Friday, October 04, 2002

So, can political networks operate the same way? The Economist: What does the Internet look like? Any effort to map the Internet is necessarily incomplete and out of date the moment it appears. Instead, Albert-Laslo Barabasi and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, in Indiana, treat the net as though it were a natural phenomenon. [Tomalak's Realm] The study says that treating all points against a virus has relatively little effect on the whole net as it is "scale free".  Treating a few important hubs, on the other hand, can impact the spread of a virus. So, if you look at political networks, can you infer that affecting the important "hubs" will have the greatest impact on the behavior of the whole network?  If this is true, is tv advertising similar to innoculating PC's against a virus? 2:18:17 PM