Two University of Minnesota researchers have written a paper arguing that Metcalfe's Law, a rule of thumb that computes the value of communication networks, is overly optimistic.

Metcalfe's Law--a rule of thumb, really, that provided a rationale for aggressive expansion efforts during the dot-com boom--posits that the value of a network increases with the square of the number of devices in the network. But in a preliminary paper (click for PDF) published March 2, Andrew Odlyzko and Benjamin Tilly of the university's Digital Technology Center concluded that the law "is a significant overestimate." In one example, where the law would find a network's value increased 100 percent, their calculations found only a 5 percent enhancement.

Internet download speeds could be improved dramatically by mimicking Darwin's evolution to "breed" the best networking strategies, say computer scientists.

Transferring popular data across the internet repeatedly can be inefficient and costly, so networking companies have developed ways of temporarily storing, or "caching", data at different locations to reduce costs and increase download speeds.

But figuring out where to store data and for how long is a complex problem. One solution might be to have caches "talk" to each other repeatedly, but this is inefficient as it takes up a lot of bandwidth.

To tackle the challenge, Pablo Funes of US company Icosystem and Jürgen Branke and Frederik Theil of the University of Karlsruhe in Germany used "genetic algorithms", which mimic Darwinian evolution, to develop strategies for internet servers to use when caching data. Using a simulation they were able to improve download speeds over existing caching schemes.

If you recall this sentence a few seconds from now, you can thank a simple network of neurons for the experience. That is the conclusions of researchers who have built a computer model that can reproduce an important aspect of short-term memory.

The key, they say, is that the neurons form a "small world" network. Small-world networks are surprisingly common. Human social networks, for example, famously connect any two people on Earth - or any actor to Kevin Bacon - in six steps or less.

Properties like this have made them the focus of much research. It turns out that regardless of the size of these networks, any two points within them are always linked by only a small number of steps.

Scale-free networks are everywhere. The can be seen in airline traffic routes, connections between actors in Hollywood, weblog links, sexual relationships, and terrorist networks. So what exactly is a scale-free network? A scale-free network is one that obeys a power law distribution in the number of connections between nodes on the network. Some few nodes exhibit extremely high connectivity (essentially scale-free) while the vast majority are relatively poorly connected. The reason that scale-free networks emerge, as opposed to evenly distributed random networks, is due to these factors:

* Rapid growth confers preference to early entrants. The longer a node has been in place the greater the number of links to it. First mover advantage is very important.
* In an environment of too much information people link to nodes that are easier to find. This preferential linking reinforces itself by making the easier to find nodes even more easy to find.
* The greater the capacity of the hub (bandwidth, work ethic, etc.) the faster its growth.

The Strength and Weaknesses of Scale-Free Networks
The proliferation of scale-free networks and our increasing dependence on them (particularly given their prevalence in energy, transportation, and communications systems) begs the question: how reliable are these networks?

A new immunization strategy could help to prevent disease epidemics without blanket vaccination, suppress computer viruses, and even break up terrorist networks. At least, so say its designers.

All you need do is choose people at random and treat some of their friends, suggest Reuven Cohen, of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, and his colleagues1.

"Friends just aren't normal," agrees Mark Newman, a networks specialist at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. "Friends are, by definition, friendly people, and your circle will be a biased sample of the population because of it."

I link, therefore I am.
- Unknown

Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged - people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't. Everything is deeply intertwingled.
- Ted Nelson

Nature always tends to act in the simplest way.
- Bernoulli

When BTexact Technologies, BT’s advanced communication technologies business, QinetiQ, one of Europe’s largest science and technology solutions providers and the Ministry of Defence, set out to collaborate in making the most effective possible use of limited radio spectrum for the next generation in battlefield communications technology, their first step was to take inspiration from the natural world...

...Mimicking the flies’ own organisational attributes, the algorithm would allow base-stations in a mobile phone network to negotiate with each other and decide how the available radio frequencies will be divided up to meet the demand for calls without causing unacceptable interference. It would even ‘heal’ in the event of a base-station failure, totally negating the need for a central organiser to track events in the network and re-plan frequency use to accommodate faults and changes in demand.

It is less random than people thought

FEW questions are simultaneously so baffling and so significant as: ?what is the structure of the Internet?? Baffling, because the thing has grown without any planning or central organisation. Significant, because knowing how the routing computers that are the net's physical embodiment are interconnected is vital if it is to be used properly. At the latest count, there were 228,265 of these routers around the world. They direct the packets of data that make up Internet traffic.

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. What scientists generally do with a natural phenomenon that they do not understand is to build a model of it. Dr Barabasi's latest paper on the matter, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, presents a general framework for improving the accuracy of Internet models.

"Nature uses only the longest threads to weave her patterns, so that each small piece of her fabric reveals the organization of the entire tapestry."
-Feynman, The Character of Physical Law

An interesting article, Seeing and Tuning Social Networks, discusses how our natural senses have developed for apprehending what's in our immediate environment, but in today's increasingly complex world we'll need computerized tools to effectively deal with larger scale "network" issues.

The convergence of wireless communications technologies (such as wireless text messaging) and widely distributed networks is allowing social swarming on a scale that has never existed before.
In "Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution," due for release this fall, author Howard Rheingold envisions shifts similar to those that began to occur when people first settled into villages and formed nation-states. "We are on the verge of a major series of social changes that are closely tied into emerging technologies," he said.
Orig