Monday, December 02, 2002

The problem of our epoch is the problem of the house. [ MIT Home of the Future Consortium ] 3:36:40 PM    comment []

Taking Liberties With Our Freedom. Law enforcement and big business were the big winners in the passage of the Homeland Security Act. Americans worried about the degradation of their civil liberties, were not. A commentary by Lauren Weinstein.   [ Wired News ] 9:39:25 AM    comment []

Scale-free networks and mirror worlds. I visited my local den of piracy in order to read Linked sooner than Amazon could ship it to me. Now I know more precisely what Clay Shirky means when he talks about "power law distributions" and "scale-free networks." An example of a power law distribution, as Clay noted in his ETCON talk on LiveJournal, is the way in which such networks display a "rich-get-richer" pattern of clustering. This is something Tim O'Reilly has often called attention to, as well. There is a kind of naive egalitarian notion that because links are free and everything is connected, all nodes are created equal. In fact, although it apparently never occurred to early network theorists, nothing could be further from the truth. As networks grow, new nodes don't attach themselves randomly. They prefer to connect to the nodes that are already the best-connected.   [ Jon's Radio ] 9:24:00 AM    comment []