http://www.physorg.com/news11611.html

This looks like it could be promising to trace terrorist networks throughout the culture they exist in. If only someone could get somebody at the NSA or pentagon to pull their head out of the sand.

The approach outlined in this paper is very similar to the methodology used at Sandia in 2003 for simulating terrorist attacks on the national bulk power grid. It was shown to be very effective for gaining insight for prepositioning spares, prioritizing site vulnerability analyses, etc.

Foolish me.

I thought it was fantasy when I took a Political Science course in college. Not the content, but the entirely inappropriate use of the word science.

I had a somewhat negative impression of the notion of "random contacts" when I read the beginning of the article on "The Physics of Friendships".

If they're successful in simulating real-world netwroks of humans, then foolish me.

In the many discussions of evolution which have and are taking place in PhysOrg Forum topics, some anti-evoltuionists whip up huge probabilities against certain phenomen in evolution using a randomness of factors.

In fact, so many of the collision and adhesive processes involved in genetics and evolution are not random, but are biased in particular ways because of such things as bonding energies.

I would have expected similar non-random factors to be involved in human intereactions.

As I noted above, fooolish me.

I liked the article a great deal.
However, it seems there may be some unclear areas.

I mention a comment posted on March 12, wherein the writer states:

"I would have expected similar non-random factors to be involved in human interactions."

This points back to a sentence within the article:

"...business managers can identify leaders or points that require an organizational change. "

We do not have to focus solely on business leaders. We do because we assume we know that they are motivated to perform the functions imputed to them; i.e., identify leaders or points and so on.

We could look at government leaders and say that government leaders could identify points requiring organizational change, such as a new plan for the New Orleans levees, or something effective for evacuation of all citizens.

However, this identifying requires a commitment to a goal which is not part of the model.
In the case of government leaders, we may say that these leaders need to subscribe to an ethical or moral goal which determines how they perform their functions. There exists a meta-language of Ethics which describes that for which they do their identifying and - we hope - changing for the better.

This, then, is the non-random factor involved in human interactions.

This is why the government would love to get your personal information. It becomes important to have banking information and any other information on all citizens if you are going to know what they will do when you announce new laws that restrict your freedoms and what will happen as they try to raise more revenue.

Find the original paper here Physical review letters.

Also the citation on the page has a mistake.. it's 088702, not 088701

The citation is incorrect. The number should be: 088702 not 088701.

DH.

The citation in the article to the original is wrong, the correct citation is:

System of Mobile Agents to Model Social Networks
Marta C. González, Pedro G. Lind, and Hans J. Herrmann
Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 088702 (2006)
http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v96/e088702

i have been working along similar lines
and it does not suprise me at all

i tried chasing up the link
but i end up with dead-ends:
i can't seem to get into contact with the authors
or view their computer resources

i am currently exploring Breve
as a modelling application
and wonder if there are others...

i am not good at this
and wonder if anyone can help....

thanks
email me [at] davidpinto [dot] org

thanks

Frank hit it on the head. This information is likely not news to a few agencies.

Fantastic upfront Article. But where is "The model"? And the rules?

I will try to connect my studies on online social networks with this thesis, see you soon.

NN

www.brandkraft.wordpress.com