Customer Reviews

Nexus

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

The author makes a strong case that many diverse phenomena can be modelled in very similar ways. This book can be summarized as a very brief introduction to network models, followed by numerous examples from the real world.

The level of mathematical sophistication needed to comprehend the matterial is minimal. I do not believe there are any equations in the entire book. There are many easily understood graphs and a few percentages.

The basic concept of the networks is very easy to explain and to understand. The applications are the interesting part. Thoughout the pages are clear and interesting examples that make you want to turn the page to see what is coming next. In my case I often found myself thinking how I would have approached the problem and more importantly what problems could this have been applied to. Any book that can do that is a good one in my book!

Like many good books, this one leaves more questions unanswered than it answers. The subject area is a generic one that allows it's self to be applied in many many different fields. The question becomes not is this model of the world valid but rather how can it be applied.

This was a quick read, certain to change my views on how the world works.

I just finished reading Nexus right after I finished Steven Johnson's book, Emergence. Both are great, quick reads. The ideas are fascinating and build upon chaos theory that James Gleick gives a history of in Chaos, which is the last book I read that addressed topics such as complexity. It's a great thrill to receive journalistic reports on what has happened in the small-worlds theory and gaining a cursory understanding of its current and future applications. I also just started reading Harold Morowitz's The Emergence of Everything, which is interesting in its subject matter while the writing is much more austere than in Emergence and Nexus. I look forward to reading everything I can on the small-worlds, complexity theory-type popular science books.

The surprising answer is yes. I picked this book up after reading Steven Strogatz's Sync which mentions a great deal about the science of networks. Buchanan explains how networks exist everywhere - the net, the web, the power grid, our circle of friends, our sex partners - and that they are in fact very similar to one another.

The phrase "six degrees of separation" comes from the fact that two randomly chosen people, A and B, will on average be connected by six social links. A knows C who knows D who knows E who knows F who knows G who finally knows B. Considering the world has over 6 billion people, an average separation of 6 seems unbelievable small, but the explanation of this incredible phenomenon lies in the makeup of our social network. Our close friends know each other but our cluster of friends has weak ties to other clusters through acquaintances, people we really don't know that well - that's why when one is looking for a job, it's better to tell an acquaintance rather than a friend so that our inquiry can jump to other clusters. Our social network is essentially highly clustered but enough links exist between these clusters to allow us to jump from ourselves to any other person through just an average of six links. Buchanan shows us how this kind of network exists everywhere as mentioned above although he distinguishes between egalitarian networks where clusters are roughly the same size and aristocratic networks such as the WWW where gigantic hubs like Amazon.com exist that link to millions of websites.

One of the most interesting chapters in the book deals with sexual networks. It turns out that in the network of sex partners, certain people have a great many more links than the average person in the network. Buchanan explains how the structure of the sexual network actually accounts for the rapid spread of HIV. The virus spread quickly because the hubs in the network spread it to their numerous partners. In fact, it turns out that a significant percentage of the inital HIV cases had a sexual relationship with one particular flight attendant.

As I wrote in my review for Strogatz's Sync, we are entering an era of science where disparate fields of study are being linked because many phenomena that we used to regard as unrelated now appear to have very similar underlying bases. It is exciting to read books like Nexus because it illustrates this point. You should definitely read this book if your are interested in the science of networks and want to know how so many different phenomena are being explained by the same underlying principles.

In this book, Buchanan introduces to the non-expert audience one of the most recent and stimulating theories in the study of complexity: the theory of networks. The author does so by using a clear and fresh prose, deprived of specialistic mathematical terms. He will guide the reader through this theory and its many practical applications, being they in economy, epidemiology or ecology. The book is not exactly linear, somewhat jumping from one example to another and a few digressions are almost confusing. It is rich in information and very good references, although a couple of imprecisions about Euclid and Pythagoras had me frowning. However, being not too long, this book manages to get the reader to understand the points made and never ceased to surprise and interest me.
I recommend this book to the non-mathematician interested in complexity and theory of networks. The book will be an ideal starting point for further reading.

Buchanan makes the complex seem easy for the layman. The work of Watts and Strogats in discovering the mathematical proof of the the six degrees of separation concept is presented in an eminently readable and exciting way.
This proof, and Buchanan's description of it, is powerful evidence of the value of networking for the majority of us who don't like it or feel it is a waste of time. I recommend Nexus to my audiences in every Power of Positive Networking Seminar I deliver; people who have read it from my classes are truly dazzled. Darcy Rezac: author, The Frog and Prince.

Buchanan points out the hidden networks that tie together both the physical world and the world of consciousness, showing that amongst other things the Internet, electrical grids, the brain and the global economy are all systems with an underlying pattern that shares nature's design.

Physics, biology and other sciences have uncovered a multitude of unexpected connections between the operation of the human world and the functioning of other seemingly unrelated things. Many networks that seemed to be random are turning out to have a hidden order as revealed by the discipline of Complexity Theory.

The most interesting sections are those on the Internet, on the spread of AIDS and on economic systems. The author's conclusion is that many aspects of the world are indeed simpler than they appear on the surface and that there is a hidden and powerful design that binds everything together.

This fascinating book confirms many of the findings that I have encountered in other titles like Beyond Chaos by Mark Ward and Hidden Connections by Fritjof Capra. It concludes with a set of explanatory notes and a thorough index. Small World is a stimulating and thought provoking work.

After reading this book, you starting these "small worlds" everywhere in different parts of your daily lives. It's an eye-opener to an emerging field that we will all see a lot more of in the near future.

This book is quite an unassuming work, full of redundant repetitions, inadequate citations, examples nothing to do with the subject-matter, incoherent and obscure trains of thought and a lot of uninformative bla-blas and small-talks. Moreover, the text does not construe, not edited properly and literally worthless. A total bust, which can not be salvaged by the freshness and excitement of its issue.

Buchanan really does as promised by the jacket - discusses networks and their similarities in areas such as social, neural, financial, disease, and information. He focuses mainly on the "small-world" principal that we're all familiar with, (i.e. the Kevin Bacon game) and shows how other successful network type application use the same model, from worm neurons to taxes.
The book is extremely non-technical, and you don't need any prerequisite learning to enjoy it.

This book introduce to the science of networks and how they can improve our understanding tanks to the small-world theory.
It try to connect the most diverse area of knowledge to show they can be connected simply by small-world theory.
But what say this small world theory? it say that any well working network is a mix of clustering and weak links that tie distinct clusters together so i think it say that not only we have to make love and not war but that we also have always to remember and chat with ours first love!