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augusti 19, 2003
Barabasi om det amerikanska strömavbrottet
Albert-Làszlò Barabasi skrev häromdagen om det amerikanska strömavbrottet i We're All on the Grid Together.
Something will be inevitably missed, however, during all this finger-pointing: this week's blackout has little to do with faulty equipment, negligence or bad design. President Bush's call to upgrade the power grid will do little to eliminate power failures. The magnitude of the blackout is rooted in an often ignored aspect of our globalized world: vulnerability due to interconnectivity.
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Cascading failures are common in most complex networks. They take place on the Internet, where traffic is rerouted to bypass malfunctioning routers, occasionally creating denial of service attacks on routers that are not equipped to handle extra traffic. We witnessed one in 1997, when the International Monetary Fund pressured the central banks of several Pacific nations to limit their credit. That started a cascading monetary failure that left behind scores of failed banks and corporations around the world.
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Most failures emerge and evaporate locally, largely unnoticed by the rest of the world. A few, however, percolate through our dense technological and social networks, hitting us from the most unexpected directions. Unless we are willing to cut the connections, the only way to change the world is to improve all nodes and links.
I sin bok Linked har Barabasi skrivit mycket mer om dessa fenomen (komplexa nätverk). Se även Amazom-länk.
Posted by hakank at augusti 19, 2003 09:38 FM Posted to Social Network Analysis/Complex Networks