Aamas 2004 blog

Posts Tagged ‘worlds’

This book is very hard for non-numerate individuals (like myself, a law student). I picked it up after reading Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age (Open Market Edition), hoping I would find longer – but equally accessible – explanations of those concepts that are sketched in the latter.
Unfortunately, I didn’t. The book is essentially a presentation of the modelling techniques used by Prof. Watts in arriving to the theory of Small Worlds. A thorouhg understanding would require truly firm foundations in statistics, graph theory and topology. Without that, you’ll probably be able to understand at most twenty pages (out of 241).
If you have read Six Degrees, you’ll still find some useful and still accessible discussion on multidimensional scaling, i.e. on the problem of measuring social distance, which Watts later discusses in Six Degrees with reference to the problem of search in networks. However, that’s just about it.
My two-star rating is by no means meant to criticise Prof. Watts’s ideas, or the substantial contentions he makes in the book (very few of which I was able to understand from a mathematical point of view, due to my faulty background). Deserving two starts, instead, are the Editorial reviews, which are hugely misleading. This is not “aimed at a wide audience”. Or, better, it is aimed at a wide audience of MATHEMATICIANS. It is a technical one, and that would need to be made explicit.
Small Worlds The Dynamics

The Glorious Cause The As a Canadian, I was not that exposed to the American Revolution in school. I recall us covering Washington on the Potomac, Bunker Hill, and Benedict Arnold but only basic, propaganda-like content …

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