Cathy Wang

As I mentioned in 43things, I would like to be more involved in physical and online communities. I have actually taken action in doing that. I am building a community website for a coffeeshop that has a strong community around it already. As I would like to put it, The physical space will reinforcement the online space, and the online space extends the interaction of the physical space. It’s a really tricky thing about community. The whole web 2.0 / social portal movement has pushed “community” into a buzzword. I am doing the coffeeshop’s website partially pro-bono as a way of giving back to what they have given me. (All the free wireless and all the warm coffees.)

Recently I read a post in a discussion thread by Filippo A. Salustri about Latour’s usage of agency. (I personally do not know … Read More »

What’s the 80/20 rule? Looking at the income distribution, we can find the existence of power law distribution. We all understand the idea of Pareto’s law of economics, which emerges from his understanding of 80% of the Italy land, was owned by only 20% of the population. The 80/20 rule then later emerges into different areas. Examples like, 80% of profits are produced by only 20% of the employees. 80% of customer service problems are created by only 20% of consumers. It might be hard to see the relation between the 80/20 law and power law in these examples, but we can clearly understand power law if we think about 80% of the money is made by 20% of the population. There are only very few rich people out there (We don’t have 10 Bill Gates or Mr. Trump running … Read More »

The idea of hub exists not only in the social network; moreover, it can be considered in an online space. Even though it is suggested by Barabasi that hub is nautrally formed, the question of “can we create hub?” emerged in my mind.

As I previously suggested, I have noticed the “key person” or the connector in a social context where a person that connects different clusters together. To think of the idea of hub in a cyberspace context, we can consider yahoo as a hub because there are so many page pointed to yahoo. If we were to create a person as a connector in a society, we would have to push the person to a very social level. (The example of social climbers who try to meet all different people all the time can be considered a creation of … Read More »

A real network is usually governed by the laws of growth and preferential attachment. The assumption of a network from Erdo and Renyi does not perfectly describe how real networks work. Their assumption describe a fixed number of nodes and all the nodes are equivalent so they are linked randomly to each other. If we only have a fixed number of nodes we’ll end up wit a static network. In real network, it is dynamic because there is always growth. New nodes are added into the network from time to time. This step underscores the fact that networks are assembled one node at a time. When new nodes are added in, they do not just link to any other random nodes. The nodes will more likely connect to the one that has more connected node. It also brings up the … Read More »

From the reading of Barabasi, the goal of graph theory can be considered as an aim to discover and catalogue the properties of the various graphs. I would like to see the formation of random graphs as a process of finding simple solution to a complex system.