Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered a secret assignment to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that hve been appearing on the Internet. An entire subculture of people is obsessed with these bits of footage, and anybody who can create that kind of brand loyalty would be a gold mine for Cayce's client. But when her borrowed appartment is burgled and here computer hacked, she realizes there's more to this project that she has expected.

... me and my fiddle

A Solution for Blind Spots

"Try It: It Works! Some of the most serious preventable accidents occur because of blind spots while driving. Now there is a remarkable simple solution discovered by an engineer named George Platter. He presented his method at the prestigious Society of Automotive Engineers. The National Safety Council tested his theory and discovered, to their amazement, that it works! The method has been tested and fully endorsed by the National Safety Council as described in their September/October issue of Traffic Safety.

Here's how it works.

First, forget how we learned to adjust our outside mirrors by plopping behind the steering wheel and turning the mirrors so that we just saw the side of our car looking back at us in the mirrors. Instead, adjust the driver's side mirror by resting your head against the driver's side window and then turning the mirror so that you just see the side of your car. Once this is set, move to the center of the vehicle and turn the passenger side mirror so that you can just see the side of your car from the center of the vehicle. That's it. You won't see your own car in either mirror, yet what you will see is far better. Cars behind you show up as usual in the inside rearview mirror above the dash, but the instant the car leaves your field of vision from the rearview mirror the outside mirror picks it up. No. blind spot; no delays; no wondering where that car about to pass you has disappeared to--and no waiting a few seconds for the car that you just saw in your rearview mirror to show up in your outside morrors. All three mirrors work in harmony with one another, and the blind spot has been elminated!"

The whiteboard in Duncan J. Watts's office at Columbia University was a thicket of squiggly blue lines, circles and calculus equations. Mr. Watts, an associate professor of sociology, had just begun a passionate disquisition on the virtues and liabilities of scale-free networks when the telephone rang. It was Alfred Berkeley, the vice chairman of Nasdaq, hoping to chat about the exchange's design.

Mr. Watts, 31, is a network theorist. And these days that means fielding frequent calls from powerful admirers like Mr. Berkeley - Wall Street moguls and government officials eager to tap into a nascent academic science that few understand but that many think may hold the key to everything from predicting fashion trends to preventing terrorism, stock market meltdowns and the spread of HIV.

Never mind that Mr. Watts's new book on the subject, "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age," which will be published by W. W. Norton next month, is littered with the arcana of theoretical physics as well as charts and graphs that appear to require an advanced degree in math in order to decipher. Network theory is hot. Two other recent books on networks, "Linked: The New Science of Networks" (Perseus, 2002) by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and "Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks" (W. W. Norton) by Mark Buchanan, have already sold tens of thousands of copies.

And that's not counting sales in the burgeoning genre of consumer studies, where network science terms and concepts are invoked with near religious fervor. From Malcolm Gladwell's three-year-old best seller, "The Tipping Point," to just-published analyses like "The Influentials" and "Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers," the shelves at Barnes & Noble are laden with books alternately applauding and deploring the importance of things like hubs, connectors, mavens and influencer teens for creating fads, cementing brand loyalty and swelling profits.

"Network theory has become a bit of a fad," Mr. Watts conceded after hanging up the phone. "I spend half my time telling people I think it's relevant to a lot of problems people care about and half my time trying to tone down the hype."

Network scientists study networks: collections of people or objects connected to each other in some way. Think of the 1.5 million Manhattan residents or the 30,000 genes inside a human cell. Such networks, scientists argue, behave in ways that can't be understood solely in terms of their component parts. Without knowing what every single person or object within the network is doing, they say, it's nevertheless possible to know something about how the network as a whole behaves.

Stated that way it sounds simple. But as an intellectual approach, network theory is the latest symptom of a fundamental shift in scientific thinking, away from a focus on individual components - particles and subparticles - and toward a novel conception of the group. As Mr. Barabasi, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, put it: "In biology, we've had great success stories - the human genome, the mouse genome. But what is not talked about is that we have the pieces but don't have a clue as to how the system works. Increasingly, we think the answer is in networks."

Not that network theory is an entirely contemporary creation. Its roots stretch back nearly 300 years, to Leonhard Euler, a brilliant 18th-century Swiss mathematician who dabbled in nearly every branch of modern science, from algebra to astrophysics. In 1736, Euler took up a brain teaser that had preoccupied the residents of Königsberg, a Prussian town on the Pregel River not far from where he lived: how to cross all seven bridges in town without crossing the same bridge twice. No one had been able to pull off the feat, but Euler provided the mathematical proof that it could not be done. To do so, he turned the problem into a network, depicting the bridges as lines and the landmasses they connected as nodes.

After Euler, mathematicians continued to analyze networks, then called graphs, enumerating the properties of orderly and static structures like ice crystals and beehives. No one thought to tackle networks of people or objects that were, as Mr. Watts puts it in his book, "actually doing something - generating power, sending data or even making decisions." Such complex real-world networks were assumed to be random: nodes and links connected in an arbitrary, disorderly fashion. But clearly this is not always the case. "Imagine that you really did pick your friends at random from the global population of over six billion," Mr. Watts writes. "You would be much more likely to be friends with someone on another continent than someone from your hometown, workplace or school. Even in a world of global travel and electronic communications, this is an absurd notion."

Of course, studying a network of six billion people is an unfathomable proposition. It wasn't until the mid-1990's and the advent of powerful computers that network scientists were able to analyze real-life networks of significant size and complexity. And in doing so, Mr. Watts and his colleagues made some tantalizing discoveries. By 1998, they had found that networks as diverse as actors, power grids, the World Wide Web, the proteins in a human cell and the neurons of a wormlike organism called C. elegans aren't random at all but obey the same simple, powerful rules.

For example, whether the network has nearly a billion nodes (the estimated number of Web pages) or just half a million (roughly the number of actors in the Internet Movie Database), the paths between any two nodes tend to be extremely short - such that, for example, any two movie actors can be connected by an average of less than four links.

That may not seem like news to anyone who has played the Kevin Bacon Game - in which film actors invariably turn out to have starred in a movie with Mr. Bacon or else with another actor who has - or seen John Guare's play "Six Degrees of Separation." (The play was inspired by the famous 1967 experiment in which the Harvard social psychologist Stanley Milgram tried to prove that anyone in America could reach anyone else through a chain of fewer than six people.) But it was not entirely clear why these should all be "small-world" networks. As Mr. Watts points out, "There is nothing similar at all about the detailed way in which movie actors choose projects and engineers build transmission lines."

Eerier still, in 1999, Mr. Barabasi and a student at Notre Dame found that many of these small-world networks are also what scientists call scale-free. Many natural phenomena, including traits like height and I.Q., tend to cluster around an average (producing the familiar bell curve distribution). By contrast, scale-free networks go in for extremes: a few hubs - nodes with lots of links - and many more nodes with hardly any links at all. (Think of Google, the search engine, as a hub, and your personal homepage - which probably has just a few links - as an ordinary node.)

Mr. Barabasi's discovery startled scientists. "People always knew there were networks but thought they were random," he said. "To know they were nodes linked by hubs was very unexpected."

It also provoked a frenzy of research. For as Mr. Barabasi and his collaborator were able to show, the structure of scale-free networks has important practical implications. If you remove a few nodes at random, the network can still function normally. But if you remove one of the hubs, the results can be catastrophic.

Inspired by this insight, cancer researchers are now homing in on the cell's hub proteins in order to learn how to defend them from devastating attacks. Epidemiologists studying sexually transmitted diseases are arguing that it makes more sense to identify and treat the hubs in the transmission network than to give drugs to everyone. "The Bush administration's policy to give drugs to mothers with children is completely irrelevant to stopping AIDS in Africa," Mr. Barabasi said. "It's much better to go and target the hubs."

Even the United States military has begun recruiting network theorists to conduct counterterrorism research, with the goal of learning how to protect information and economic networks at home and destabilize terrorist networks abroad. Yet just which network model describes human society remains a subject of fierce debate. Mr. Barabasi believes the human social network is scale-free with the expected smattering of richly connected hubs. Mr. Watts disagrees. "If you asked people to list the number of people they recognize, that could be scale-free, everyone recognizes Michael Jordan," he said. "But if you said, `Who would you trust to look after your kids?' That's not scale-free. As you start to ratchet up the requirements for what it means to know someone, connections diminish."

Is society a small-world network of the sort Milgram was interested in? Mr. Watts spent the past year trying to test that idea, using the Internet as a proxy for the world population. Whatever the results, he says, it's clear that human psychology has not yet adapted to the implications of a connected world.

"We like to think of our world as full of atomized individuals," he said. "But decisions people make and the actions they take are so hopelessly entwined with the behaviors of everyone else that it's difficult to draw the boundaries around the individual." When it comes to choosing a CD or explaining the success of Harry Potter, your preference may matter less than the network's. But some scholars dismiss the network hypothesis altogether. Judith S. Kleinfeld, a psychologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, prompted a flurry of media attention last year when she published an article questioning the validity of Milgram's small-world findings. Given the prevalence of networks - from power grids to airports to the Internet - it's tempting to assume that human society is a network as well, she says. But ultimately, that is impossible to prove.

"Duncan assumes the world is a matrix," Ms. Kleinfeld said in a telephone interview. "He wants to know how you get from one point on it to another. But what if the world isn't a matrix? What if people aren't all connected? What if they're islands in space?"

Mr. Watts admits that he faces daunting empirical challenges - and that overzealous scientists are a concern. "You can turn almost anything into a network," he said, holding up two papers he had received on the "small world of human language" and shaking his head. "So what?"

"When I'm brutally honest with myself, I think that if we can figure this out, we can answer some important questions. Other times, I think it's just too hard."

The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat
Author: Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer
Previously Published: (1990) in Michael Benedikt (ed.), _Cyberspace:First Steps_, MIT press, Cambridge, Mass.

The essential lesson that we have abstracted from our experiences with Habitat is that a cyberspace is defined more by the interactions among the actors within it than by the technology with which it is implemented. While we find much of the work presently being done on elaborate interface technologies - DataGloves, head-mounted displays, special-purpose rendering engines, and so on - both exciting and promising, the almost mystical euphoria that currently seems to surround all this hardware is, in our opinion, both excessive and somewhat misplaced. We can't help having a nagging sense that it's all a bit of a distraction from the really pressing issues. At the core of our vision is the idea that cyberspace is necessarily a multiple-participant environment. It seems to us that the things that are important to the inhabitants of such an environment are the capabilities available to them, the characteristics of the other people they encounter there, and the ways these various participants can affect one another. (emphasis added - Tom Portante) Beyond a foundation set of communications capabilities, the technology used to present this environment to its participants, while sexy and interesting, is a peripheral concern.

Book Review: from The Industry Standard

In his 1996 book The Road Ahead, Bill Gates invited business executives to take a ride with him into the gee-whiz techno-future. In the photo on the cover of his book, Gates stands on a two-lane road reminiscent of Route 66, which disappears into a clear, crisp horizon. Except for Gates and the road, there is nothing around.

John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid would decline the offer of a lift on this road. In their new book, The Social Life of Information, they say they prefer to slowly and steadily explore the road's surrounding terrain. They'd make a stop here and there to check out a tourist trap or converse with the locals at a dusty cafe.
As they note, "The way forward is paradoxically not to look ahead but to look around." They're concerned with the "practice" of knowledge rather than the "process" of information, making them more akin to information archeologists than information technologists.

To them, looking around means considering the context of information rather than simply its content. Marshall McLuhan argued much the same in the 1960s when he proclaimed that the medium (context) was really the message (content).
The authors' different specialties make them interesting tour guides. Brown is chief scientist at Xerox and director of its Palo Alto Research Center. Duguid is a history professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a social theorist affiliated with PARC.

They see the modern world cluttered with institutions, media and structures that futurologists and technopromoters predicted would be extinct by now: the paperless office, the home office, the smaller entrepreneurial firms, to name a few in their long list.

The rise of the information age has likewise brought about a good deal of "endisms," among them the end of: the press, television and mass media; brokers and other infomediaries; firms, bureaucracies and universities; government, cities, regions and nation states.

THE MYTHOLOGY OF INFORMATION

One reason futurist predictions have been off target, according to Brown and Duguid, is the mythology that envelops information. As they note, this mythology "overpower[s] richer explanations" of the consequences of information and blinds us to the forces behind technological change.

Information mythology is the fuel for "infoenthusiasts" and futurists. This group, according to the authors, rages "against the illogic of humankind and the primitive preferences that lead it astray" while they "continue to tell us where we ought to go."

By "taking more account of people and a little less of information, they might instead tell us where we are going." The authors suggest it's one thing to argue that many of our old structures will not survive the onslaught of the new information economy, but it's another to argue that we don't need them in the new economy.
The most relevant chapter for the business world is "Practice Makes Process," which relates information mythology to the early 1990s re-engineering management fad. According to Brown and Duguid, re-engineering was based on the information-friendly process view of an organization rather than a contextual, social practice view. Information - without the context of a social life - fits well into process but has trouble when put into practice.

The authors' examples of how knowledge and learning is created informally in corporations (particularly Julian Orr's research at Xerox) merit the price of admission. Readers learn that collaboration, narration and improvisation are important (yet relatively hidden) methods that result in information that becomes corporate knowledge.

The university system is another key area where information mythology exists. Many people have predicted that virtual universities would replace brick-and-mortar institutions. This has not happened because universities do far more than deliver information to passive learners.

But the problems that information mythology has caused are minor compared with the ones that loom in the future as information becomes a more ubiquitous part of the Internet's "DNA infrastructure." The gap continues to narrow between smart "bots" and humans, with bots increasingly taking on human names like "personal assistants" and "agents." At the same time, human activities like "brokering" and "negotiating" sound robotic.

These agents perform "collaborative filtering," the familiar product-brokering activity: They match past activity with product suggestions. While the agents are supposed to represent buyers, they often act as double agents and represent sellers, too. For example, recall the publisher-paid endorsements on Amazon.com or how American Airlines' Sabre reservation system was revealed to be weighted toward American.

It's increasingly difficult to determine whose interests agents represent. As Brown and Duguid note, "We might be able to use agents, but how many are able to understand their biases among the complex mathematics of dynamic preference matching?"
Confusion between knowledge and information underlies many of the problems information mythology causes. As Brown and Duguid note, knowledge entails a "knower," but people treat information as independent and self-sufficient. It sounds right to ask "Where is information?" but not right to ask "Where is knowledge?" The authors argue it's difficult to separate knowledge from information: It can't be picked up, passed around, found or compared.

THE PROFESSIONAL DEBUNKER

While Brown and Duguid make a compelling argument against information mythology, they can also be placed in a growing category of "information age debunkers." Witness books like Lawrence Lessig's Code, Douglas Rushkoff's Coercion, John Willinsky's Technologies of Knowing, David Shenks' Data Smog and Clifford Stoll's Silicon Snake Oil.

Certainly the past few years have seen an abundance of "cyber-snake oil" promotion. In this sense, the information debunkers' criticisms give a welcome breath of fresh air. Yet one can argue criticism of information mythology often goes too far in promoting its own cause.

For example, while Web-based universities aren't exactly all they're cracked up to be, neither is brick-and-mortar academia, which Brown and Duguid idealize. For proof, look at the growing connection between universities and business. A recent story in the Atlantic Monthly, "The Kept University," describes how corporations are providing more and more of the money that supports academic research - especially at Duguid's UC Berkeley.

And the bare "content" of information is not always a bad thing. The subliminal context that surrounds brands - slick advertising images and packaging - often obscures the mediocre "content," the product itself. Information wrapped in context is a "hidden persuader" - the backbone of America's consumer culture - rather than the friendly communities of "practice" Brown and Duguid suggest.

Despite these minor criticisms, The Social Life of Information is an important book. Unlike many other "information age debunkers," Brown and Duguid wisely stand back from prescription. "We do not have solutions to offer," they note at the end. "We only know that solutions will be much harder to find if we drive at the problems with tunnel vision" and if "peripheries and margins, practices and communities, organizations and institutions are left out or swept out of consideration."

The authors face a formidable opponent in an age more entranced with information-based answers than context-based questions. If you have a problem, they note, redefine it in terms of information and you have an answer. "It allows people to slip quickly from questions to answers," they write.

This brings us back to Bill Gates on the cover of The Road Ahead. Microsoft plays it both ways: It asks a question and simultaneously proffers an answer. Its advertisements ask "Where do you want to go today?" The images in these ads, however, are of people sitting eagerly at computers. The subtle suggestion is that digital information is enough. In a world of ready-made answers, it's refreshing that authors like Brown and Duguid are instead asking the important questions.


John Fraim is president of the GreatHouse, a publisher and consulting firm in Santa Rosa, Calif. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Americans, of all ages, of all stations in life, and all types of dispositions are forever forming associations. They are not only commercial or industrial associations in which they all take part but others of a thousand different types -- relgions, moral, serious, futile, very general and very minute... Nothing, in my view, deserves more attention that the intellectual and moral associations in America.
(Tocqueville - from his 1830's "Democracy in America")

EXPLODING ANIMAL TALES
by DAVE BARRY

...a situation in Oregon where innocent civilians were struck by falling whale parts...

I am absolutely not making this incident up; in fact, I have it all on videotape, which I obtained from the alert father-son team of Dean and Kurt Smith. The tape is from a local TV news show in Oregon, which sent a reporter out to cover a 45-foot, eight-ton dead whale that washed up on the beach. The responsibility for getting rid of the carcass was placed upon the Oregon State Highway Division, apparently on the theory that highways and whales are very similar in the sense of being large objects.

So anyway, the highway engineers hit upon the plan -- remember, I am not making this up -- of blowing up the whale with dynamite. The thinking here was that the whale would be blown into small pieces, which would be eaten by sea gulls, and that would be that. A textbook whale removal.

So they moved the spectators back up the beach, put a half-ton of dynamite next to the whale, and set it off. I am probably guilty of understatement when I say that what follows, on the videotape, is the most wonderful event in the history of the universe. First you see the whale carcass disappear in a huge blast of smoke and flame. Then you hear the happy spectators shouting ``Yayy!'' and ``Wheee!'' Then, suddenly, the crowd's tone changes. You hear a new sound, the sound of many objects hitting the ground with a noise that sounds like ``splud.'' You hear a woman's voice shouting ``Here comes pieces of ... my GOD!'' Something smears the camera lens.

Later, the reporter explains: ``The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere.'' One piece caved in the roof of a car parked more than a quarter of a mile away. Remaining on the beach were several rotting whale sectors the size of condominium units. There was no sign of the sea gulls, who had no doubt permanently relocated to Brazil.

This is a very sobering videotape. Here at the Institute we watch it often, especially at parties. But this is no time for gaiety. This is a time to get hold of the folks at the Oregon State Highway Division and ask them, when they get done cleaning up the beaches, to give us an estimate on the U.S. Capitol.

Geocaching is an entertaining adventure game for gps users. Participating in a cache hunt is a good way to take advantage of the wonderful features and capability of a gps unit. The basic idea is to have individuals and organizations set up caches all over the world and share the locations of these caches on the internet. GPS users can then use the location coordinates to find the caches. Once found, a cache may provide the visitor with a wide variety of rewards. All the visitor is asked to do is if they get something they should try to leave something for the cache.

... and even though this sounds remarkably straight-forward:

It is deceptively easy. It's one thing to see where an item is, it's a totally different story to actually get there.

A Lost Eloquence

The New York Times
December 29, 2002

By CAROL MUSKE-DUKES

LOS ANGELES - The poem in my head goes something like this: Sunset and evening star/And one clear call for me!/O Captain my Captain!/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers/I'm nobody!Who are you?

These fragments were put there by my mother, who can recite, by heart, pages and pages of verse by Tennyson, Milton, Wordsworth, Longfellow and Dickinson. On occasion, I can manage to recite the poems that contribute to my voice-over poem in their entirety. My mother - whose voice (like the sound of waves, a kind of sea of words) is one of my earliest memories, my first sense of consciousness and language - gave me this gift.

She is 85, a member of perhaps the last generation of Americans who learned poems and orations by rote in classes dedicated to the art of elocution. This long-ago discredited pedagogical tradition generated a commonplace eloquence among ordinary Americans who knew how to (as they put it) "quote." Poems are still memorized in some classrooms but not "put to heart" in a way that would prompt this more quotidian public expression. Thus my mother, who grew up on the prairie of North Dakota during the Great Depression, spent time in high school memorizing the great thoughts and music of the ages. She never forgot these poems and managed to regale all who would listen (mostly her husband and children), and by virtue of this word-hoard was able to effortlessly (almost eerily) produce a precise appropriate quote for any occasion. Often social or familial failings inspired her. For example (to me, frowning at my spinach): "How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is/To have a thankless child." Or an aside to a sibling whining in line at the bank: "They also serve who only stand and wait."

For those who love poetry, the recent announcement that Ruth Lilly had donated about $100 million to Poetry magazine was a welcome boost. But to me the most illuminating aspect of this extraordinary news was not the size of the gift, but rather a subsequent revelation that the journal gets roughly 90,000 submissions a year - yet its circulation peaks at just 10,000. Literary magazine editors have pondered this kind of awkward imbalance for some time. It seems there are a lot of would-be poets out there. But it seems that many are writers who write without reading. And the power of reciting in order to share a poem or to comfort oneself with its words, seems almost unknown.

Years ago, when I taught in the graduate program in writing at Columbia, the late Russian poet Joseph Brodsky was also on the faculty. Brodsky famously infuriated the students in his workshop on the first day of class, when he would announce that each student would be expected to memorize several poems (some lengthy) and recite them aloud. The students - even if they had known that Brodsky had learned English in dissenter's exile in Russia by putting to heart the poems of Auden, among others - were outraged at first. There was talk among students of refusing to comply with this requirement. Then they began to recite the poems learned by heart in class - and out of class. By the end of the term, students were "speaking" the poems of Auden and Bishop and Keats and Wyatt with dramatic authority and real enjoyment. Something had happened to change their minds. The poems they'd learned were now in their blood, beating with their hearts.

In the workshops I teach I continue to ask students to choose poems to memorize. Recently, a young woman loudly resisted what she called a boring exercise. But after memorizing Emily Dickinson, Countee Cullen, Sylvia Plath and several haiku by Issa, she was still going strong - delighted with how the words rolled trippingly off her tongue. "I own these poems now," she said. (When I ask students early in the semester if they know a poem by heart, I usually hear the names Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss and occasionally Robert Frost. They often say that they can't memorize long poems, but then I ask them if they know the lyrics of "Gilligan's Island" or "The Brady Bunch," and my point is made.) Lately I've been dropping in at a local preschool and have been reminded how much even little children love to memorize poems. They absorbed rather effortlessly Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Swing" (How do you like to go up in a swing?/Up in the air so blue?), accompanied by gliding hand and body movements. They loved the repetition, the chiming of the words and images.

My mother taught me this poem as she pushed me on a swing in our backyard in St. Paul, Minn. when I was about their age. She would push me out and away from her on the "question" line (How do you like); then I would fly back on the "comment" line (Up in the air so blue). Like my young students, I was swinging within the shape of the words; I was learning words with my body as well as my brain; I was swinging, like them, within what would last forever - within the body of the poem itself.


Carol Muske-Dukes, who teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California, is the author, most recently, of ``Married to the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood.''