If you’re a network scientist, or you’ve hung around with one, you’ve probably heard about ridiculograms. It’s a tongue-in-cheek derogative word for plots of huge networks intended to impress by their complexity. I have a vague memory of someone crediting Marc Vidal for coining it. In this blog post, we will explore if they really […]

In this blog post, I will explore why network science mostly is a science of large networks and argue that studying small networks can be just as rewarding and challenging as studying large ones. In other words, a manifesto for small-network science. (But a modest one, because it is not going to be any main […]

This is not a shot at making a side career as a motivational speaker. There are of course tons of more creative people out there, and even science about it! Still, I couldn’t resist writing down my thoughts since I slightly disagree with some of the gurus out there. 😛 1. Be bored   Good ideas […]

I really like computational social science and love to identify myself as a computational social scientist. Having an identity in that sense is perhaps not so important. Through my entire career, I’ve got accustomed to be a [one field] person doing [other field] things, and learned to like it. Still computational social science very much […]

I needed some reasonably fast C code for SIR on networks. Funny enough, I just had C code for a discrete time version, nothing for the standard continuous-time, exponentially-distributed durations of infection. Although there are book chapters written about this that are probably more readable than this post (and accompanied by Python code), I decided to […]

If you haven’t heard about Zachary’s karate club, you should probably be careful calling yourself network scientist in the wrong company. It is a small network data set that is used as an example, and benchmark for community detection algorithms. It even has a club! The Zachary Karate Club Club. With a trophy going to […]

A day or two ago Anna Broido and Aaron Clauset arxived a paper about how rare scale-free networks really are. If network science was invented today, I think such a paper would not raise many eyebrows. Now it already got much attention, and I think it looks like a methodologically solid and important contribution. To someone […]