📖 Read Chapter 1: A Networked Public pages 3-27 of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

📖 Read Chapter 1: A Networked Public pages 3-27 of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

Book cover of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

Chapter 1 was pretty solid. This almost seems to me like it would make a good book for an IndieWeb book club.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

A national public sphere with a uniform national language did not exist in Turkey at the time. Without mass media and a strong national education system, languages exist as dialects that differ in pronunciation, vocabulary, and even grammar, sometimes from town to town.  

What I’m understanding about the text is that it was hard for Turkish to interact with one another since there was no official language and how these girls for enforced to master this one language.—beatrizrocio

I suspect that it wasn’t the case that they had trouble communicating via speech, but that the formal language was more difficult for them. Typically most languages have a “high” (proper) form and a “low” (colloquial) form. Think of it more like the King’s Standard English versus the speech of an illiterate inner-city youth. They can both understand each other, but one could read and understand the New York Times, but the other would have significant trouble.

December 26, 2018 at 12:33PM

Political scientist Benedict Anderson called this phenomenon of unification “imagined communities.”  

December 26, 2018 at 12:35PM

Technologies alter our ability to preserve and circulate ideas and stories, the ways in which we connect and converse, the people with whom we can interact, the things that we can see, and the structures of power that oversee the means of contact.  

December 26, 2018 at 12:37PM

As technologies change, and as they alter the societal architectures of visi-bility, access, and community, they also affect the contours of the public sphere, which in turn affects social norms and political structures.  

December 26, 2018 at 12:40PM

For example, in a society that is solely oral or not very literate, older people (who have more knowledge since knowledge is acquired over time and is kept in one’s mind) have more power relative to young people who cannot simply acquire new learning by reading.  

To a large extent, this is also part of the reason we respect our elders so much today, although this is starting to weaken as older people are increasingly seen as “behind the times” or don’t understand new technologies…

December 26, 2018 at 12:45PM

In her lifetime, my grandmother journeyed from a world confined to her immediate physical community to one where she now carries out video conversations over the internet with her grandchildren on the other side of the world, cheaply enough that we do not think about their cost at all. She found her first train trip to Istanbul as a teenager—something her peers would have done rarely—to be a bewildering experience, but in her later years she flew around the world. Both the public sphere and our imagined communities operate differently now than they did even a few decades ago, let alone a century.  

It’s nice to consider the impact of the technologies around us and this paragraph does a solid job of showing just that in the span of a single generation’s lifetime.

December 26, 2018 at 12:47PM

movements, among other things, are attempts to intervene in the public sphere through collective, coordinated action. A social movement is both a type of (counter)public itself and a claim made to a public that a wrong should be righted or a change should be made.13 Regardless of whether movements are attempt-ing to change people’s minds, a set of policies, or even a government, they strive to reach and intervene in public life, which is centered on the public sphere of their time.  

a solid definition of what a movement is

December 26, 2018 at 12:49PM

Governments and powerful people also expend great efforts to control the public sphere in their own favor because doing so is a key method through which they rule and exercise power.  

December 26, 2018 at 12:49PM

homophily  

December 26, 2018 at 12:57PM

If you cannot find people, you cannot form a community with them  

December 26, 2018 at 01:05PM

The residents’ lack of success in drawing attention and widespread support to their struggle is a scenario that has been repeated the world over for decades in coun-tries led by dictators: rebellions are drowned out through silencing and censorship.  

December 26, 2018 at 04:47PM

In his influential book The Net Delusion and in earlier essays, Morozov argued that “slacktivism” was distracting people from productive activism, and that people who were clicking on political topics online were turning away from other forms of activism for the same cause.  

December 26, 2018 at 04:58PM

Another line of reasoning has been that internet is a minority of the pop-ulation. This is true; even as late as 2009, the internet was limited to a small minority of households in the Middle East.  

December 26, 2018 at 05:05PM

Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally to affect the entire environment. In Egypt in 2011, only 25 percent of the population of the country was on-line, with a smaller portion of those on Facebook, but these people still managed to change the wholesale public discussion, including conversa-tions among people who had never been on the site.  

There’s some definite connection to this to network theory of those like Stuart Kaufmann. You don’t need every node to be directly connected to create a robust network, particularly when there are other layers–here interpersonal connections, cellular, etc.

December 26, 2018 at 05:07PM

Two key constituencies for social movements are also early adopters: activists and journalists  

December 26, 2018 at 05:08PM

Ethan Zuckerman calls this the “cute cat theory” of activism and the public sphere. Platforms that have nonpolitical functions can become more politically powerful because it is harder to censor their large num-bers of users who are eager to connect with one another or to share their latest “cute cat” pictures.  

December 26, 2018 at 05:13PM

Social scientists call the person connecting these two otherwise separate clusters a “bridge tie.” Research shows that weak ties are more likely to be bridges between disparate groups.  

December 26, 2018 at 05:18PM

As Ali explained it to me, for him, January 25, 2011, was in many ways an ordinary January 25—officially a “police celebration day,” but traditionally a day of protest. Although he was young, he was a veteran activist. He and a small group of fellow activists gathered each year in Tahrir on January 25 to protest police brutality. January 25, 2011, was not their first January 25 pro-test, and many of them expected something of a repeat of their earlier protests—perhaps a bit larger this year.  

This mirrors the story of the rape that preceded the Rosa Parks protests in Alabama several years prior and helped set the stage for that being successful.
It’s often frequent that bigger protests are staged to take place on dates/times that have historical meaning.

December 26, 2018 at 05:31PM

His weak-tie networks had been politically activated  

This makes me wonder if she’s cited Mark Granovetter or any of similar sociologists yet?
Apparently she did in footnote 32 in chapter 1. Ha!

December 26, 2018 at 05:37PM

or example, it has been repeatedly found that in most emergencies, disasters, and protests, ordinary people are often helpful and altruistic.  

December 26, 2018 at 05:53PM

However, that desire to belong, reflecting what a person perceives to be the views of the majority, is also used by those in power to control large numbers of people, especially if it is paired with heavy punishments for the visible troublemakers who might set a diff erent example to follow. In fact, for many repressive governments, fostering a sense of loneliness among dissidents while making an example of them to scare off everyone else has long been a trusted method of ruling.  

December 26, 2018 at 05:56PM

Social scientists refer to the feeling of imagining oneself to be a lonely minority when in fact there are many people who agree with you, maybe even a majority, as “pluralistic ignorance.”39 Pluralistic ignorance is thinking that one is the only person bored at a class lecture and not knowing that the sentiment is shared, or that dissent and discontent are rare feelings in a country when in fact they are common but remain unspoken.  

December 26, 2018 at 05:57PM

Thanks to a Facebook page, perhaps for the first time in history, an in-ternet user could click yes on an electronic invitation to a revolution.  

December 26, 2018 at 06:00PM

Only a segment of the population needs to be connected digitally  

Don’t forget the power of the “sneakernet”!

December 26, 2018 at 06:59PM

👓 The power to publish as an individual | DaveNet

Read The power to publish as an individual by Dave Winer (scripting.com via DaveNet)
Weblogs: A new source of News
An awesome “old” and prescient post about blogging and journalism. It’s interesting to look at this through the modern lens of social media and IndieWeb. Of course this article was written at a time when IndieWeb was the only thing that existed.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

media organizations would do well to incorporate them [blogs] into their Web sites as an important new addition to the journalistic toolkit.  

December 21, 2018 at 08:09PM

Regular readers of Gillmor’s eJournal will recognize his commitment to user participation. “One of the things I’m sure about in journalism right now is that my readers know more than I do,” he says. “To the extent that I can take advantage of that in a way that does something for everyone involved ó that strikes me as pretty cool.”
One fascinating aspect of Gillmor’s Weblog is how he lifts the veil from the workings of the journalism profession. “There have been occasions where I put up a note saying, ‘I’m working on the following and here’s what I think I know,’ and the invitation is for the reader to either tell me I’m on the right track, I’m wrong, or at the very least help me find the missing pieces,” he says. “That’s a pretty interesting thing. Many thousands more people read my column in the newspaper than online, but I do hear back from a fair number of people from the Weblog.”  

Awesomely, this sounds almost exactly like something that David Fahrenthold would tell Jay Rosen about Twitter nearly 16 years later in an interview in The Correspondent.
My listen post

December 21, 2018 at 08:20PM

Anyone who’s dealt with networks knows that the network knows more than the individual.”  

December 22, 2018 at 09:15AM

Man, this is a beast that’s hungry all the time.”  

Mind you he’s saying this in 2001 before the creation of more wide spread social networks.

December 22, 2018 at 09:18AM

While many blogs get dozens or hundreds of visitors, Searls’ site attracts thousands. “I partly don’t want to care what the number is,” he says. “I used to work in broadcasting, where everyone was obsessed by that. I don’t want an audience. I feel I’m writing stuff that’s part of a conversation. Conversations don’t have audiences.”  

Social media has completely ignored this sort of sentiment and gamified and psychoanalyzed its way into the polar opposite direction all for the sake of “engagement”, clicks, data gathering, and advertising.

December 22, 2018 at 09:22AM

“The blog serves as a kind of steam valve for me,” he says. “I put stuff out there that I’m forming an opinion about, and another blogger starts arguing with me and giving me feedback, and I haven’t even finished what I was posting!”  

An early written incarnation of the idea of blogs as “thought spaces”.

December 22, 2018 at 09:24AM

The Weblog community is basically a whole bunch of expert witnesses who increase their expertise constantly through a sort of reputation engine.”  

The trouble is how is this “reputation engine” built? What metrics does it include? Can it be gamed? Social media has gotten lots of this wrong and it has caused problems.

December 22, 2018 at 09:28AM

His dream is to put a live Web server with easy-to-edit pages on every person’s desktop, then connect them all in a robust network that feeds off itself and informs other media.  

An early statement of what would eventually become all of social media.

December 22, 2018 at 09:31AM

He suggests that struggling sites like Salon begin broadening their content offerings by hosting user-created Weblogs, creating a sort of farm system for essayists. “Salon could highlight the best ones on page one and invest time and effort in the ones that are inspiring and exceptional.”  

This is a rough sketch of something I’ve been thinking that newspapers and media outlets should have been doing all along. If they “owned” social media, we might all be in a better place socially and journalistic-ally than if advertising driven social media owned it all.

December 22, 2018 at 09:35AM

Indeed, Winer says his most gratifying moments come when he posts an entry without running the idea by his colleagues first. “It can be a very scary moment when you take a stand on something and you don’t know if your argument holds together and you hit the send button and it’s out there and you can’t take it back. That’s a moment that professional journalists may never experience in their careers, the feeling that it’s just me, exposed to the world. That’s a pretty powerful rush, the power to publish as an individual.”  

December 22, 2018 at 09:36AM

🔖 Networks by Mark Newman

Bookmarked Networks by Mark Newman (Oxford University Press; 2 edition)

The study of networks, including computer networks, social networks, and biological networks, has attracted enormous interest in the last few years. The rise of the Internet and the wide availability of inexpensive computers have made it possible to gather and analyze network data on an unprecedented scale, and the development of new theoretical tools has allowed us to extract knowledge from networks of many different kinds. The study of networks is broadly interdisciplinary and central developments have occurred in many fields, including mathematics, physics, computer and information sciences, biology, and the social sciences. This book brings together the most important breakthroughs in each of these fields and presents them in a coherent fashion, highlighting the strong interconnections between work in different areas.

Topics covered include the measurement of networks; methods for analyzing network data, including methods developed in physics, statistics, and sociology; fundamentals of graph theory; computer algorithms; mathematical models of networks, including random graph models and generative models; and theories of dynamical processes taking place on networks.

book cover of Networks by Mark Newman
I’ve been stockpiling episodes in my podcast queue for far too long, but Haley and Angie have been killing it on Human Current doing interviews with some of my favorite complexity systems thinkers. My listened to list is slowly growing. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend subscribing.

🎧 Episode 115 The Network Science of Success: An Interview With Albert-László Barabási | HumanCurrent

Listened to Episode 115 The Network Science of Success: An Interview With Albert-László Barabási by Haley Campbell-GrossHaley Campbell-Gross from HumanCurrent

In this episode, Haley talks with Albert-László Barabási. Barabasi is the Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science and a Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University, where he directs the Center for Complex Network Research. He is also a renowned author of several books including his newly released book, The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success, which he discusses in-depth during his interview. Barabási shares key takeaways and important lessons from his new book and research on the science of success. He also gives us insights from his journey of learning about and pioneering the young field of network science and shares his hopes for the future of this field.

Albert-László Barabási

🔖 The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert-László Barabási

Bookmarked The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success by Albert-László Barabási (Little, Brown and Company)

In the bestselling tradition of Malcom Gladwell, James Gleick, and Nate Silver, prominent professor László Barabási gives us a trailblazing book that promises to transform the very foundations of how our success-obsessed society approaches their professional careers, life pursuits and long-term goals.

Too often, accomplishment does not equal success. We did the work but didn't get the promotion; we played hard but weren't recognized; we had the idea but didn't get the credit. We convince ourselves that talent combined with a strong work ethic is the key to getting ahead, but also realize that combination often fails to yield results, without any deeper understanding as to why. Recognizing this striking disconnect, the author, along with a team of renowned researchers and some of the most advanced data-crunching systems on the planet, dedicated themselves to one goal: uncovering that ever-elusive link between performance and success.

Now, based on years of academic research, The Formula finally unveils the groundbreaking discoveries of their pioneering study, not only highlighting the scientific and mathematic principles that underpin success, but also revolutionizing our understanding of:
Why performance is necessary but not adequate
Why "Experts" are often wrong
How to assemble a creative team primed for success
How to most effectively engage our networks
And much more.

Caught an interesting reference to this in an episode of Human Current, but I’ve also recently finished his prior book Linked. I’ll likely read it, but I’ll probably wish I had read the relevant papers instead.

🔖 On random graphs by Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi (1959)

Bookmarked On Random Graphs. I by Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi (Publicationes Mathematicae. 6: 290–297.)

Original source of Erdős–Rényi model.

In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Erdős–Rényi model is either of two closely related models for generating random graphs. They are named after mathematicians Paul Erdős and Alfréd Rényi, who first introduced one of the models in 1959,[1][2] while Edgar Gilbert introduced the other model contemporaneously and independently of Erdős and Rényi.[3] In the model of Erdős and Rényi, all graphs on a fixed vertex set with a fixed number of edges are equally likely; in the model introduced by Gilbert, each edge has a fixed probability of being present or absent, independently of the other edges. These models can be used in the probabilistic method to prove the existence of graphs satisfying various properties, or to provide a rigorous definition of what it means for a property to hold for almost all graphs.

hat tip: Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

🔖 Collective Dynamics of Small-World Networks by Duncan J. Watts & Steven H. Strogatz

Bookmarked Collective dynamics of ‘small-world’ networks by Duncan J. Watts & Steven H. Strogatz (Nature | VOL 393)
Networks of coupled dynamical systems have been used to model biological oscillators1–4, Josephson junction arrays5,6, excitable media7, neural networks8–10, spatial games11, genetic control networks12 and many other self-organizing systems. Ordinarily, the connection topology is assumed to be either completely regular or completely random. But many biological, technological and social networks lie somewhere between these two extremes. Here we explore simple models of networks that can be tuned through this middle ground: regular networks ‘rewired’ to introduce increasing amounts of disorder. We find that these systems can be highly clustered, like regular lattices, yet have small characteristic path lengths, like random graphs. We call them ‘small-world’ networks, by analogy with the small-world phenomenon13,14 (popularly known as six degrees of separation15). The neural network of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans, the power grid of the western United States, and the collaboration graph of film actors are shown to be small-world networks. Models of dynamical systems with small-world coupling display enhanced signal-propagation speed, computational power, and synchronizability. In particular, infectious diseases spread more easily in small-world networks than in regular lattices.
hat tip: Linked: The New Science Of Networks by Albert-László Barabási

🔖 The building blocks of economic complexity | César A. Hidalgo and Ricardo Hausmann| PNAS

Bookmarked The building blocks of economic complexity by César A. Hidalgo and Ricardo Hausmann (PNAS)
For Adam Smith, wealth was related to the division of labor. As people and firms specialize in different activities, economic efficiency increases, suggesting that development is associated with an increase in the number of individual activities and with the complexity that emerges from the interactions between them. Here we develop a view of economic growth and development that gives a central role to the complexity of a country's economy by interpreting trade data as a bipartite network in which countries are connected to the products they export, and show that it is possible to quantify the complexity of a country's economy by characterizing the structure of this network. Furthermore, we show that the measures of complexity we derive are correlated with a country's level of income, and that deviations from this relationship are predictive of future growth. This suggests that countries tend to converge to the level of income dictated by the complexity of their productive structures, indicating that development efforts should focus on generating the conditions that would allow complexity to emerge to generate sustained growth and prosperity.
h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

🔖 Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital by Ronald S. Burt

Bookmarked Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital by Ronald S. Burt (Oxford University Press)
Almost everything that happens in a firm flows through informal networks builts by advice, coordination, cooperation, friendship, gossip, knowledge, and trust. In this book, Ron Burt builds upon his celebrated work on network analyses to explain how these informal networks functions and the role of network entrepreneurs who have amassed social capital. Burt shows that social capital is a critical element in business strategy. Who has it, how it works and how to develop it have become key questions as markets, organizations and careers become more and more dependent on informal discretionary relationships. Informal relations have always mattered. What is new is the range of activities in which they now matter, and the emerging clarity we have about how they create advantage for certain people at the expense of others. This advantage is created by brokerage and closure. Brokerage is the activity of people who live at the intersecting of social worlds, who can see and develope good ideas. Closure is the tightening of coordination on a closed network of people. Brokerage and Closure explores how these elements work together to define social capital, showing how in the business world reputation has come to replace authority and reward has come to be associated with achieving competitive advantage in a social order of continuous disequilibrium.
h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

🔖 The Strength of Weak Ties | American Journal of Sociology: Vol 78, No 6

Bookmarked The Strength of Weak Ties by Mark S. Granovetter (American Journal of Sociology 78, no. 6 (May, 1973): 1360-1380. https://doi.org/10.1086/225469)
Analysis of social networks is suggested as a tool for linking micro and macro levels of sociological theory. The procedure is illustrated by elaboration of the macro implications of one aspect of small-scale interaction: the strength of dyadic ties. It is argued that the degree of overlap of two individuals' friendship networks varies directly with the strength of their tie to one another. The impact of this principle on diffusion of influence and information, mobility opportunity, and community organization is explored. Stress is laid on the cohesive power of weak ties. Most network models deal, implicitly, with strong ties, thus confining their applicability to small, well-defined groups. Emphasis on weak ties lends itself to discussion of relations between groups and to analysis of segments of social structure not easily defined in terms of primary groups.
h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

🔖 Network medicine: a network-based approach to human disease | Albert-László Barabási, Natali Gulbahce & Joseph Loscalzo | Nature Reviews Genetics

Bookmarked Network medicine: a network-based approach to human disease by Albert-László Barabási, Natali Gulbahce & Joseph Loscalzo (Nature Reviews Genetics | volume 12, pages 56–68 (2011))

Abstract
Given the functional interdependencies between the molecular components in a human cell, a disease is rarely a consequence of an abnormality in a single gene, but reflects the perturbations of the complex intracellular and intercellular network that links tissue and organ systems. The emerging tools of network medicine offer a platform to explore systematically not only the molecular complexity of a particular disease, leading to the identification of disease modules and pathways, but also the molecular relationships among apparently distinct (patho)phenotypes. Advances in this direction are essential for identifying new disease genes, for uncovering the biological significance of disease-associated mutations identified by genome-wide association studies and full-genome sequencing, and for identifying drug targets and biomarkers for complex diseases.

Key points

  • A disease phenotype is rarely a consequence of an abnormality in a single effector gene product, but reflects various pathobiological processes that interact in a complex network.
  • Here we present an overview of the organizing principles that govern cellular networks and the implications of these principles for understanding disease. Network-based approaches have potential biological and clinical applications, from the identification of disease genes to better drug targets.
  • Whereas essential genes tend to be associated with hubs, or highly connected proteins, disease genes tend to segregate at the network's functional periphery, avoiding hubs.
  • Disease genes have a high propensity to interact with each other, forming disease modules. The identification of these disease modules can help us to identify disease pathways and predict other disease genes.
  • The highly interconnected nature of the interactome means that, at the molecular level, it is difficult to consider diseases as being independent of one another. The mapping of network-based dependencies between pathophenotypes has culminated in the concept of the diseasome, which represents disease maps whose nodes are diseases and whose links represent various molecular relationships between the disease-associated cellular components.
  • Diseases linked at the molecular level tend to show detectable comorbidity.
  • Network medicine has important applications to drug design, leading to the emergence of network pharmacology, and also in disease classification.
h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

🔖 A Dynamic Network Approach for the Study of Human Phenotypes | PLOS Computational Biology

Bookmarked A Dynamic Network Approach for the Study of Human Phenotypes by César A. Hidalgo , Nicholas Blumm, Albert-László Barabási, Nicholas A. Christakis (PLOS Computational Biology)
Author Summary: To help the understanding of physiological failures, diseases are defined as specific sets of phenotypes affecting one or several physiological systems. Yet, the complexity of biological systems implies that our working definitions of diseases are careful discretizations of a complex phenotypic space. To reconcile the discrete nature of diseases with the complexity of biological organisms, we need to understand how diseases are connected, as connections between these different discrete categories can be informative about the mechanisms causing physiological failures. Here we introduce the Phenotypic Disease Network (PDN) as a map summarizing phenotypic connections between diseases and show that diseases progress preferentially along the links of this map. Furthermore, we show that this progression is different for patients with different genders and racial backgrounds and that patients affected by diseases that are connected to many other diseases in the PDN tend to die sooner than those affected by less connected diseases. Additionally, we have created a queryable online database (http://hudine.neu.edu/) of the 18 different datasets generated from the more than 31 million patients in this study. The disease associations can be explored online or downloaded in bulk.
h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

🔖 Statistical mechanics of complex networks | Rev. Mod. Phys. 74, 47 (2002)

Bookmarked Statistical mechanics of complex networks by Réka Albert and Albert-László Barabási (Reviews of Modern Physics 74, 47 (2002))
Complex networks describe a wide range of systems in nature and society. Frequently cited examples include the cell, a network of chemicals linked by chemical reactions, and the Internet, a network of routers and computers connected by physical links. While traditionally these systems have been modeled as random graphs, it is increasingly recognized that the topology and evolution of real networks are governed by robust organizing principles. This article reviews the recent advances in the field of complex networks, focusing on the statistical mechanics of network topology and dynamics. After reviewing the empirical data that motivated the recent interest in networks, the authors discuss the main models and analytical tools, covering random graphs, small-world and scale-free networks, the emerging theory of evolving networks, and the interplay between topology and the network's robustness against failures and attacks.
h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)

🔖 Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and Reka Albert | Science

Bookmarked Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks by Albert-László Barabási, Réka Albert (Science)
Systems as diverse as genetic networks or the World Wide Web are best described as networks with complex topology. A common property of many large networks is that the vertex connectivities follow a scale-free power-law distribution. This feature was found to be a consequence of two generic mechanisms: (i) networks expand continuously by the addition of new vertices, and (ii) new vertices attach preferentially to sites that are already well connected. A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, which indicates that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of the individual systems.
h/t Disconnected, fragmented, or united? a trans-disciplinary review of network science by César A. Hidalgo (Applied Network Science | SpringerLink)