notes that gossip, power outages, epidemics, even properties of the human brain such as consciousness are phenomena that may be understood as emerging from the interaction of their constituent elements. Through such examples, he calls attention to the broad applicability of his subject matter. Having provided this motivation, Watts spends much of first half of the book discussing what he knows best, "small world" networks. In the second half he presents a network perspective for a wide range of topics such as epidemics, externalities, speculation, social decision making, and organizations.
Like many academics marketing books to non-academics, Watts skillfully weaves his personal story with the science. His personal story is not only provided to keep laymen interested. Watts is now a member of the sociology department at Columbia University, but one can't help but wonder whether he identifies as a sociologist? How would other members of the discipline respond to a youngster whose PhD is in theoretical and applied mechanics who may never have read Durkheim? His early collaborators were mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists lodged in appropriate departments. Watts though, has become a strong proponent of interdisciplinary science, and he respectfully acknowledges research that has been done in anthropology, sociology, psychology and economics.
His first foray in the social sciences was inspired by the "small world" phenomenon. When two people are surprised to learn they have mutual acquaintances, someone often says, "It's a small world." In 1967, social psychologist Stanley Milgram decided to investigate how small the world really is. He tasked randomly selected residents of Boston and Omaha with getting a letter to a stockbroker who lived in Massachusetts. The rule was, they could only send the letter to people they knew on a first name basis. Amazingly, the letters that reached their destination usually did it in just 6 steps. This finding was then misconstrued and became the urban legend that there are six degrees of separation between any two people. Despite the widespread interest in the small world phenomena, little progress was made understanding it over the next thirty years.
Watts got interested in this problem when he was a graduate student in theoretical and applied mechanics. He and his advisor, Steven Strogatz, had been trying to understand how crickets' chirping becomes synchronized without a conductor cricket. Watts surmised that the timing of a cricket's chirp must be influenced by where it is located and the other crickets it is listening to. The ability to synchronize may depend on the structure of this network of crickets. The relationship between network structure and network phenomena such as synchronicity suddenly seemed broadly important, and he was surprised to learn how little mathematical attention it had garnered. Recalling the idea of "six degrees of separation," Watts and Strogatz turned to social networks and set about building simple models. Where Milgram had asked, "How small is the world?" they were now asking, "What does it take to make a world small?" This reframing of the problem was fundamental to the contribution they were to make.
Watts and Strogatz settled on modeling just two facets of social networks. One was the "small world" aspect, quantified as average path length (the number of links required to connect two randomly chosen people). The second was clustering, the extent to which my friends overlap with my friends' friends. What makes small world networks surprising is that short path lengths and high clustering are inherently antagonistic. Paul Erd?s and Alfred R?nyi rigorously proved that path lengths are short in networks with no inclination towards increased clustering, a random graph in the parlance of mathematicians. At the opposite extreme, if everyone was friends with all of their friends' friends, short path lengths would be impossible (in fact social groups would be completely disconnected from each other). After countless computer simulations, Watts had two important results. The alpha model captured the small world balance of path length and clustering. The beta model showed that if a network was systematically clustered, to the point of fragmentation, just adding five random links (edges) halves the average path length. He then began acquiring and examining network data sets. Remarkably, Hollywood actor collaborations, the neurology of C. Elegans, the power grid of the Western United States, interlocking boards of directors and the world wide web are all small world networks.
Next Watts reviews the work by L?zl? Barab?si, a physicist at the University of Notre Dame. His major contribution is research on scale free networks. Sociologists have long been concerned with questions surrounding the number of connections (degree) people have. Barab?si realized the importance of the degree distribution in a network. The degree distribution of many networks is approximately Poisson but Barabasi showed that the degree distribution of other important networks follows the highly skewed power-law. The distribution of wealth and the size of cities both fit this model. Furthermore he showed that this distribution will follow if the future growth rate is linearly related to the present size. This has obvious implications for these two examples and calls to mind Merton's Matthew Effect.
Barab?si's book, Linked, is similar to Six Degrees in that is geared to the general public and reviews many of the most important advances in network scholarship. Do Watts and Barab?si overstate their case? Rather than get bogged down in the semantic debate that is likely to arise from the claim to a "new" science, we should appraise the value of this line of research. It clearly has potential but Watts himself sometimes alludes to the difficulties in achieving that potential. Watts' work is mostly theoretical. Six Degrees offers a thought provoking network perspective on many topics but little help harnessing the theory in empirical work. Appropriate data may be hard to come by. Perhaps Watts has provided ideas that creative empiricists will find ways to exploit, but there are methodological challenges that may prove to be stubborn.
Despite some important exceptions such as Granovetter's Strength of Weak Ties sociologists have tended to take one of two approaches. One was to focus on the relationship between social structure and network structure. The other was to view network ties as sources of information or influence. This means exploring the association between position in a network, and a node's identity or power. Watts is right to call attention to the fact that these approaches usually ignored dynamics: changes in the network structure (changes in network connections), and what individuals do on the network (search for information, spread rumors, make decisions). Network data that captures these dynamics may be harder to come by.
Furthermore, large detailed datasets may be limited by the computational power available. Even simple computer simulations can be very computationally demanding. Threshold models of decision making, discontinuous phase transitions and cascades - many of the fundamental concepts in the study of networks are nonlinear. Proving the existence of causal relationships is always a challenge but these complex systems make a hash of everything. The measured effect of an independent variable, on average or at the margin, tells us little about the importance of that variable.
Despite a reasonable display of humility and respect, Watts should be criticized for the sociology he leaves out. Neither space limitations, nor a rush to publication can justify the gaps in his otherwise helpful recommendations for further reading. For example, Blau, Burt, Coleman, Homans, Laumann, Marwell and Oliver are conspicuously absent from the list. Perhaps this observation should not be overanalyzed but it does brings us back to how Watts will be received by sociologists and what impact he and scholars outside the discipline will have on sociology. It is hard for this reviewer to understand how anyone who reads this book could come away uncertain of the value of mathematics for theory development as well as empirical analysis. Model building can simplify and clarify, enhancing our intuition. Watts would never argue that all sociologists should drop what they're doing and begin running computer simulations, just that we should be open to such approaches. As he points out, "For any complex system, there are many simple models we can invent to understand its behavior. The trick is to pick the right one. And that requires us to think carefully, to know something about the essence of the real thing." Sociologists know something about the real thing. That's why we can't leave all the modeling to physicists and economists.
4 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Hungry after 1 hour...
By A Customer
Very interesting material, written in an entertaining conversational way.
When I was done, I had an empty feeling. Now what? Chapter 9 is perfect example of this. Watts explains how the Toyota production system almost ground to a halt because of a devastating fire at one of the key nodes [factories] in the supply network. Great story, but no details on how the network actually recovered from the disaster, or how others can use that experience to apply to their situations.
Overall a good, general introduction to network thinking. Read it along with "Linked" by Barabasi.
See all 49 customer reviews...
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts PDF
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts EPub
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts Doc
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts iBooks
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts rtf
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts Mobipocket
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts Kindle
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts PDF
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts PDF
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts PDF
Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, by Duncan J. Watts PDF
