Category: Nets ‘n’ webs

Take up the study of earthquakes, volcanoes or stock markets and the goal, whether voiced or not, is to find a way to predict future “events” in your field. In that sense, these guys have something in common with scientists who study traffic jams. The difference is that traffic experts might one day reach their…

Spider silk and silkworm silk are almost identical in chemical composition and microscopic structure. And yet spider silk is far tougher. “One strand of pencil thick spider silk can stop a Boeing 747 in flight,” say Xiang Wu and colleagues at the National University of Singapore. Whereas a pencil thick strand of silkworm silk couldn’t.…

The study of complex networks has given us some remarkable insights into the nature of systems as diverse as forest fires, the internet and earthquakes. This kind of work is even beginning to give econophysicists a glimmer of much-needed insight in the nature of our economy. In a major study, econophysicists have today identified the…

How will the next generation of search engines outperform Google’s all-conquering Pagerank algorithm? One route might be to hire Vwani Roychowdhury at the University of California, Los Angeles and his buddies who have found a fascinating new way to tackle the problem of website rankings.

One of the major goals in biology is to reconstruct the complex genetic networks that operate inside cells, and to “film” how these networks evolve during the course of an organism’s development. Today, Eric Xing and buddies at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh claim to have worked out how the way patterns of gene expression…

“Two identical chaotic systems starting from almost identical initial states, end in completely uncorrelated trajectories. On the other hand, chaotic systems which are mutually coupled by some of their internal variables often synchronize to a collective dynamical behavior,” write Meital Zigzag at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and colleagues o the arXiv today. And perhaps the…

Spotting communities within networks is a big deal. Not least for search engines that rely heavily for their results on the communities that form when websites point to each other. If a lot of websites point to another site then that proves it is of value. At least that’s what everyone has assumed. But links…

Wealth distribution in the western world follows a curious pattern. For 95 per cent of the population, it follows a Boltzmann Gibbs distribution, in other words a straight line on a log-linear scale. For the top 5 per cent, however, wealth allocation follows a Pareto distribution, a straight line on a log-log scale, which is…

The page views for entries on this site in the last week range from more than 17,000 thousand for this story to around 100 for this one. That just goes to show that when you post a blog entry and there’s no way of knowing how popular it will become. Right? Not according to Gabor…

If scientists are to study massive datasets such as mobile phone records, search queries and movie ratings, the owners of these datasets need to find a way to anonymize the data before releasing it. The high profile cracking of data sets such as the Netflix prize dataset and the AOL search query data set means…