Ascription is an Anathema to any Enthusiasm

If there was any doubt that Microsoft’s buisness model is at it’s heart a Talent Scrapping business. Consider their slogan.

“Your Potential. Our Passion.”

People often complain that Microsoft doesn’t innovate. Of course not, that’s not the business they are in. It out to be “Your innovations. Our Passion” or “Your innovations. Our Potential.” or “You innovate ‘em. We bank ‘em.”

It’s amusing to note that the culture of Microsoft is fixated on how smart they are. They are of course smart in a particular way. Smart at talent scrapping. It is a pretty smart thing to have decided to specialize in. It must always lead to a bit of self doubt.

This is a wonderful paper. Your one stop shopping for all things network-science. Seventy five pages of overview! Dozens of pages of bibliography! Enjoy!

1 Introduction

1.1 Types of Networks

1.2 Other Resources

1.3 Outline of the Review

2 Networks in the Real World

2.1 Social Networks

2.2 Information Networks

2.3 Technological Networks

2.4 Biological Networks

3 Properties of Networks

3.1 The Small-World Effect

3.2 Transitivity or Clustering

3.3 Degree Distributions

3.3.1 Scale-Free Networks

3.3.2 Maximum Degree

3.4 Network Resilience

3.5 Mixing Patterns

3.6 Degree Correlations

3.7 Community Structure

3.8 Network Navigation

3.9 Other Network Properties

4 Random Graphs

4.1 Poisson Random Graphs

4.2 Generalized Random Graphs

4.2.1 The Configuration Model

4.2.2 Example: Power-Law Degree Distribution

4.2.3 Directed Graphs

4.2.4 Bipartite Graphs

4.2.5 Degree Correlations

5 Exponential Random Graphs and Markov Graphs

6 The Small-World Model

6.1 Clustering Coefficient

6.2 Degree Distribution

6.3 Average Path Length

7 Models of Network Growth

7.1 Price
				

By way of Making Light this marvelous essay on printing. In high school we took a field trip to the New York Times. The Linotype machines were in the next room. Hot, dangerous. In that room you were right at the narrow point in the bottleneck. The throat down which all that journalism flowed thru on it’s way to my parent’s breakfast table. The danger, the hot lead, the diversity of specialized crafts seemed entirely appropriate. Disintermediating these bottlenecks certainly triggered a mess of displacement.

I see that Comdex is dead. Another intermediary who’s time is passed. There was a time when Comdex was the hub of the computer industry; the place were buyer and seller would meet. The folks that ran Comdex used to be able to charge everybody. They would charge the sellers, the buyers, the hotels, the venues. Lots of power at the bottleneck.

When electronic type setting came along the unions negotiated a contract that assured jobs for their children. I wonder what the Comdex guys got; if anything.

Braudel’s marvelous History of Capitalism reports that in the middle ages seasonal fairs would emerge and grow huge and specialized. Villages in France would be entirely turned over to trading some good, horses for example, for a week or two a year. The entire of Europe’s horse industry would descend on the town. And then mysteriously one year or over a period of just a few years it would stop. Some other way for the buyers and sellers of horses to find each other would displace the market fair. I’ve watched that happen to MacWorld, Comdex, Sears. I wonder if it will ever happen to eBay?

Impressive! Yes indeed! My readers are so insightful. Rarely does a group gather so blessed by insight. Each of you nurtures a thirst for candor. Your self awareness keeps you immune from the wiles of sycophants. I’m proud to know you.

This book is a hoot!

Equally amusing is the evolution of it’s cover over the years.

The second golden age is at hand. The court of the Sun King is making a come back. Best to brush up on the flattering skills.

oh. Did I mention? Your the best!

Yeah. Notice how the neat vs. scruffy debate in computer science is related to this:

Bricolage: “(French, ‘doing odd jobs’). A characteristic (according to C. Levi-Strauss) of the early human mind, in contrast to modern scientific thinking. But bricolage is entirely rational (i.e. not pre-rational) in its own way. He introduced the term in The Savage Mind. A bricoleur is one who improvises and and uses any means or materials which happen to be lying around in order to tackle a task: ‘The bricoleur is adept at executing a great number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools, conceptualized and procured specifically for this project; his instrumental universe is closed, and the rule of his game is to make do with the means at hand.’ In the making of myth, bricolage is the use of whatever happens to be ‘lying around,’ so that myth is both rational and improvisatory.” — www.bloomington.in.us/~okolicko/definitions.html

The book I’m reading about Self Efficacy attempts to define efficacy but Garrison Keiler put it well: “The ability to get up and do what needs to be done.” The book labors with some success to block out subspecies of efficacy. For example that ability to get stuff done within the limits of what is at hand v.s. the ability to get stuff done while bending the rules and reworking materials at hand.

I am effective if I bend a coat hanger to keep the hotel window held open at night. To me a coat hander is just a source of soft iron wire. To me that is an act of the first kind; a simple shaping of materials at hand. To the hotel it may appear instead a bit of rule bending bordering on vandalism. Category making in this kind of discussion ain’t easy, which is why the book is labored and long - I guess.

Another suggested partitioning: efficacy via collective vs. individual action. The author reveals his personal and culture preference for the individual. b He sorts the individual before the collective. So in his view collective action is an exception handler for failed individual efficacy. Should the means above prove insufficient then you might shift over to collective action. Using politics to rewrite the rules presumably. That’s too narrow a model of what collective action is good for; there is of course a bricolage of collective action.

All these means of achieving goals form camps: inside/bend/outside the rules; inside/outside the individual/collective boundary. The camps then lay claim to the generic labels primitive or modern, scruffy or neat. The scruffies in computer science have always worn the label with pride; like the some people wear the label hacker. But then a group’s self label always means to entirely different things depending on the speakers membership in the group. When other non-programers call me a “programmer” they know not of what they speak.

Dragged a word into service from a foreign language, like bricolage, brings the possibility of freeing up the discussion. Maybe? We should replace the term hacker with bricoleur. I kind of like that Levi-Strauss was using it to suggest savage.

Yeah! Let’s having an illustration.