Cathy Wang

In the article from WolrdChanging Blog it talks about Fractal Democracy.

small numbers of people, let’s say somewhere around 7 form the base cell of the organisation. Out of these, the group agrees on who represents their group will the best, and these selected persons form together with others who are selected to form the same kind of grouping, and these people then select one out of their group which goes up to the next level, where the same thing happens again. This method of distributing the will of the people is guaranteed to be totally representative, because it is the collective decision which ultimately feeds up to the top level, which irons out all the kinks.

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.

The concept of rich-get-richer is an application of the preferential attachment. In a sense, it’s the seniority of the first-comers. Because the first-comers have been in the network for longer, it’s more likely that they have more chance of being linked. While the chance of being linked is high, that means they will most likely be heavily linked. Following the preferential attachment law, they are more likely to be linked too. As new nodes join the network, these heavily linked nodes will be linked more and more and become a hub. The idea behind the fit-get-richer concept is not much different from the rich-get-richer except that it’s the latecomers that become the hub. The latecomers pass the pioneers to become bigger hubs. The example of that would be google. As the most popular search engine, google has more customers than … Read More »