As a result, with the success of the Lille line, optical telegraph lines were built over the entirety of France over the next twenty years or so. Napoleon loved the system, having his own portable station built which he carried with him on campaign. He also poured money into building more of the network. It wasn't cheap, because each station had to be manned by a highly-trained person, who observed the signal from other towers and knew how to pass it on. But the French system of fast communication was one of the key ingredients in France's success during the Napoleonic War, and so they hung onto it as long as they could. Claude Chappe himself remained in his position as the head of the system for over 30 years, until there was an administration change.

(note: most sociology analysis uses static networks, and fails miserably on nets that change over time as all do. here's some plausible start)

Abstract: Stochastic networks are a plausible representation of the relational information among entities in dynamic systems such as living cells or social communities. While there is a rich literature in estimating a static or temporally invariant network from observation data, little has been done towards estimating time-varying networks from time series of entity attributes. In this paper, we present two new machine learning methods for estimating time-varying networks, which both build on a temporally smoothed $l_1$-regularized logistic regression formalism that can be cast as standard convex-optimization problem and solved efficiently using generic solvers scalable to large networks. We report promising results on recovering simulated time-varying networks.

This key intuition, that economic activity is embedded, has led to a more normative or prescriptive agenda as well — not only is an embedded conception of economic activity more realistic, but it is also argued that embeddedness has significant advantages over market-like relations. Rather than search for partners, or monitor another’s performance, or write up hard-to-specify contracts—one might instead benefit from a more mutualistic and trusting relationship with increased joint effort, information and resource flow. Trust, in essence, forms a governance mechanism.

While the virtues of embeddedness are extolled, it seems that the other side of the argument gets short shrift. (This came to mind as I was reading the Bernie Madoff link that Fabio provided in the previous post.) In the Madoff case it appears that trust indeed was the relied-upon governance mechanism for the investment activity, and from what I have read (the Madoff wikipedia site has lots of details)

The Centre for Mobilties Research (CeMoRe) studies and researches the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of 'mobilities'. The concept of 'mobilities' encompasses both the large-scale movements of people, objects, capital, and information across the world, as well as the more local processes of daily transportation, movement through public space, and the travel of material things within everyday life.

e.g. better, faster, cheaper, pick any two; three reasonable conditions for a clustering algorithm that cannot be simultaneously satisfied

Thanks to everyone I saw there (cja, mayabe, dsobeloff, glee, srh) and especially to those who were young enough in 1987 to disagree with the networking orthodoxy of the time (because we had nothing to lose and everything to win).

This page shall become a platform for projects, knowledge, and experience related to free and open mesh networks. We want to provide informations and services covering everything in the range of technical to social aspects and visions to real-live examples.

Netomata makes networks more reliable and flexible by automating network configuration.

We build tools that generate complete configurations for the various devices that make up a network, starting from a simple, light-weight model of the network. Generating configurations in this manner provides a number of critical benefits by ensuring consistency, eliminating human errors, and easing both network expansion (increase in size) and evolution (increase in scope and capabilities).

Now Samuel Arbesman and colleagues at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, have developed computer models of social networking which show that the sheer size of larger cities generates disproportionately more connections between people with very different personalities and backgrounds. Such bonds tend to foster innovation as they link people with complementary skills, they say.

These findings suggest that there may be cognitive constraints on network size.

And if the sales representative comes to you and tries to sell you an LMS or (worse) an LCMS, ask them why you have to pay them so much money for something the web and web browsers do for free. If the sales representative tries to sell you online course and lessons, ask them whether it supports random access so students can use it when they want, even if they're not at school, or ask them where you can access the dynamic feed with daily updated content, or how easy it is to place images from the course content in your blog. If the sales representative tries to sell you learning design, ask for the open ended improv version, the game outliner, the simulation editor. When he shows you the software, ask him where the student content goes in, ask him to show you the blog aggregator.

Above is a network map of a portion of the US electric grid. Life is great if you live in one of the densely connected clusters using electricity generated nearby. Things start to get real complicated if energy needs to transferred from one cluster to another cluster in grid. Distance destroys. Electricity does not flow like information or water or oil. It is not easy to direct, and much electricity is lost to heat when transferred over long distances. On the internet, 100 packets sent from Cleveland all arrive in New York wholly intact -- not so with a 100 MW of electricity generated in Cleveland and sold to NY. Even more electricity would be lost going to Miami, and forget about LA. It makes no sense to transfer electricity made in Cleveland to Los Angeles -- most of it would be lost during the trip.

This on-line textbook introduces many of the basics of formal approaches to the analysis of social networks. The text relies heavily on the work of Freeman, Borgatti, and Everett (the authors of the UCINET software package). The materials here, and their organization, were also very strongly influenced by the text of Wasserman and Faust, and by a graduate seminar conducted by Professor Phillip Bonacich at UCLA. Many other users have also made very helpful comments and suggestions based on the first version. Errors and omissions, of course, are the responsibility of the authors.

Wikipedia’s incremental-growth model, apart from providing an in-vivo validation of Barabási’s scale-free network-development theory, suggests that the processes we have discovered may continue to shape Wikipedia in the future. Wikipedia growth could be limited by invisible subjective boundaries related to the interests of its contributors. Our growth model suggests how these boundaries might be bridged. Consider that references to nonexistent entries prompt creation of these entries and assume that all human knowledge forms a fully connected network. Through a breadth-first graph traversal or flood-filling process Wikipedia’s coverage will broaden, albeit over an uneven time progression.

We studied the entire Wikipedia corpus, 485 Gbytes of data, adding up to 1.9 million pages and 28.2 million revisions. Using a suite of tools we developed, we showed that the ratio of undefined to defined concepts in Wikipedia has been stable over time. Furthermore, we found that articles are added to Wikipedia in a collaborative fashion: Wikipedians often add a new article when they encounter a missing entry. Finally, we established that Wikipedia grows in a manner similar to that witnessed in a number of different areas, by having new articles linked to the most popular existing articles. This pattern of growth, called preferential attachment, has been used to explain the number of species per genus, the internet, the world-wide-web, scientific citations, collaboration networks between people, and others. It is the first time preferential attachment has been studied live at a structure of this size.

For secure name resolution, it is important that your DNS resolver uses random source ports. The box below will tell you if there is something you need to worry about.

What use is a friend if they don't click on your ad?

Small wonder that the Known Net of the distant future is also referred to by its users as "The Net of a Million Lies."

"Convoys Over the Life Course: Attachment, Roles, and Social Support."

Because the map shows networks rather than hierarchical standing, it is innately more community-enabling than a list, which automatically orders people into rankings or disconnected categories.

We see clusters of happy and unhappy individuals in the social network like blinking lights in this complex fabric that is made up of people where some people are happy and some people are unhappy and there is a kind of gray zone between them.

One of the things we will soon see is the rise of "peripheral networked scholarship" where every so often a displaced scholar will effect entire disciplines while operating almost entirely from within the networked environment.

Ypsilanti has a Meraki network up and running. Where are the high spots we need to hit to get it extended all the way to Ann Arbor?

In making Facebook's useless-information-production apparatus central, the real value of the network decreases.

how science self-organizes

Like companies dependent on their SEO’d Google PageRank, companies dependent on their NFO’d Facebook FeedRank will experience similar trauma when the algorithm unpredictably or inexplicably changes.

funding for facebook apps

organisational performance can be enhanced by judicious combinations of strong and weak networks. In general, weak ties are a source of novelty and creativity but strong ties are needed to turn creativity into marketable innovation.

valdis has a blog

sun data-center-in-a-box hurtling down the highway on a truck

hypothetical Emma Maersk container ship full of Sun data-center-in-a-box transit from Rotterdam to Melbourne; unlikely that you could insure this load

We needed to transfer six tapes a day and rapidly learned (the hard way) that the US Snail could
outperform the network in bandwidth and cost.

1970s bulk data transfer over Arpanet

original 1987 thread of station wagon full of bits

vint cerf 1987 "appleseed", 50 lbs of optical media carried at a walking pace

approximate "station wagon full of mag tapes" data rate

"To: Royce / As you can see, I added you as a nemesis on uSuckbook.com. "

Why is it that the strongest advocates of a networked economy fail to see the importance of communities, which they wrongly equate to social networks?

Next time someone asks you to help move furniture or asks for some serious advice from you, help them out. When you have a chance to connect one friend to another, make it happen. It might take you some time and effort - it might even make you grumble a b

Spread throughout my recent writing, a certain latent idea is lurking, incompletely articulated, which I summarize in the title: the individual is the new group.

"Networks work fine until they reach their capacity, then all sorts of strange things happen."

For example, sharing a single class had roughly the same effect on developing a new relationship as sharing a single mutual friend. Curiously, additional mutual friends counted for more than additional shared classes. And shared activities and friends cou

Social networks evolve over time, driven by the shared activities and affiliations of their members, by similarity of individuals' attributes, and by the closure of short network cycles

a message i forwarded about a project thomas krichel was doing in 1992.

more broadband subscribers in china than the usa happening next quarter !

network theory of value from Shannon Clark

dory leifer on the solution space for providing guest access to the net, wired or wireless.

boston seminar panel w/jenkins & benkler

shortest path through a graph

almost 70% of users have broadband, and DSL is growing way faster than cable.

12 Gigabit network appliance running Linux + custom network hardware.

for clustering discussion

turned into The Tipping Point

statistical physics and networks researcher

Paul Hartzog blog

on the routing of shipping containers through the Dubai megaport

"reverse engineer the attention networks"

high res scan of mark lombardi drawing