Database Reference
In-Depth Information
GIL DER'S L AW
The technologist George Gilder conjectured that the communication capacity triples every
12 months at constant cost (see Figure 1.6).
POWER LAW AND SMALL-WORLD NETWORKS (SWNs)
The phenomenon of networks is pervasive, and they deeply affect all aspects of human life
and relationships. Networks matter because local actions have global consequences, and the
relationship between local and global dynamics depends on the network structure. The idea
of small worlds is applicable to diverse problems—community of prospects or customers,
organizations, national markets, global economy, flying routes, postal services, food chains,
electrical power grids, disease propagation, ecosystems, language, or firing of neurons. In
1998, Cornell mathematician Duncan Watts with his advisor, Steve Strogatz, recognized
the structural similarity between graph problems describing any collection of dots con-
nected by lines and
◾
The coordinated lightning of fireflies
◾
The 1967 idea of sociologist Stanley Milgram that the world's six billion people are all
connected by six degrees of separation, that is, the average number of steps needed to
get from one selected person to another is six
They showed that when networks of connected dots have a degree of order to their cluster-
ing, the degree of separation is correspondingly high, but adding random links shrinks the
degree of separation rapidly. Real-world networks are far from being a bunch of nodes ran-
domly linked to each other; instead, a few well-connected hubs keep most of the networks
together. They showed that networks operate on the Power Law, the notion that
a few large
interactions carry the most action
or
the rich get richer
! This explains why the Internet is domi-
nated by a few highly connected nodes or large hubs such as Yahoo! or Amazon.com as also
the dominance of Microsoft Windows on desktops. Similarly, in a separate context, a few
individuals with extraordinary ability to make friendships keep the society together.
Thus, networks combine order and randomness to reveal two defining characteristics of
the
small worlds networks
: local robustness and global accessibility. Local robustness results
from the fact that excepting the hubs, malfunctioning at other smaller nodes does not dis-
rupt or paralyze the network; it continues to function normally. However, paradoxically, the
elegance and efficiency of these structures also make them vulnerable to infiltration, failures,
sabotage, and, in case of the Internet, virus attacks.
Infosphere
The implications of Moore's Law and Metcalfe's Law lead me to conceive of the concept of
Infosphere
along with the other factors like
◾
Pervasiveness and convergence of information technology (see Section 1.2.1.2
“Convergence: From Marketplaces to Market Spaces”)
◾
Ubiquity of the Internet (see Chapter 9's note “The Significance of the Internet”)
◾
Application Service Providers (ASPs) (see Chapter 14, Section 14.7 “Applications
Outsourcing” and also Kale 2014)
