- Def. of Graph
- Mechanisms – protocols of engagement
- Internet
- Natural webs
- Cultural
- Organic food
- Political/Economic
Def. of Graph
Mathematically, a network is a graph with a set of nodes and a set of pairs of nodes called edges.
What's the difference between graphs and networks? While a graph is an abstract mathematical object, a network is a real-world web with specific structural properties. These properties have been exploited to investigate the origin and evolution of networks and to study the processes taking place on them.
Mechanisms – protocols of engagement
This is an example of two communities, the basic entity that we refer to as a sustainable community (SC). In most cases there is very little communication between these communities. I envisage a network of sharing that will enable them to be far more effective as well as a larger network that will enable them to be supported by a larger community upon which they can call upon in times of need and use as a market for their products and services. This is the part of the space which the network will serve – enabling more effectiveness, to be utilitarian and beneficial to all members.
Internet
Scale free network
This is a collection of routes linked by various physical lines. Ideally, the Internet would be a growing network with no central control authority. However, there are certain "essential" nodes, often referred to as hubs, and these will have influence over, and access to, many of the nodes connected to it.
In the creation of a new seed, the basic node, or affinity group, two factors will determine whom to connect to: distance and bandwidth. While distance puts obvious constraints, bandwidth, which is a measure of the connection between the two people in a group, will typically be the dominant factor
The study of Internet topology is crucial to investigate the robustness of the network under failures, which involve nodes randomly, and attacks, which purposely decimate network hubs. If the network is highly connected and dominated by few hubs, then random failures are generally not problematic, but a successful attack on a vital hub would have Draconian effects.
Although the channels of communication are directed and controlled, what is being communicated and who hears it is controlled for the main part by the participants of this communication - until recently.
This has to be one of the most important issues to address in the creation of a sovereign, private, community driven and facilitated network.
The World Wide Web (Social)
This is a connected web in which nodes represent Web pages and edges are the hyperlinks between pages.
This type of network is known as unweighted, as it is makes no intrinsic difference to the network how many connections any page is linked to, except for mapping purposes. But the web continues to function if there is one link between the page or hundreds.
Most surveys of the web look at the connections between pages, or (see 2 below) the physical connections between the computers that make up the web (ie the internet).
Social networks (Social)
However, a dominant social force that arose, was the groupings that manifested the connections between people.
There are many types of social networks. Our family is one. Your social circle is another. Both provide good examples of interlinking networks, webs are they are commonly referred to. Or one could think of them as circles that intersect at a certain point. John, your best friend works at IBM. Jill, your girlfriend works for an NGO... etc.
Social networks link people according to various "affinities", like friendship, interests, work, desires, and more mundane activities, like shopping & entertainment. They are of extremely efficient mechanisms for the spread of information - both accurate and inaccurate - within groups, providing an accurate picture of the currents, both active and passive, in the ocean of human societies. They are wonderful tooos to better understand and anticipate the spread of ideas, innovatios, fads, as well as biological and computer viruses.
For instance, the dominant position of hubs in sexual networks -- people with an extraordinary number of sexual partners -- has been adopted as an explanation of the partially unexpected diffusion and persistence of AIDS epidemic, which defies the predictions of classical epidemic models based on the homogeneous, random network hypothesis. Indeed, due to their high connectivity, hubs are easy to be infected and, once infected, they potentially can pass the virus to all linked people.
Furthermore, social networks has been extensively used to measure the social standing of people participating in the network. The interpersonal directed links in a social network are interpreted as input-output channels for the transmission of influence, and the possibly negative weight of links captures the endorsement strength between individuals.
These social networks are tracked, and can be easily exploited for various goals - mainly marketing - and through this social information, influencing the emergent social, political, media and information networks.
Wether this exploitation is positive or negative is dependent on the intentions and goals of those wielding the information.
Some of these networks are made by nature, other are built by humans. All of them are webs without a spider: there exist no central authority that regulates their growth, but evolve in a self-organized and decentralized way.Complex Systems
The majority of the natural networks have existed for many years. Some of them (biological networks) have been here since millions of years. In the last years many researchers independently showed that real networks have similar topologies, regardless of their age, function, and scope, that elude the random world. Nature doesn't play dice, and neither should the human builders of networks.
It would behoove the architects of these social networks and communication systems to take a lesson from nature's book, and ensure that these networks are also no central authority that sits at the center of the web controlling its growth. That is highly effective for specific (and often short term) goals - the Finite Game. However, to play the Infinite Game, the network will need to be decentralised and self-regulating - which naturally emerges in complex systems
Natural webs
Food webs (Nature).
These are networks created by nature. In food webs, species are connected by links telling which species feeds on which other species. The links of these networks seldom go both ways, and hence food webs are also an example of directed networks.
Studying food webs is important to understand the ecosystem dynamics. For instance, ecologists believe that hubs of food webs are the keystone species of the ecosystem, paramount in maintaining the stability of the ecosystem. The ecosystem can easily survive if random species are deleted; if, however, hub species are removed, the ecosystem dramatically collapses.
Metabolic and protein networks (Nature).
The nodes of metabolic networks are simple molecules like water or ATP. The links are the biochemical reactions that take place between these molecules. Moreover, proteins can be viewed as nodes of a complex network in which two proteins are connected if they can physically interact.
Cultural
Jews
How the Jews managed to succeed after arriving penniless in a new culture. The rooted themselves in their own communities by only using all the services that the community offered them – exclusively. They purchased all their food from the community – as it has to be kosher. The education was provided by the community as they wanted their children to get a good Jewish education. (See the notes accompanying discourse on TOL). They taught them to read and write, to do arithmetic and to think critically, producing excellent doctors, accountants and lawyers, thus empowering them to both deal with the societies they found themselves in, and to be able to access essential services from within the community. In addition, when someone catered to a non-Jewish client, or worked for a non-Jewish employer, most of their earnings were pumped back into the community.
This enabled them to enrich their own communities, as more money was coming into the community then was bleeding out of it – that is, supply exceeded demand.
This structure has a number of qualities:
- It had a moral imperative that you could activate within the community. Thus there was recourse to a Rabbi who would make a moral decision about conflicts, rather than relying on an external legal process. If there was a need for that, then there were generally lawyers within the community who could advise the participants as well as the Rabbi.
- It becomes a self-sustaining and self-supporting structure that has minimal reliance on the greater surrounding community.
- When services were provided to the greater community, that energy would be used to enrich the Jewish community itself. This provides an example of the way in which we can extricate ourselves from our reliance on the old, current paradigm. A form of the “build it and they will come”.
Organic food
A simple example would be to only eat food that is organic, thus supporting the organic farmers.
If everyone in the network only ate organic food, then a web of organic food producers and suppliers and consumers would naturally emerge in the network. As the energy circulated amongst this group so it would reverberate along larger and larger segments in the network. Once a certain momentum is reached, it would become a major player in this space.
In the more advanced version, it would behove the network to have its own legal, educational, and other practitioners. Thus becoming enriched and thus more able to become itself self-sustaining and harmonic.
Political/Economic
Instance 7. Economic networks.
Markets can be viewed as a huge directed multi-relational network. Companies, firms, financial institutions, governments play the role of nodes. Links symbolize different interactions between them, for instance purchases and sales or financial loaning, and the weight of the links captures the value of the transaction.
Model of the Sovereign entity.
(See notes accompanying discourse on TOL).
The corporation is becoming a model of a sovereign entity. Though it is become “para-governmental” and is not guided by any other imperative than to survive and increase itself. It is a bit animal like, eat and reproduce – though as we all know that its food is not organic, but economic – lacking the “higher” skills of judgement, morality, social consciousness, etc.
That is one of the main reasons that we are speaking about it in terms of a nation, a nation being an entity that has a government, as a managing body, that is answerable to the members of the nation.
What if we declared this network a Sovereign entity with citizens, laws, codes of behaviour, etc? Just as the Jewish culture has created a culture that is in essence a sovereign nation.
I choose the concept of a nation, because our web has aspects of a nation, and that is why I sometimes speak of it as a community too. There are ways of “joining”, i.e. becoming a “citizen” of this nation; modes of behaviour required as well as ethical and moral imperatives’ embedded in the social fabric.)
Example: UN decade of the child.
In order to enable the voice of the children to be heard, the UN allowed a representative with full nation status to sit on the UN to speak for the rights of the children.
Sanctions & Boycotts
Sanctions are an agreement of the global community not to supply or interact with a country for moral reasons.
Boycotts are a willingness to do without certain things supplied by a group or company to which you have an objection, which is generally moral or ethical.
NOTE: Boycotts are better, because they are more personal. Through boycotts, once the critical mass is reached, we will be able to effect much change very quickly. As the call to arms has stated, “We vote with our dollars”. Meaning by the purchasing choices we make, we can affect the suppliers who are driven purely by the profit motive.
Example: SA Breweries
An example of this was SA during Apartheid when sanctions were imposed on it, became more self-reliant because it could not rely on the global community to supply all its needs.
A side effect was also that a lot of the local companies emerged from Apartheid cash-rich, and became global in their reach by buying up a lot of other companies when sanctions were lifted. An example of this was SA Breweries.
Example: Bowling for Columbine:
Michael Moore got K-Mart to agree to stop selling bullets for the automatic weapons that had been used in the Columbine massacre. North American Rifle Association boycotted K-Mart and it went down.
Usage: Coca cola principle
Speaking to boycotts, in a business environment, which runs according to the equations of profit, if you could mobilise a critical mass of people to declare sanctions, it would have an immediate effect on profit. The CEO would notice the rapid loss of sales and negotiate to “Make what they want, or they won’t buy”. In a sense it is speaking the language of the driving force of our society.
Instance 4. Language networks.
In these networks the nodes are words and the links represent relationships among words like significant co-occurrence in texts.
Instance 5. Citation networks.
An article citation network links scholarly papers through bibliographic references contained in the bibliography of the papers. This network is directed and follows the temporal ordering of papers: we cite the past, not the future. Hence, cycles are very rare, and a citation network closely resembles a directed acyclic graph.
Moreover, papers may be aggregated at different levels, forming bibliometric units like scholars and journals. These bibliometric units can play the role of nodes is a citation network, with edges representing the citations among them.
Usually, such a network is weighted, with the weight of an edge representing the number of citations between the journals participating in the edge.
Citation networks are fundamental tools in bibliometrics, the discipline that concerns itself with the study of the dissemination of knowledge through academic publication. In particular, bibliometric indicators like the PageRank-inspired Eigenfactor take full advantage of the topology of journal citation networks.
Citation networks arise also in different contexts like patents and corresponding citations and published opinions of judges and their citations within and across opinion circuits.
Instance 9. Powerline and airline networks.
These are human-made networks. Failures may have cascading effects: the failure of one node may recursively provoke the failure of connected nodes. The topology of the network directly influences the magnitude and reach of such events.